Does it? If the answer is having to raise your own food, then that's hardly independence. It is forced labor necessitated by the oppressive policies of an overreaching regime. I don't want to be a farmer. I want to enjoy a healthy society where free enterprise allows us the freedom to be a factory worker, or a doctor, or an artist or whatever our skills and hard work allow us to achieve. I do not want to be forced to spend a certain amount of my time directly producing so much of my own basic staples.
We live in the 21st century. I do not want to return to the life of a serf from 500 years ago.
The more occupied you are with the labor and logistics of just meeting the bottom two rungs of your Maslow's triangle, the less time and energy you have for observing, interfering with or even caring about the affairs of the sovereign.
There is no better formula for subjugation of a population than to have them constantly in a state of peril from starvation. Not actually in starvation - that is counter-productive, except when it is necessary to effect an ethnic cleansing or a genocide - but just on the knife edge, so all of their time and effort is devoted toward getting food, water and shelter. A little hungry, a little thirsty, a little cold, just a little sick and ricketty. That's how the tyrant wants you.
See The Hunger Games...