Are you seriously arguing that people bound by law to stick to a specific plot of land and produce a specific variety of goods there were not comparable to slaves?
Yes.
With slaves, person itself was a property. Serf was not a property himself.
Big fucking difference. For one, a noble
could not just go and kill a serf the way slaveowner could with a slave. Secondly, serfs could not be bought, sold or traded individually. This meant that serfs had a fairly stable life, as there was no possibility of a family being randomly ripped apart - if a plot of land was sold by a noble to another noble, that changed literally nothing for the serf - only thing different was whom he paid his dues to. Third, noble had a legal obligation towards serfs, especially in terms of protection, and serfs had extensive legal rights: ability to collect firewood from lord's forests, right to sell any surplus produce on the free market, right to demand legal protection at the court. And while lord could demand certain produce (usually wheat) as part of the tithe, so long as the tithe was met, serf could choose to produce whatever he wanted on his land and sell the produce on the free market. Tithe was also not excessive: 10% to the lord and 10% to the Church; compare to modern world where average person gives to the state some 50% - 60% of their income. And a serf knew to whom and to an extent even for what his taxes were being used; good luck knowing that with the modern state. Lord could also
not randomly dispossess the serf - in a way, serfs had more extensive legal protection of property rights than today's "free people" have (just ask the banks). Lord also had a legal obligation to support the serfs, both in terms of protecting them from depredations of bandits and other lords, but also in terms of supporting them in time of famine or war. And while lord could and did demand serfs to work his own land, not just theirs, this obligation was sharply limited: in 14th century Poland, requirement was one week per household per year.
If there is no difference between slaves and serfs, then there is no difference between slaves and today's "free" people.
What definition of "office of state" are you using that excludes feudal aristocrats? How, exactly, are people who collect taxes and command military forces not holding an office of state? Are you seriously going all-in on the state being exclusively the direct efforts of the Monarch himself? Or how most of the elective monarchies arose directly as a work-around to a mode of hereditary aristocracy that constantly split domains, starting from Charlemagne himself?
Office of state is literally office of state. Treasury, captainship, literally any function related to functioning of the kingdom. You could say barons and other high nobility were holding offices of the state by default as they were tasked with enforcing laws, but majority of nobility did not.
If you want to use modern terminology, feudal lords were not collecting
taxes, they were collecting
rent on allowing usage of
private property. According to you, if you rent out a flat
you own and require subtenants to pay you for renting the flat, you are holding office of the state. That is, literally, the logic you are using here.
And yes, I know it was basically a form of taxation. But that does not mean they were holding offices of the state: they were not.
Capitalism as we know it today originated under the UK when it had a very active House of Lords and was still expanding the British Empire. One of the early supermassive black-holes of manipulative investment was a scheme to wash the Crown's and the state's debts, reaching the so-far unique distinction of having such an astronomical valuation it was seriously choking out the entire rest of the economy.
The modern hidden-in-the-cacophony oligarchy does not have nearly so much command over social structure as Feudal stratification. Because again, people like Elon Musk and the Trump family exist. The Rockefellers and Disneys and Fords exist. Massive economy-warping concentrations of wealth within the last 150 years are what's dominant today, not Old Money.
Rockefellers are literally the definition of old money nowadays, as are most of the US political dynasties. You have Forbes, Astors in the US (and Kennedies, Bushes, Clintons in the political landscape), Rothschilds in Europe. As for the rest, that comes down to modern world in general being far quicker in general. There were cases in Middle Ages of peasants becoming lords, it just didn't happen very often.
...So you're just ignoring the half-built wall where he managed an end-run to get started around all the bullshit by doing it through the military? The piles and piles of judges he appointed? The serious threat to abortion from the Justices he got through? That he didn't pull a one-eighty in four years is no indication of his comprehensive failure, there is very obvious resistance with noteworthy effect he got through massive interference.
People believed he will drain the swamp, he did not because he could not. I did not say he had no successes, just that these successes don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
So long as the Left controls the deep state and can brainwash the children, literally nothing that Trump has achieved or might achieve matters. I suspect he was allowed to win to give people hope, and he did not actually poke the Cathedral where it hurts. Even McCarthy and especially Reagan did not, yet both are being vilified for what little they did do.
A common point of contention in this argument is that the Monarchs in WW1 wanted to avoid it but couldn't. What is the point if the Monarch does not have the authority to decline going to war? How do the desirable features function in that situation?
As best I can tell, what you call a "Monarch" is indistinguishable from the popular perception of the US President. Hell, there were seriously considerations to have the President be literally an elected monarch in all but name, following the procedures of the British Parliamentary Monarchy.
If you really want to be technical, issue with World War I was not only the
authority - in fact, diplomacy between the monarchs had managed to prevent several close calls in the years preceding the war, if memory serves me - it was the entire setup in general. Essentially, once situation got to the point everybody started mobilizing, war became unavoidable due to the way mobilization worked. But it is true that decision to go to war was made by governments, not by monarchs.
Ironically, in this specific situation the outcome might have been far better if 1900s monarchs truly were absolutist rulers
a la Louis XIV. But even that might not have stopped the war. Fact is that monarchs were
not immune to political forces within the countries nor were they immune to the nationalist sentiment. Especially Austria-Hungary could not avoid war against Serbia, not just for the reasons of national prestige but because its populace was
pissed at Serbs assassinating the Archduke. Again, that situation was fundamentally identical to the US and intervention in Afghanistan, except for the fact that US did not start a world war in doing so.