Opponents framed land-use regulation as a return to feudal serfdom

Evidence

Representative Steve Symms warned the House of Representatives in 1974 that passage of the land-use bill would begin a slow but sure erosion of the rights of property ownership. “For this bill will lay the groundwork for a New Feudalism,” Symms argued. “The duke and baron of old will be replaced by the State, supposedly acting in the name of ‘the people.’ Today’s independent landowner will become the serf of tomorrow’s New Feudalism. Under the New Feudalism all real property will be not owned, but merely ‘held,’ at the sufferance of the State. Whatever the State thinks the landholder must do in the people’s interest, he will be forced to do. The New Feudalism will recreate the misery and bondage of an age long since mercifully forgotten.” — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 968

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘New Feudalism’ rhetoric connecting regulation to a property-ownership language tracks the property-rights legal scholarship angle in the legal systems course of the polyad. — connects to: Voluntary and enjoyable platform use still constitutes unpaid extraction like feudal serfdom — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 338
• ADDENDUM: Deepens the ownership-vs-stewardship metaphor from my trees-infrastructure piece: the same ‘held at sufferance of the State’ inversion appears when framing trees as infrastructure.