{"id":37982,"date":"2019-03-18T01:00:20","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T05:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37982"},"modified":"2019-02-18T08:39:39","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T13:39:39","slug":"qotd-the-eternal-bad-bet-that-was-feudalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/03\/18\/qotd-the-eternal-bad-bet-that-was-feudalism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The eternal bad bet that was feudalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>From time immemorial, the reigning myth of rule has been that the rulers provide a <em>quid pro quo<\/em>: in exchange for the people\u2019s submission and payment of tribute, the rulers protect the people from the enemies who lurk \u201cout there.\u201d The promise was often unfulfilled, however. The lord of the manor might well flee into his castle, leaving the peasants outside the walls to suffer whatever outrages an invader chose to wreak on them. Or the lord might haul them off to a distant war in which they had no real interest, merely to satisfy the lord\u2019s feudal obligation to the baron or duke just above him in the feudal pecking order.<\/p>\n<p>Most important, however, is the sheer fact that the ordinary people\u2019s most dangerous enemy, the one by far the most likely to plunder and abuse them, was their own impudent lord, the selfsame \u201cnobleman\u201d who forbade them to leave their place of birth or to engage in a variety of tasks and pleasures they might prefer \u2014 that is, the man who held and exploited them in a condition of serfdom.<\/p>\n<p>Robert Higgs, <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.independent.org\/2017\/04\/03\/i-reject-the-right-of-the-government-to-choose-my-friends-and-enemies-for-me\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;I Reject the Right of the Government to Choose My Friends and Enemies for Me&#8221;, <em>The Beacon<\/em><\/a>, 2017-04-03.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From time immemorial, the reigning myth of rule has been that the rulers provide a quid pro quo: in exchange for the people\u2019s submission and payment of tribute, the rulers protect the people from the enemies who lurk \u201cout there.\u201d The promise was often unfulfilled, however. The lord of the manor might well flee into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,41],"tags":[1272,703],"class_list":["post-37982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","tag-feudalism","tag-middleages"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9SC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37982"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46970,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37982\/revisions\/46970"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}