In recent days, I’ve written a lot about the trend in this country over the past fifteen years towards corporatist government, that is to say, towards government maintaining strong relationships with large corporate interests, including big business, large unions, and powerful special interests like AARP, under the assumption that what’s good for these interests is ultimately good for all. The temptation to follow this road on the part of public officials is not hard to comprehend. Big interests have big money, and it takes money to win elections. Further, large interests provided Establishment liberals and Beltway conservatives with sort of a Faustian bargain in order for both to get what they wanted out of government. The Left wanted a larger welfare state but the public refused to pay for it; the Right wanted a smaller welfare state but the public wouldn’t allow it. What better way for everyone to have their cake and eat it to than to contract out the welfare state to corporate interests, each of which then became a sort of feudal nobleman in charge of taking care of its various serfs. Want a college education? Become a serf to Sallie Mae! Want a Cadillac health plan? Lord or Lady Union will make sure your employer provides it to you. Don’t want any changes to Social Security or Medicare? Join the AARP. And so forth. And of course all of this excess just made things more expensive than they should have been, with the cost of education, medical care, etc., skyrocketing, and with entitlements becoming unsustainable, thus making it all the more essential for anyone desiring these services to enter into indentured servitude.

President Obama, far from acting as an opponent of all of this, has not only validated the new feudalism since taking office but in less than a year has tried time and time again to exacerbate it, to cement it, and to ensure that the new road to serfdom is one which we must all follow. ObamaCare is a perfect example of this sort of thing — a plan in which the Crown (the state) ensures the maintenance and protection of the Aristocracy (in this case, the insurance companies, the drug companies, and the trial lawyers) in exchange for those large interests promising to care for their serfs (the citizens). ObamaCare disallows interstate competition between insurance companies, puts no limit on non-compensatory damages in lawsuits against medical professionals, and, most importantly, uses the power of the Crown to mandate that all citizens become serfs of a nobleman, i.e., an insurance company. Gone is the ability to live as a free individual; the new corporatist feudalism is complete.

In his book Obamanomics, Timothy Carney elaborates on the way in which the president’s policies essentially amount to a society based on big government and big business. He writes:

President Barack Obama, if he gets his way, will increase government control over the U.S. economy in ways previously thought impossible. This isn’t surprising, but you may be surprised to learn who’s benefitting: the biggest and most well-connected businesses.

Just as President George W. Bush, with his bailouts, spending sprees, and new entitlements, abandoned the free market at the behest of Wall Street and drug makers, Barack Obama’s vision of bigger government is also the dream of corporate lobbyists.

Obama’s healthcare reform, stimulus spending, global warming legislation, and auto industry bailouts are ambitious packages of regulations, taxes, mandates, and spending that benefit Big Business — what corporation wouldn’t welcome more taxpayer-funded subsidies, regulation that crowds out competition, and government mandates that drive more business to them?

There are other big beneficiaries as well: Politicians, who gain more power; and lobbyists, who gain more influence.

The victims are small businesses crushed by regulations and taxes, taxpayers — especially future taxpayers who will be burdened by the debt financing today’s spending sprees — and consumers, who face higher prices and fewer choices.

What should we call this Big Business-Big Government agenda pursued by President Obama? Although robust corporate-government collusion was hardly invented by the current administration, the U.S. has not seen such a consistent practitioner of corporatism in more than half a century. It’s fitting then to name this Big Business-Big Government practice Obamanomics.

I don’t think that this sort of system is sustainable in the era of modern democracy, though, where citizens can enact a revolution with the ballot box instead of the sword and could easily elect a T.R.-style president to go to war with the robber barons and send the Aristocracy of large interests to the guillotine, only in this case the guillotine would consist of things like changing the laws to make it easier to compete with the protected corporate interests and so forth. The reason, I think, that the Houses of Clinton and Bush were able to convince the American people that serfdom was in their interest was that this sort of system works well for the average person when the economy appears to have nowhere to go but up. Bill Clinton described and defended this dynamic quite well during Hillary’s campaign when he said during a speech — and I am paraphrasing from memory — that the fact that we all essentially live in debt to banks, student loan companies, etc, is a good thing because it allows us to acquire the things we need to survive and thrive and that will lay the groundwork for continued growth, with which we will able to essentially buy ourselves back. But that framework only survives if the money keeps rolling in. And arguably it was that sort of framework — an economy based on debt relying on the assurance of presumed future growth — that led to the collapse, because, as John Derbyshire said in his new book We Are Doomed: Re-Discovering Conservative Pessimism, all of that wealth was “Faery Gold.” That is to say, it wasn’t real, it was imagined, it was assumed, and once it didn’t appear, the whole thing collapsed like any other Ponzi scheme. And that leaves the Aristocracy (the large corporate and special interests) dividing up the scraps that remain with the protection of the Crown (the government), with the serf-like citizens unable to do anything about it.

Eventually all of this will change, as either the economy will re-bound and everyone will be a happy serf again, or, more probably, things will continue to look abysmal, there will be a “Let them eat cake!” moment involving someone in government, and a revolution at the ballot box will lead to an Administration backed with the popular anger necessary to give the nation’s large interests their comeuppance. I don’t know if this will happen in the near future, but I do think the contest for the GOP nomination in 2012 will reflect national angst based on the relationship between big government and big monied and special interests, and that the nominee will ultimately be opposed to corporate-socialism.