The Libri GmbH The New Serfs: How the Western World Is Sliding Back Into Feudalism

You don't own your car's heated seats. You can't fix your own tractor. Your landlord is a hedge fund. And your government is quietly building money that can expire.A thousand years ago, the answer to "who really controls your life?" was simple: the lord who owned the land you worked. Today the answer is more complicated - and, this book argues, disturbingly similar.In The New Serfs, economic analyst Robert F. Geissler traces how the Western world's core institutions - housing, debt, technology, labor, and money itself - have quietly rebuilt the essential architecture of feudalism, one terms-of-service agreement at a time. Institutional landlords now behave like a distributed landed gentry. Non-dischargeable debt binds a generation's future labor to creditors. Software licenses have replaced ownership with revocable permission. And central banks are building the technical capacity to program exactly how, where, and when you're allowed to spend your own money.Drawing on the Austrian and Chicago School traditions of Hayek, Mises, Friedman, and de Soto, Geissler doesn't just diagnose the problem - he shows how the West broke free of feudalism once before, and lays out concrete, practical steps any reader can take today to reclaim real ownership over their own economic life.This isn't a metaphor. It's a pattern - and once you see it, you can't unsee it.