There are plenty of systems where “nobles” control the things you mentioned:
1. Soviet or Chinese communism. The nomenklatura class controls all these things. Everyone else is peasant.
2. State capitalism, e.g., in Nazi Germany
3. bureaucratic welfare state capitalism—what we have incrementally been living under since the Progressives of the early 1900s or perhaps FDR. But it’s not quite as bad, yet, as under the USSR or National Socialism.
4. Ancien Regime absolutist mercantilism (1600s, 1700s)
5. Ancient imperial Rome
See, you’re hung up on “nobles.” There has always been a group of powerful owners of resources. They are called nobles in the Middle Ages and so you think that that’s the only time a “nobility” has controlled these resources.
But the nomenklatura class of the USSR or the Wall-Strett-White-House axis of the present administration are also forms of noble rule.
But within systems of “rule by elites” (which is really what “nobles” means), you can have immense variation, both in the degree to which the elites own all these resources and the degree of impunity with which they govern.
All I’m saying is that on the scale of impunity, thuggishness and totality of control of resources, the worst regimes have all been post-1500, not pre-1500.
Peasants had rights and recourse to law for redress of their rights. You had not rights, to speak of, under Henry VIII in England. You could be condemned without trial, either condemned to death or to property confiscation or whatever. If you were one of the abosolute monarch’s cronies you were fine, as long as you propped up the absolute monarch.
That was not true in the Middle Ages. Real checks on the power of the king by the nobles and bishops and on the power of bishops and nobles by the kings existed. Were they perfect? No. The system of checks and balances established by the American founders was as good as it gets.
But notice what’s happening: the older check and balance system (nobles and bishops checking kings, kings checking nobles and bishops) failed because of a combination of corruption (non-virtuous rulers at all levels) and greedy power-grabbing by the kings who managed to reduce/eliminate the nobles/bishops as checks on their power.
In reaction to that, the middle class overthrew the absolute kings and decided not to trust in feudum, in personal honor alone but to put trust in a written constitution.
It worked pretty well, as long as those entrused in governing under it were honorable and virtuous, as the Founders were truly honorable and virtuous. But eventually, as we shifted from honor and virtue as key qualifications for the “nobles” (and yes, we had our elites, our Nobles throughout American history, from Washington, Jefferson down through Lincoln) to technical prowess and “value-neutral” “problem-solving” (FDR’s Brain Trust marks the shift)as the key, we handed ourselves over to the bureaucratic state.
We’d be better off with feudum as the key to government than with cleverness and technocratic prowess.
Just something to think about before you throw around “feudal” or “medieval” as cheap descriptions for whatever you despise about the present.
Our problem is not that we have elites governing us. There’s no way to avoid that. Even if you manage to distribute land and wealth among small stake-holders (which was the key to American virtue from the 1600s to the late 1800s), you will still have elites (nobles) among that relatively more widely distributed ownership of resources. Likewise, you can have relatively more concentrated ownership of resources and still have relatively virtuous elites governing. Or you can have concentration of resource ownership and have unvirtuous, thuggish, evil elites governing.
Our problem is lack of honor, lack of virtue among our governing elites, which is directly traceable to the abandoning of Judaeo-Christian virtue in the formation of new generations. We went from “what’s right” to “what works” as the criterion of evaluation.
In the much-maligned pre-1500 Middle Ages, they did still ask, “what is right?” not merely “what works?”
That was a VERY long way of saying, ‘I don’t have one’.
What you’re describing is Oligarchies. In a sense you’re right, all of those are examples of a relatively small group of people dictating how the rest of the population are allowed to live.