From Over Regulation to Feudalism and Back Again

Part I: Under Feudalism Everything is Property, and Property is Permission

We like to pretend that history progressed from primitive chaos into clean, abstract notions of liberty, civil rights, and neutral public administration. That's the progressive "right side of history" idea, and it prevents our clear thinking about government mechanisms. And it's a comforting fairy tale for people who have never looked at a ledger from an actual agrarian-feudal state. Legal processes can transform a government from one form to another and we need a clear-eyed view of that so we don't slide into feudalism ourselves.

In the historic English and European system, there was no sharp distinction between public office, private property, and human beings. Everything and everyone was an asset class. You didn't just "get a job" as a tax collector or a customs officer; you bought it. The practice of purchasing public offices—known historically as venality of office—meant that government authority was a piece of capital. A man leased a tax collection franchise the way a modern investor buys a franchise restaurant expecting to extract rents, tolls, and extortions from the populace to recoup his principal and turn a profit.

The entire social architecture was an unbroken matrix of property claims. You were either someone’s property, you owned property, or your rights were completely mediated by an interlocking web of proprietary titles:

• Coverture: Under the common law doctrine of coverture, a married woman's legal identity was legally absorbed into that of her husband. She could not own independent property in her own right; her legal existence as an independent economic actor was suspended, effectively rendering her part of the household estate managed by the master of the house. Coverture was basically ownership of women.

• Peonage and Serfdom (Peasants): The peasantry were bound to the soil. A serf wasn't merely a poor worker; he was a legal appurtenance to the land. When an estate changed hands, the human stock—the serfs and villains—went with the acreage, obligated to provide unpaid corvée labor and a cut of every bushel they grew. Imagine your bank selling your mortgage but you are also required to do farm labor on the land and not allowed to move or sell. The peasant was not just a worker of the land but part of the property of it's owner.

• The Military-Land Circuit (Knights and Baronies): Feudalism was an explicit exchange of violence for land. A baron held a barony and a knight held a fief in exchange for quantified military service (knight-service). The land wasn't a free gift; it was conditional collateral granted by a higher lord in exchange for armed muscle. Once you acquired the right to own land you acquired the peasants on it. Your barony was a property right you purchased from the king by sending your male peasants to die in war and your sons to command them. Even after doing this service the king could revoke your ownership and barony rights.

• Fee Simple Title: Even the cleanest form of property ownership we inherited from this era—fee simple—was never an absolute, God-given right of independence. It was simply the highest grade of tenure, meaning you held your land directly from the Crown, subject to feudal incidents, reliefs, and eventual escheat if you failed to render dues or produced no heir. This is where you pay property taxes in exchange for permission to live on some land. Unlike knight-at-castle or barony it does not strictly require military service (although they would later reinstitute that with the draft).

In this world, nobody was a free-floating individual. You were either a holder of a proprietary title or you were part of the inventory, and often both. You bought your position or you bought your monopoly over a trade guild, and you squeezed those beneath you to pay for it all. Even piracy was licensed under the title of "privateer."

Part II: The Stranglehold of Regulatory Accumulation

We have a political system that relentlessly makes laws and never repeals them. This is a fatal flaw in our form of government, that we have a House of Representatives for enacting laws but not one for repealing them. The Senate works in coordination with the House, it does not work against it. A true House of Repeal would only have the power to repeal law and would not need the permission of the other body or the president to do that. 

The effect of all of this is an ever-increasing ratchet of legislative accumulation.

Every time a legislature or an un-elected administrative agency passes a rule, writes a mandate, or creates a permit requirement, they add another layer to the legal labyrinth. And unlike the periodic legal "resets" of the ancient world (like Justinian’s code), the modern state never repeals its old laws. They only accumulate. Old authoritarian political systems periodically scrapped their entire illegal systems and started over from scratch, or consolidated and rewrote outdated laws. They also did not continuously add to their laws, or at least not in the volume of the current administrative state.

This endless piling-on of unbudgeted, un-depreciated legal friction leads directly to strangulation by compliance:

• The Death of Action: When the rules grow to tens of millions of pages, it becomes impossible for any individual or business to operate without violating a dozen obscure rules. Compliance costs increase beyond reason, pricing out small business and leaving only massive, heavily lobbied conglomerates that can afford armies of compliance lawyers. In fact the lobbyists of the conglomerates are usually the ones proposing new rules.

• Engineered Scarcity and Rent-Seeking: Regulatory accumulation is the primary driver of modern inflation and high prices. Housing is expensive not because concrete suddenly costs a fortune, but because environmental reviews, zoning boards, historical preservation overlays, and permitting delays add years of carrying costs and legal fees to every square foot. Healthcare is crushing because every administrative mandate raises prices (that's on purpose). If it takes a year to get a permit you have to pay all the employees a salary for that year and then you have to pass on that increased cost to whoever buys the new houses. Everything is like this, everything has fees and permits and excessive credentialism. It takes 6 years to become an architect instead of two because they want to restrict entrance into the profession. The certified public accountants voted to increase the training requirement from four years to five in order to limit competition by new entrants into the profession. The number of primary care physicians was capped by Congress in 1997. Building codes are continuously updated every year not because they need to be but because they want to force homeowners into costly upgrades when the homeowner decides to renovate their property. When one person has an angle they profit, but when everyone has an angle they all work more for a lower standard of living.

When the state makes it illegal or impossible to tie your shoes without a license, it creates an artificial drought of action. Everyone wants to get things done, but the system is engineered to say no by default—unless you pay the toll. Bribery becomes not just the intelligent response but the only response that let's you work.

Part III: The Soviet Mirror and the Return of Neo-Feudalism

When a society buries itself in unnavigable laws, reality doesn't stop; it simply goes underground.

Look at the late Soviet Union. On paper, everything was tightly regulated by an impossibly rigid, totalizing code of state commands. In practice, obeying the literal text of Soviet law meant you starved, froze, or sat idle. To get anything done—to secure cement, to repair a factory machine, to source decent shoes—Russians had to rely on the blat system, informal networks, and pervasive, systemic bribery. Far from being evil and corrupt bribery was the thing that prevented evil excessive regulations from starving everyone to death.

And this is where the loop closes back into feudalism: When breaking the law becomes a structural necessity for survival, the state's enforcement power transforms into a commodity. Bureaucrats stop enforcing objective laws and start selling exemptions. Bribes replace taxes, (or add to them) and informal patronage networks replace statutory rights. You do not succeed because you followed a neutral rule but because you have a patron who looks the other way in exchange for a cut. In Russia these bribes form a hierarchy going all the way to the top. The cop buys their job from the police chief, who bought their job from the mayor, who bought their job from somebody else and so on. It goes all the way to the top and bribes passed from one person to the next in an upward direction. The local cop cannot abstain from taking a bribe because his superiors are demanding that he constantly pays bribes. Money is forced to move up and everyone below is forced to pay the game by everyone above.

A businessman has tremendous incentives to want a receipt for the bribes he pays. Maybe you want to build a factory and you need evidence that the government will let you do it. This is because your investors are nervous and want to make sure it can actually be built. So you need a letter from whoever you're bribing that gives you a specific permission to do whatever it is that you want to do. This letter is also great because it implicates the other party which means they can't just come back to you over and over again for more money. Once there's enough bribery then there's competition to receive bribes and once that happens you can shop around and find someone who will give you a letter. The letter proves that you're allowed to do things which proves to your investors that it's safe to invest in your venture. 

The letters become royal titles. It's literally permission to do something in exchange for payment to the official giving you permission. It's the same damn thing, and once you get it it limits them from coming back to you over and over again and demanding more. Maybe it sets out a fee schedule but whatever the case by implicating the higher official it tones down their rapaciousness.

Seen in this light, royal titles and modern regulatory waivers are identical. A medieval royal title wasn't an award for being a good person; it was a state-issued receipt proving that you bought your job, your monopoly, or your permission to bypass the king's general prohibitions. When a country builds a towering mountain of unrepealed regulations it starts down the road to feudalism. Eventually bribes will have to be paid and once they are accepted they will organize themselves into a hierarchy of bribery. Eventually receipts will be issued and letters of permission. Eventually people will take pride in these receipts and hang them on the wall. Congratulations, you just reinvented feudalism. Russia is speed running feudalism and there's no reason to think that it over regulated United States won't get there eventually too.

It turns the government into a licensing board for oligarchs, where every permit, every waiver, and every "legal exception" is just a modern royal title / bribery receipt purchased to prove you bought your right to exist in the market. At some point the king will cancel all the old laws just like Justinian did.

Once the oligarchs start sitting down around a table and negotiating you've got the beginning on the house of lords. Once you've got a house of lords the people might get it in their head that they want a house of commons. Then they might one day decide they want equal justice under law. They might even decide they want rights to be absolute and universal instead of purchased. They might draw up a constitution limiting the power of the oligarchs, elect a prime minister and then start relentlessly making laws. 

So in summary:

Everyone wants an angle

They get together to make laws and protect their industries

Legislative accumulation strangles the economy

Bribery gets around the laws

Bribery organizes itself into a hierarchy

Bribes get formalized as receipts and letters of permission

People eventually take pride in their letters

Now you've got feudalism