Economically speaking, the US is not a "moderately sized country". It is the richest country in the world.

There are several moderately sized countries with lower GDP than Bill Gates net worth.

While you are technically correct (the best kind of correct), this was kind of a brain-fart on my part and not really important to the point.

The point is that net worth includes the assumption of future earnings in the valuation. GDP is just one year's production.

Bill gates is orders of magnitude less wealthy than Ukraine, for example, even though his net worth is similar to Ukraine's GDP.

That's a terrible argument for why the amount of money Bill Gates has is not absurd.

(It is indeed a terrible argument for the point I'm not making).

In feudalism a single person is the entire state. His wealth isn't comparable, disregarding the extra rights that are conferred from literally being the law of the land as a monarch.

No, that's not true. That's not at all true.

No, that's (approximately) monarchical absolutism. Feudalism is completely different, because the state (insofar as that term is even loosely valid for feudalism) is a bunch of people, arranged in heirarchy, but each with both rights and obligations both up and down the heirarchy, not one person with absolute power. That's why the transition from feudal government to absolute monarchies in much of Europe was a big deal.

Your calculation is making my head hurt. I assume by 'expenditures' you mean the US governments budget is about 4 trillion? If so, your $14trillion represents expenditures by the private sector. So if we build a bridge or something it doesn't count into your 10x, for some reason. Sorry this whole argument makes no sense to me.

Argument is humans aren't on the same scale as governments (even comparing exceptionally rich humans and middle of the road governments). It is easy to verify with a few minutes of thought.

This is entirely wrong. Other people have already commented on what feudalism is, but I wanted to provide a brief high-level history in case people were interested.

So let's take the historical look! How did we go from ancient Rome, an imperial monarchy, to feudalism being the law of the land?

The seeds of feudalism were sown from the Roman Emperor Diocletian's decision not to tax lords if all commerce took place within a lord's domain. Diocletian was a wonderful Emperor, one of the best, but he was around at a time when the Empire was cannibalizing itself with constant civil wars, making his main goal was peace and stability. To simplify, if I owned a city, and the city blacksmith supplied everyone else in my city, the state (i.e. the Roman Empire) would not take a cut of this. Only if goods flowed into a neighbouring lord's areas would the empire tax it.

What's the incentive structure here for the lords? Build up as much as you can within your domain and make it as self-sufficient as possible. It's legal tax avoidance, baby!

Because of all the civil wars there were labour shortages, both from bloodshed, devastated landscapes, and people fleeing. What's the solution to this? Outlaw moving, making peasants stay where they grew up and work the job of their father. This made economic planning much simpler, and Diocletian was an economic planner. In doing so, we get serfdom going hand in hand with the seeds of feudalism.

Over time, as the Roman Empire waned, this political structure stayed in effect. Power was increasingly ceded to the regional and away from the imperial. Basically, the state collapsed on itself. While we do get the Catholic Church springing up, it only sorta-kinda fills the power vacuum as it's clearly not a state in the same way Rome was.

Ambitious lords take more power, filling the vacuum of the the monolithic state. Without a single arbiter to enforce relationships between the lords, fealty and swearing allegiances become much more important. Literally the only thing holding these states together were a few lords word, some marriages, and often some hostages. If it was worth it to break those things, the 'state' would crumble, and everyone knew it.

That's basically it. From then, feudalism became the law of the land for around a thousand years (let's roughly say 300AD-1500AD). Then we're onto absolute monarchies, the renaissance, and the bourgeoisie throwing a wrench in everything.

In case all that hasn't helped, here's a (probably weak) analogy: monarchies are monoliths, feudalism is microservices.

FYI, Diocletian didn't use the word lord, he used dux. Which is where we get duke, doge, duce, etc. We also get the word dioceses here, which the Catholic Church still uses to this day.