Corporate Feudalism

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (OpEdNews.com): “Right now, the Wisconsin legislature is considering a bill that would make Wisconsin the nation’s 25th right-to-work-for-less state. Workers in right to work-for-less-states make less money, get skimpier health benefits and are more likely to die on the job than the workers in non-right-to-work-for-less states.

“The line from Wisconsin Republicans, of course, is that the proposed right-work-for-less law will improve their state’s economy and help build the middle class. But in reality, the exact opposite will happen.

“That’s because right-to-work-for-less laws bring capitalism a lot closer to its natural, unregulated state, and capitalism in its natural, unregulated state tends toward massive levels of inequality that we usually associate with feudalism.

“It looks a lot like this:

“At the top, there is a very small class of super-rich oligarchs and financiers. They’re the monarchs of capitalist society.

“Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very, very small, class of professionals and mercantilists —doctors, lawyers, shop-owners — who help keep things running for the super-rich and supply the working poor with their needs. They’re nobles or knights of capitalist society.

“And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people who make up the working poor. They have no wealth — in fact they’re typically in debt most of their lives and can barely survive on what little money they make. They’re the peasants of capitalist society.

“So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in natural capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option, just as it was in medieval Europe under feudalism.

“The only ways a true middle class can emerge in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval (a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century) or by government intervention.

“Historically, the government is the only thing that can put a check on the growth of feudalism, and it’s what we used here in the United States, from the founding of the republic until the Reagan revolution, to fight the elite and build a middle class from the ground up.

“Tariffs, workers’ rights legislation, the Glass-Steagall Act, higher taxes on the rich, you name it — our government used all of these things to restrain the natural tendency of capitalism towards inequality and to create a middle class.

“But ever since Reagan came to town and brainwashed everyone into believing that ‘government is the problem, not the solution,’ we’ve gutted regulations, busted unions and, as a result, returned capitalism to something resembling its natural, brutish state.

“Inequality is now at a record high, and the richest three percent of the population now controls more than half of all wealth.

“And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the child poverty rate here in the US is now among the worst in the developed world.

“Things have arguably gotten even worse since the recession, as the top one percent has absorbed almost all of the gains of our so-called ‘recovery.’

“The kings and noblemen may be long gone, but here in the US, the business and financial elite reign supreme, and corporate feudalism is the name of the game.”

My Comment: Egoism, if it is not restricted, is itself unlimited, and therefore constantly strives to boundless expansion and fulfillment. The more it gets, the more it feels emptiness. “Having received 100, it desires 200, and having received 200, it desires 400,” according to the law of expansion of the desire by the Light.

And thus until its death; when it dies, there is not even half of the desired in its hands. It is impossible to restrict egoism, because it is the basis of nature, and the only force of nature, except for the Light, the quality of bestowal and love. The pull to balance egoism (the middle line) is only by the knowledge of the wisdom of Kabbalah, which is the science of using egoism correctly.
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