Democracy vs American Feudalists

The American Republican party is dedicated to exalting the power of owners at the expense of citizens. It advocates neo-Feudalism and calls it democracy.

Democracy elsewhere, including so far in Canada, instead defines the relationship between citizen and state. Rights and obligations fall to the individual in their role as citizen. I owe the wider community a share of whatever resources I momentarily control in order to sustain the environment that makes acquisition of those resources possible. Everyone benefits, me most of all, and I am free of control by any other individual, including my employer. The work I do is contractual and consensual, not coerced.

Taxes pay a pre-existing debt; They were never mine. Their delivery is just a matter of bookkeeping, not a choice I make to ‘give away’ anything that was ever ‘mine’. I know that everyone around me is also paying their share. The political system is just and open to anyone to participate.

Besides providing rule of law and freeing me from personal domination, the state also fulfills a larger public safety role. My food has been inspected. My roads are safe. I have access to good medical care. Universities are sustained.

Americans, on the other hand, seem to be recreating Feudalism. All rights belong to owners; None to the penniless. Medical care is a favour that an employer might or might not bestow on his powerless serfs. They have no alternative but to obey a master who has this power of life and death over them, for that is what medical care is.

People who can’t afford lawyers end up in jail on arbitrary charges. Conviction not only results in ridiculous lengths of incarceration, it also disenfranchises citizens of their vote.

The rich amplify their power election by election. The more the federal state is weakened the more the rights of Americans as citizens are weakened.

This is not a joke. It is the precursor to revolution. Republicans will inevitably discover that no one rides the populist beast and that Feudal control is not a sustainable system. Until the revolution that will sweep it away, Feudalism will progressively starve the commonweal of resources, impoverishing skills and opportunities, reducing the marketplace.

Feudalism is not Capitalism. It is at least as corrosive to markets as Socialism.