“Feudalism was about the concentration of wealth and power in a relative handful of people,” say New Geographer Joel Kotkin and big-data whiz Marshall Toplansky. By that definition, California is increasingly feudalistic, they argue in a new paper, California Feudalism.
“At its essence, feudalism was about hierarchy, and the domination of land ownership by a relative few,” says the paper. In contrast, “a strong, land-owning middle class” has played a central role in more egalitarian societies, ranging from ancient Greece to the United States of the 1960s. California’s land-use and energy policies run counter to such a land-owning middle class, which helps explain why California’s homeownership rate peaked in 1960 and today is one of the lowest in the country.
Kotkin and Toplansky are not the first to compare restrictive land-use policies with feudalism. The Antiplanner’s 2016 paper, The New Feudalism, noted that under the old feudalism the government or a small number of people owned nearly all of the land, while under the new feudalism, more people own land but the government strictly controls what they can do with it. More than 30 years before that, private property advocate and vice-president of the Ethan Allen Institute John McClaughry applied the same term to the same type of regulation in an environmental law review article. Continue reading
