# Did Kristof predict a new feudalism in our future?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-kristof-predict-a-new-feudalism-in-our-future/641936
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [November 23, 2012, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-kristof-predict-a-new-feudalism-in-our-future/641936 "2012-11-23T21:04:14Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@BigAppleBucky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigAppleBucky)
#### Post date: [November 23, 2012, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-kristof-predict-a-new-feudalism-in-our-future/641936/1 "2012-11-23T21:04:14Z")
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/opinion/kristof-a-failed-experiment.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&seid=auto](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/opinion/kristof-a-failed-experiment.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&seid=auto)
His Op-Ed is titled “A Failed Experiment”, but I think it might have been titled something like: “The danger of a new feudalism”.
> [@](#):
>
> _ **snip** _ That’s how things often work in America. Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds.
>
> _ **snip** _
>
> But our political system is dysfunctional: in addressing income inequality, in confronting climate change and in maintaining national infrastructure.
>
> So time and again, we see the decline of public services accompanied by the rise of private workarounds for the wealthy.
>
> _ **snip** _
>
> Is crime a problem? Well, rather than pay for better policing, move to a gated community with private security guards!
>
> Are public schools failing? Well, superb private schools have spaces for a mere $40,000 per child per year.
>
> Public libraries closing branches and cutting hours? Well, buy your own books and magazines!
>
> Are public parks — even our awesome national parks, dubbed “America’s best idea” and the quintessential “public good” — suffering from budget cuts? Don’t whine. Just buy a weekend home in the country!
>
> Public playgrounds and tennis courts decrepit? Never mind — just join a private tennis club!
>
> I’m used to seeing this mind-set in developing countries like Chad or Pakistan, where the feudal rich make do behind high walls topped with shards of glass; increasingly, I see it in our country. The disregard for public goods was epitomized by Mitt Romney’s call to end financing of public broadcasting. _ **snip** _
If we don’t have some sort of shared sacrifice, at what point will our society slide into something akin to AD 500 Europe when localities had to fend for themselves after the central Roman government collapsed?
Clearly we are not to close to such a situation yet, but what steps can be taken to prevent or slow down the slide into it?
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### Author:  [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)
#### Post date: [November 24, 2012, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-kristof-predict-a-new-feudalism-in-our-future/641936/2 "2012-11-24T22:54:06Z")
_5th Century Europe_? You must be kidding me. I consider a comparison to say present-day Brazil or the Gilded Age rather extreme but the idea that modern budget cuts are equivalent even remotely to the rise of feudalism is too ridiculous for words.
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### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [November 25, 2012, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-kristof-predict-a-new-feudalism-in-our-future/641936/3 "2012-11-25T00:12:24Z")
Mitt Romney wants to eliminate federal funding for PBS. Well, did 6th century Europe have PBS? No!
Q.E.D.
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### Author:  [@Kimmy\_Gibbler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimmy_Gibbler)
#### Post date: [November 25, 2012, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-kristof-predict-a-new-feudalism-in-our-future/641936/4 "2012-11-25T01:56:53Z")
> [@BigAppleBucky](#):
>
> If we don’t have some sort of shared sacrifice, at what point will our society slide into something akin to AD 500 Europe when localities had to fend for themselves after the central Roman government collapsed?
>
> Clearly we are not to close to such a situation yet, but what steps can be taken to prevent or slow down the slide into it?
Good heavens! What kind of history are they teaching in the schools these days!
Wasn’t the chief organizing principle of the manorial system a hypertrophic notion of “shared sacrifice”? Vassals and peons owed duties to their local lord of the manor and the lord of the manor in turn promised protection to his clients?
Didn’t, indeed, the idea of the commons, a collective resource given over to the use of the peons, quite apart from their need to pay for it, originate in the very manorial system that you argue collectivization is needed to prevent?
Didn’t manorialism finally come to the end because of the rise of a merchant class in free (i.e., unfettered by the ossified demands of shared sacrifice) towns?
Wasn’t this precisely the reason that Hayek titled his book arguing against the ambitions of state-organized benevolence _The Road to Serfdom_.
Hasn’t the suppressive effect of an ever-increasing class of “stakeholders,” to use the modern parlance, who, like their aristocratic antecedents, have veto power over commercial activity by virtue of merely being around and not because they’ve paid-in any actual stake, already been studied under the notion of [the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons).
In short, what held back the peons of yore was not a rapacious mercantile class, but rather a system that divorced sacrifice and benefit from voluntary bargaining. Provision of goods and inurement to duty was presupposed: one had obligations to the manor/society/the collective, quite apart from any bargain that might be struck (if, indeed, these privileges and duties were even subject to being bargained).
In post-Communist Europe, as the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons showed, socially productive commercial activity was held back because one needed to secure the blessings of otherwise uninvolved parties. And these parties were not abashed about skimming a little off the top of any deals over which they held veto power.
So, no, the way to forestall a descent into neo-feudalism is not to recreate socially-binding obligations that do not arise organically from the division of labor and free exchange of goods and services bargained for in a free market. Free markets are the very thing that consigned feudalism to the dustbin of history.
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### Author:  [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)
#### Post date: [November 25, 2012, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-kristof-predict-a-new-feudalism-in-our-future/641936/5 "2012-11-25T02:02:48Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#):
>
> Mitt Romney wants to eliminate federal funding for PBS. Well, did 6th century Europe have PBS? No!
>
> Q.E.D.
You think you’re joking, but substitute “residential generators” for “PBS” and you’ve written a fairly accurate summary of the article.