From Purchasing Power to Kingdoms: How Divide-and-Rule Economics Is Recreating Feudal Rule
From
Purchasing Power to Kingdoms: How Divide-and-Rule Economics Is Recreating
Feudal Rule
Markets do not exist
because corporations create them. Markets exist because people have purchasing
power.
Purchasing power comes from
wealth. Wealth comes from the freedom to sell labor, products, services, and
ideas. And when that freedom is systematically stripped from the many and
concentrated in the hands of the few, markets do not grow; they rot from the
inside, no matter how impressive economic statistics appear.
This is not a warning about
the future. This is a description of the present.
Every extractive system in
history has followed the same trajectory: wealth concentration, political
capture, erosion of purchasing power, social division, and eventual collapse.
We are not witnessing a new economic model. We are rebuilding the oldest form
of feudalism using modern language, digital systems, and legal contracts.
In medieval Europe, kings
and nobles owned the land, the roads, the mills, and the means of survival.
Ordinary people worked endlessly but could never truly own. Law protected
ownership, not justice. Mobility was an illusion. Society functioned only as long
as the base could support the top.
The Roman Empire followed
the same path. As land and wealth concentrated into the hands of a narrow
elite, small farmers disappeared, the middle class collapsed, and the economy
hollowed out. Rome did not fall because it lacked military power. It fell because
it destroyed its own purchasing power. An empire without buyers cannot survive,
no matter how large its armies are.
Colonial monopolies
perfected this model. The British East India Company did not merely trade
goods. It controlled land, taxation, courts, and armies. It rewrote laws to
legalize extraction and called it commerce. Local markets collapsed, dependency
replaced productivity, and millions paid the price while shareholders
prospered.
The United States nearly
repeated this mistake during the Gilded Age. Industrial monopolies controlled
railroads, oil, steel, banking, and politics. Democracy survived only because
people forced limits on power through antitrust laws, labor protections, and
public investment. Those reforms were not ideological luxuries. They were
emergency brakes.
We are now dismantling
those brakes.
Today, corporate power no
longer needs colonies. It owns the domestic system. When a small number of
corporations and financial institutions control housing, land, infrastructure,
communication platforms, healthcare systems, logistics, employment markets, and
financial rails, they are not companies they are unelected governments.
Elections still happen. Power
does not change hands.
When corporations buy
politicians through lobbying, campaign finance, and revolving-door
appointments, public office stops serving the public. Laws grow deliberately
complex. Regulation becomes a weapon. Compliance costs crush small businesses
while dominant players absorb them effortlessly. Innovation is permitted only
when it does not threaten existing power.
On paper, people appear
wealthier than ever. Asset values rise. Markets climb. Retirement accounts look
healthy. But this “wealth” is conditional. It exists only as long as those who
control policy allow it to exist. Change a tax rule. Adjust interest rates.
Redefine healthcare. Alter labor law. The numbers vanish overnight.
Real ownership has already
moved upward.
Nowhere is this more
visible than in modern housing.
In many U.S. cities, a
person can still buy a two-bedroom home for somewhere between one hundred
thousand and five hundred thousand dollars. This is presented as proof that the
system works. Ownership, stability, success.
But attached to that home
is a mandatory homeowners association fee often as high as the monthly mortgage
itself. And unlike a fixed mortgage, this fee is not stable. It can rise with
inflation, policy changes, or decisions made by boards you did not meaningfully
elect and cannot control.
So what are you actually
paying?
You pay the bank. You pay
property taxes. You pay home insurance. And you pay the homeowners'
association.
Three out of those four
costs can rise indefinitely with inflation. If your mortgage is not fixed, all
four can rise. Miss one payment, and the illusion of ownership collapses. In
many cases, an association can place liens, impose fines, or even force foreclosure
even if the bank is paid.
This is not homeownership. This
is conditional permission to live.
Lose your job, and you lose
everything. Not because you failed, but because the system is designed so that
your survival depends on uninterrupted employment. You do not control your
home. You rent your life from institutions that can change the rules at will.
This is modern feudalism.
You are not working in a
cotton field. You are working in an office, a warehouse, a hospital, or a gig
platform. You are well-dressed. You have devices. You have a credit score. But
your housing, healthcare, transportation, communication, and financial survival
are all controlled by entities you cannot vote out and cannot escape.
The chains are invisible,
but they are legal.
Divide-and-rule is how this
system sustains itself. Every empire used it. Romans divided citizens and
outsiders. Monarchs divided nobles and peasants. Colonial powers divided ethnic
and religious groups. Today, people are divided politically, culturally,
racially, and ideologically, while ownership consolidates silently above them.
A divided population never
asks who owns the system.
As purchasing power erodes,
the consequences become unavoidable. Housing becomes unreachable. Healthcare
becomes extortion. Education becomes a lifelong debt. Entrepreneurship
declines. Innovation is gated behind capital and connections. Markets shrink
internally even as corporations boast of global reach. This is late-stage
empire behavior, not progress. And when trust in official systems collapses,
shadow systems rise.
The explosion of
cryptocurrencies is not accidental. Whenever the law fails to serve the public,
parallel economies emerge. Historically, this meant black markets and
smuggling. Today, it includes opaque digital currencies increasingly used for
speculation, money laundering, illegal drugs, weapons, and financial evasion.
When legitimacy dies, illegality becomes rational.
Some nations have resisted
this trajectory. Parts of Europe, along with South Korea and Taiwan, chose
participation over extraction. They protected competition, invested in people,
and treated economic development as a shared national project. Their success
proves this collapse is not inevitable. It is chosen.
Feudal systems always fail not
because people stop working, but because the system destroys its own
foundation. When people cannot afford to live, markets die. When markets die,
power follows. When legitimacy collapses, stability vanishes.
Democracy was created to
prevent the return of kings. But democracy without economic participation is
theater.
If purchasing power
continues to be stripped from the many and concentrated at the top, we are not
moving forward. We are building digital kingdoms, ruled by corporate monarchs,
enforced by law, and disguised as freedom.
History does not repeat
because people are ignorant. It repeats because those in power believe this
time will be different. It never is.
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