Two related concepts are fascism and feudalism. While the historic experience of feudalism centered on patronage schemes between the king and the land-owning barons, fascism is based on patronage schemes between government and “private-sector” cronies.
Private sector is in “scare quotes” because, with fascism, you do not have a free enterprise system with a sharp division between the public sector and private sector. Instead, just like feudalism, it is more important “who you know” (in the government) than it is “what you know” (about producing private-sector value and wealth).
An indicator of the loss of free enterprise is a divergence of income growth to the price growth of necessities, such as homes. Home prices are supposed to grow faster than incomes do, because home prices start off at a higher absolute value than incomes.
Under free enterprise, the dollar price of homes grow at approximately 3.6 times the dollar growth rate of income:
[click to enlarge]
But look what happens when free enterprise is interfered with by government collusion with cronies:
Notice how the 2004 home prices grew (26/3.6=) 7.3 times faster than would be expected under a free market system.
The public-private fraud and collusion which is required for home prices to grow 26 times faster than incomes, eventually led to the Great Recession — where $5 trillion in private sector wealth vanished and several million people lost jobs and even homes.
Events just after the Patriot Act legalized domestic spying — so that government could know what everyone in the private sector was doing — and also the events during COVID, represent large jumps in fascism (loss of free enterprise).
Evidence suggests that we need to return to free enterprise in the USA, so that ordinary Americans will continue to have the opportunity to buy a home.
The USA is devolving into a Banana Republic where regular people will no longer be able to afford to maintain living standards (while cronies and government officials get richer and richer).
The median price of a home in 2022 was equivalent to 6.1 years of median household income, so that people are having to work almost twice as long to buy a home as they had to back in 1984.
Reference
[median household income] — U.S. Census Bureau, Median Household Income in the United States [MEHOINUSA646N], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
[median home price] — U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States [MSPUS], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS