What do you call a system in which:
- Massive and increasing private wealth;
- Increasing inheritance of that wealth, reducing social mobility;
- Private control over traditionally public resources;
- Debts to private interests that persists after death, sometimes burdening families for generations;
- Increasing economic growth in non-productive ("rentier") sectors with declines in productive sectors, like manufacturing;
- Public officeholders continuing to use their former titles of office long after leaving service;
- Economic policies guaranteed to lengthen an economic catastrophe;
- Increasing authoritarianism and mixing religion and politics;
- Increasing separation of military and civilian societies as the military derives its membership from a narrower sub-set of people;
- Systematic efforts to remove people from the political process; and
- Judges, even at the highest level, making unabashedly partisan decisions that tend to perpetuate the above?
In short, what do you call a system that concentrates wealth—mainly derived from investments, not from production—in a few hands, keeps it there, and makes it difficult if not impossible for everyone else to better his own condition?
The United States isn't a feudal country, obviously, but a good chunk of the political and economic elite clearly want it to become one. It's still in our power to prevent this. But I'm less and less confident.
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