Source: The Dispatch
by Marian L Tupy
“On a recent podcast, Tucker Carlson praised feudalism as ‘so much better than what we have now’ because a ruler is ‘vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.’ This romantic view of medieval hierarchy ignores a brutal reality: For most people, feudalism meant grinding poverty, disease, and early death. As Gale L. Pooley and I found in our 2022 book Superabundance, society in preindustrial Europe was bifurcated between a small minority of the very rich and the vast majority of the very poor. … The Great Enrichment, a phrase coined by my Cato Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey, of the past 200 years or so lifted billions from the misery that defined human existence for millennia. It was driven by market economies and limits on the rulers’ arbitrary power, not feudal hierarchy.” (08/26/25)
https://thedispatch.com/article/peasants-feudalism-maga-carlson/