A Neo-Feudal War on the People
8th March 2023
Joel Kotkin wrings his hands damned near off.
An author should be pleased to see his thesis bolstered by events. Yet since writing The Coming of Neo-Feudalism in 2020, I have not found any joy in the continued growth of the West’s class divides, as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in ever fewer hands. The good news is that the working and middle classes are not yet out for the count, and are showing welcome signs of pushback against both state and corporate power.
A lot of current journalism is like this: The author lays out a bunch of things that he says are happening (without any attempt to describe just exactly why that is; one hopes that he gets around to it eventually, but such hopes are frequently disappointed), and he just assumes that the results of these evil processes are as disturbing to his readers as they are to him.
Personally, I don’t have any problem with ‘concentration of wealth in even fewer hands’ when the ‘fewer’ refers to hundreds of thousands if not millions of ‘hands’, ‘fewer’ only in comparison with the total population of what is (let’s face it) one of the world’s largest countries, AND knowing as I do that ‘concentration of wealth’ is necessary before that wealth can be used to generate even more wealth. Presumably increasing dispersal of wealth would be a better outcome in the author’s eyes, but dispersal of wealth merely means that it will be used for consumption rather than investment (dammit, there’s that pesky Econ 101 again), which makes a lot of people slightly better off in the short term at the cost of making everyone worse off in the long term.
Further fisking is left as an exercise for the reader–and I would encourage you to do so; the mental muscles required by this process rarely get enough work in these degenerate modern times.