This graph comes to us from Paul Krugman, Competitiveness and Class Warfare. He uses it primarily to make the case that the idea of national competitiveness is nonsense. You can see that most starkly with France, which has a strong welfare state, and the United States, which has an extremely stingy one. (Don’t worry about the slight divergence at the very end; that is due to the catastrophic austerity policies in the EU.)

There is a long tradition of people freaking out about other countries becoming too competitive and the US falling behind. There is always some “star” country that people are afraid of. In the 1980s, it was Japan. Now it is China. And this supposed question for competitiveness is always used to make the lives of Americans worse. It is a reason why we have to destroy unions. It is the primary reason why must make public education boring and turn our children into top quality multiple choice test takers. And it is the reason why we must bow down to the “job creators.” Otherwise, China will take all our jobs and we will starve to death.

This isn’t to say that any nation can do anything it wants. There are a lot of things that can hurt the economy. But what it does mean is that the things that people in this country complain about don’t matter. The supposed big problem in France is that employees are really hard to fire. But we certainly don’t see that in terms of GDP growth. Similarly, with the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality. Japan and France are relatively low at 63 and 69. But the United States is 85 — one of the highest in the world — even higher than Zimbabwe.

What this shows is that our economic system is the way it is because we’ve made it that way. There is nothing natural about it. And more to the point, these policies are not designed to grow our economy. Milton Friedman’s old idea is just wrong: it isn’t that the rich are pulling away but that the lives of the poor are being improved as well. In fact, there is more and more indication that all of this inequality is also bad for the rich.

To me, it is all very simple. I’ve been hammering on this for a while. If we don’t have an economic system that shares gains relatively fairly, then there is no point to continue on with it. What we have is a system that is already highly unequal. And then we add to that a system that just makes inequality worse over time. And then we add to that a system where the poor have little chance of becoming rich. And we end up with the modern equivalent of feudalism.

I know the conservative (and even more so, libertarian) response to this: we just haven’t gone far enough! The system is “free” enough to cause problems but not “free” enough to fix them all. But this is based on an idea that just doesn’t fly. There are almost no systems in any field of endeavor that just get worse and worse until you reach the solution and are then suddenly good. In general, if you follow a path and things are getting worse, it means you are going the wrong direction. See gradient descent.

But I think conservatives understand this. They are not pushing these policies because they think they are ultimately good. Instead, they think that the market (corrupt as it is) has picked the correct winners and so we should do everything we can to further help them. This is why libertarians are almost always against labor unions. It has nothing to do with freedom — much less the common good. It is just that they have decided that businesses are “good” and workers are “bad.”

The rest of us need to stop buying all this nonsense about how screwing over the poor and middle class is actually for our own good. It isn’t even for the overall economy’s own good.

Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling wrote a very interesting article that is worth digging into, Back to Pre-Capitalism? It follows after Paul Mason’s article, The End of Capitalism Has Begun. I’m all for an optimistic take on the future. But if history shows us anything, it is that the power elite are really good at warping society to their purposes. What’s more, the power elite are usually willing to sacrifice their own absolute status in the name of maintaining or increasing their relative status. Thus — contrary to Milton Friedman — they are more than willing to trade their own economic gain if the net result is that their economic status gets better relative to the rest of society.

I’ve long argued that we are moving in the direction of feudalism. The nature of unfettered capitalism is that the winners of the economic system will have more power to distort the political system. This is a positive feedback, which means that it is unstable: the more power the rich get, the faster they gain further power. The end result of this is not some kind of libertarian utopia but rather a kind of feudalism, where people aren’t necessarily slaves, but they also aren’t free. It’s kind of like the conservative’s idea of freedom of speech: you can say anything you want to, so long as you don’t.

Dillow offers three aspects in which he thinks that we are moving toward a pre-capitalist era. This starts with the fact that people are turning into generalists. Capitalism was all about specialization: factories with trained people making the one thing that they could make most efficiently. But now, few companies are willing to pay enough to get and hold onto trained workers. So we end up with a situation where workers have to hold down two or three jobs — maybe someone works at McDonald’s by day and drives for Uber at night. No special skills in those jobs. People doing it are like the serfs of old.

The second aspect is a turn against globalization and toward the local economy. At it’s worst, this is represented in hostility toward immigrants. “You can see all these as recrudescences of feudalism — a cleaving to community and belief that one’s fate should be tied to where one was born.” I’m not convinced that we are actually seeing this, however. I think the anti-immigrant movement is based upon the fact that Americans are seeing their standards of living going down. It is always easier to lend an open hand to others when you aren’t worried about your own survival.

Dillow’s third aspect is secular stagnation, which he blames on the replacement of the entrepreneur with the bureaucracy. I like this idea very much. For conservatives, bureaucracy is this thing that is associated with the government. But in my life, the bureaucracies that most interfere are those of private companies. The big companies are not like free-wheeling revolutionaries; they are staid bureaucrats. What creativity they have is exhausted on manipulating the political system and taking more money for the top management and owners, and away from the workers. The net result is slower overall growth, but excellent growth for those at the top: secular stagnation.

The main thing that Dillow is getting at is that our economy is becoming more hierarchical. And that goes against the idea of capitalism and very much toward the idea of feudalism. As soon as I’m done writing this article, I’m going to write one about the lack of a labor market in the modern American economy. (It won’t necessarily be published after this one, but I’ll try.) And I would say that this is all inevitable. If there is no governmental check on a capitalist economy, it naturally works itself to feudalism. But it might be just as accurate to say that if democracy is not allowed to hold in check any economic system, it will naturally become something very much like a feudalism.

On 1 March of this year, Charly Keunang was killed by police officers in Los Angeles. He was unarmed and black — as if that cliche even has to be mentioned. But there is an issue that stands apart from the fact of unjustified police violence. As Janine Jackson reported recently, To LA Times, Meth in Skid Row Victim’s Blood More Important Than Gun in His Flesh. This refers to a headline in The Los Angeles Times, “Skid Row Shooting: Autopsy Shows Man Shot Six Times, Had Meth in System.” Because, you know, that explains everything. Just so you don’t think the headline distorts the article, this is the lede, “A homeless man killed by Los Angeles police officers earlier this year on downtown’s skid row was shot six times and had methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death, according to an autopsy report.”

There were other ways to report on the autopsy. Jeff Sharlet wrote, An LA Cop Pressed His Gun Into the Chest of an Unarmed Man And Shot Him Through the Heart. He was pretty clear:

But The Los Angeles Times’ reporting is entirely typical. The truth is that journalists have close relationships with law enforcement. They are great sources of tips for reporters. How else do you think that the newspapers find out that this or that celebrity was caught in a porn theater? So it isn’t at all surprising that it works the other way too: the police know they can depend upon reporters to create stories that spin the news in their direction.

For two decades now, I’ve been writing with some exasperation that our society thinks that drug use is worse than murder. There are many facets to that. For example, there is the way that drug felons on parole are required to do drug testing but paroled murders are in general not. Inside the criminal justice system, there really is the feeling that murder is just an unfortunate thing that happens to a large extent because of bad social environments. That’s true! But the same people who are understanding about this want to treat drug users in a particularly punitive way.

I’m constantly amazed how the specter of drugs can be used to totally invalidate wrongdoing. After George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin, much was made of the fact that Martin had cannabis in his system. Many liberals were surprised at the time, “What does that have to do with anything?” But that is exactly the point. The idea is to paint the victim as one of “those” people who cannot be trusted.

In the case of Charly Keunang, the emphasis is more, “Who knows what he could do while on drugs!” But the same thing can be said without the drugs, “Who knows what he could do!” The actual evidence that drugs make people violent is only strong for alcohol. A big part of that is our society’s dysfunctional attitudes towards drugs. There’s no point in testing if heroin, meth, or cannabis makes people violent. They must be because they aren’t sanctioned by the government!

Meanwhile, Charly Keunang is dead. And The Los Angeles Times is there to run with old, biased stereotypes of drugs and drug users — all in the name of protecting a group of men who, under the cover of protecting the community, murdered an unarmed man.