In this era, we have double-income people just getting by . . . .
Oh come on. Every economy goes through the occasional downturn. I don't know how old you are (I'm 71), but my parents lived through the Great Depression, which was
worldwide, at least among the industrialized Western nations. That was caused by lax rules governing banks.
The current downturn has a similar cause. This time the rules were in place, but the Comptroller of the Currency appointed by may-he-rot-in-hell Backward Baby Bush was simply not doing his job of enforcing them. (Allowing banks to loan money to people who would never be able to pay it back, and selling the mortgages to pension funds before the mortgagees began to default. In other words, they were stealing from old ladies!)
The real economic problem (in the USA, anyway) is that corporate leaders have been helping themselves to all the profits. In the past 40 years, the wealth of the top 1% of the population has grown astronomically, while the wealth of the bottom 90% (imagine calling 90% "the bottom"!) has stagnated. This is in fact not an economic problem but a political one. The economy is booming, but it doesn't "trickle down" anymore.
Nonetheless, this is still a temporary problem which the government will eventually have no choice about repairing--since it's the bottom 90% who pay most of the taxes and the government wants its slice of the pie!
In the meantime, most of those two-breadwinner families are managing to get by... at a level much higher than families enjoyed 150 years ago, when both the father and the mother worked 100-hour weeks--most of them in the grueling work of farming!
. . . . taxes probably consume more than any villein was required to contribute to his lord's agriculture.
But 99% of medieval tax revenue was spent on maintaining the lord's mansion and his art collection. The major part of the taxes collected by today's elected representative governments are spent on services for their constituents: schools, hospitals, roads, airports, police, courts, jails, etc. Sure, Congressmen draw salaries far out of proportion to the work they do, but compare our government to that of, say, India, where the salaries of legislators aren't much higher than the national average, so virtually every one of them solicits bribes.
My position is that it has created new systems of confiscation
As I just explained, very little of that money goes to today's "lords." We have a much more effective and valuable infrastructure than our ancestors did. People in medieval Europe drank beer because all of their rivers were polluted by sewage! When coffee was brought in from Ethiopia, the effective IQ of the continent practically doubled, and real progress began.
I grant that education is more widespread, but what is its inherent value?
Speak for yourself. My university degree has provided me with a very comfortable life. When I graduated I got a job as a programmer (we call them "software engineers" now) on the first third-generation computers. Now I'm a technical writer. And today's "work" can be done sitting at a desk, so I haven't bothered to retire.
Feudalism did not end with industrialism; it transformed.
Indeed. In the Western Hemisphere, the citizens found it very difficult to recruit other citizens to be yeomen, so they imported Africans (against their will) to do the hard work. We fought a war to end the practice, but almost all of the other nations on this side of the planet simply let slavery end by attrition. Industrial processes require workers to have a certain degree of initiative and pride in their work, and you don't get that from slaves. The practice vanished by 1890.
If you really think that the modern American economy has very much in common with feudalism, you weren't paying attention in your history classes. Once you start building schools (which were made possible by the
industrial phenomenon of printing books in large quantities), the children of your yeomen are going to find ways to have better lives than their parents.
There are still many places on Earth where people are as bad off as our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. It's an insult to them to put us, with our 40-50 hour work weeks, our private automobiles, our lavish air-conditioned rain-proof houses with one bed for every occupant, our shopping malls, our paid vacations, our hospitals, our universities, our pets (who eat better than they do!) and our
elections, in the same category.
If you don't believe me, burn your credit cards, give your money to the Salvation Army, smash your cellphone, dye your skin black, and buy a one-way ticket to almost any sub-Saharan African country.
