We do not pluck our rich to lift up our poor, but to let ourselves die just as poor.

No redistribution. No justice. Plunder with a calculator.

And we vote for the plunder, again and again, because that is how our democracy works. This is not an article about what others do to us. This is a mirror.

How far we have sunk

Begin with the figures, for they do not lie.

The eurozone shrank in the first quarter of 2026 by 0.2 per cent. America grew by 0.4 per cent, year-on-year by 2.6 per cent. The growth gap between America and Europe has doubled since 2000: from fifteen to thirty per cent. Our productivity per worker now stands at eighty per cent of the American level. In the innovation index we sit behind China and South Korea.

Of the Draghi plan — our own official diagnosis, written by our own former prime minister — we have after almost two years implemented fifteen per cent. Fifteen per cent. A man we hired to tell us what should be done wrote three hundred pages of recommendations, and we have hardly done anything with them. Not because we do not believe him. Because none of his recommendations suits us in the short term.

We work less than our parents. The average worker in the eurozone works 120 hours per year less than in 1995 — three full working weeks less, every year. We produce less per hour than the Americans. We invent less than the Chinese. We build less than the Vietnamese. And yet we expect our prosperity to remain the same.

Our pensions, care and defence cannot all three be paid from what is left. One of the three must give way, or money must come from somewhere. We have not cut any of the three. So we get the money from somewhere.

The three roads, and the one we have chosen

There are three ways out of this squeeze.

The first: work harder. Do more hours. Forget early retirement. Become more productive. That is unpopular, because it costs discomfort. No party dares to say it.

The second: distribute less. Lower benefits. Soberer pensions. Fewer public services. That is political suicide, because the majority now lives off a benefit, a pension, a civil-service salary or a subsidy. No party survives it.

The third: tax the productive minority extra. Their profit, their wealth, their transfer, their departure. That is what we have chosen. Not once, not by mistake, but at every election again.

We vote for parties that promise to raise taxes on wealth. We vote against parties that say the retirement age must go up. We applaud in talk shows when there is talk of "a fairer contribution by the rich". We keep quiet when the factory in Roermond closes and production moves to Poland.

There is no malicious outsider doing this to us. No Brussels bureaucrat. No American billionaire. No Chinese exporter. We do this ourselves. We, the majority, have decided that our rich must be plucked. We find it just. And tomorrow, when the consequences become visible, we shall be astonished.

What we ordered in June 2026

Let us list this year's order. These are not future plans. This is happening now.

Germany. The trade-union federation DGB demands a one-off levy of ten per cent on all assets above ten million euros, spread over twenty years. Yield: 350 billion euros. Plus the return of an annual wealth tax from one million upwards. The DIW, the German Institute for Economic Research, financed from German tax, argues for two per cent per year. The German voter approves of it.

France. Exit tax from a portfolio of 800,000 euros or a fifty per cent stake in one company. Social levies raised in January from 17.2 to 18.6 per cent. The French voter is furious when the price of diesel rises by ten cents. He applauds when the entrepreneur is targeted.

Norway. Since 2025 an exit tax of almost thirty-eight per cent on unrealised share gains, payable after twelve years — even if never sold. A fiscal claim that pursues you across the border and hits you over the head after a decade. The Norwegian Labour Party passed this with a large majority. The voter re-elected it afterwards.

The Netherlands. On 12 February 2026 our House of Representatives with 124 votes in favour passed the "actual return" Box 3 law. From 2028 an exit levy on start-up shares and foreign real estate. The conservatory assessment on the substantial interest in your own private company: unlimited in time. A shadow that follows you to the grave. One hundred and twenty-four representatives, elected by you, us, the Dutch voter.

Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom. The same pattern. Exit taxes, wealth levies, the end of non-dom regimes. In the United Kingdom 16,500 millionaires have left in one year with an estimated 87 billion euros in wealth. The British voter shrugs. They are only rich people.

Brussels. Our elected European representatives are working on a directive for a minimum exit tax for all member states. Plus eleven billion euros per year in new levies for the European budget 2028 to 2034. Above all this hangs the proposal by the French economist Gabriel Zucman: two per cent per year on assets above one hundred million, with the explicit right of states to tax leavers "as residents for five to ten more years". Serfdom with a bank account.

We have not merely permitted this. We have ordered it. With our vote.

The South African mirror

We know where this path leads. We have seen it happen in our own time, in a country that was once the richest of its continent.

South Africa chose in the 1990s to plunder its productive class. Not through taxes alone, but through laws that redistributed productive land, through quotas that replaced productive workers, through a political climate that declared the farmer and the manufacturer enemies of the nation. The reasoning sounded moral: justice, redress, equality. The practice was plunder.

Now read the figures of Statistics South Africa, June 2026. Official unemployment is 32.7 per cent. Broadly measured, including people who have given up looking for work, 43.7 per cent. Almost one in two economically active South Africans has no job. Youth unemployment among 15- to 24-year-olds is 60.9 per cent. Three in ten young people who want to work find work.

Electricity generation in 2026 has now fallen for six consecutive quarters. A country with gold under its ground can no longer keep its own lights on. Heavy industry shrank in the first quarter for the sixth time in a row. Technical talents are leaving by the thousand at a time. According to estimates the South African tech sector has a talent exodus so severe it threatens national security. The young doctors, the engineers, the AI specialists — to Australia, to America, to England. To anywhere they are still valued.

And the people who stayed behind seek a scapegoat. In June 2026 tens of thousands of South Africans march through the streets with the demand that "the migrants must go". Not the migrants with villas and businesses — there are hardly any of those. The poor migrants. The Zimbabwean refugee who still finds a job. The Mozambican market seller. The Malawian in a cleaning service. Popular anger does not turn against the system that impoverished them. It turns against the weakest others in that same system.

That is how a civilisation dies. Not suddenly. Not spectacularly. Statistically, decade after decade, with a growing envy of whoever still has something.

What we have not learned

We have seen this — we watched the South African documentaries, we read the NRC articles, we spoke, shaking our heads, about Mandela's legacy — and we do it again. Not in a far-away country. In our own Europe.

We have made our entrepreneurs into suspects. In the Dutch media the entrepreneur with a private company is a tax dodger until the contrary is proven. In the German media the Mittelständler is a tax evader. In the French media the patron is an exploiter. It is a cultural climate that precisely mirrors that of South Africa in the 1990s: moral revulsion at productive people, presented as progressive justice.

We have taught our young generation that building is suspect. A twenty-five-year-old in Eindhoven who sees how his uncle with a metal firm is being targeted learns that he had better become a civil servant. A thirty-year-old in Stuttgart considering taking over a factory sees the Wegzugsteuer and the R&D-deduction limitation and chooses a job in government. A twenty-four-year-old in Milan with a talent for fashion, instead of starting his own thing, chooses a corporate function at a French group, because entrepreneurship "no longer pays".

We have in two generations almost eradicated entrepreneurship as a life stance. We have treated the people who still do undertake as though they were doing something shameful. And we get what we ordered: a continent without builders.

We have told our older generation, which built the prosperity, that its success was improper. The manufacturer aged sixty-five who has spent his life building up a family firm hears from his grandchildren that his wealth is "unfairly distributed". He keeps silent, because every explanation is dismissed as self-defence of privilege. We have taken away his voice before we take away his money.

What this really is

This is not redistribution. In redistribution money flows from those who have surplus to those who lack, and is made productive there. Here it flows from those who still build to a state household that spends it immediately.

The money does not go to new factories. It does not go to research. It does not go to technology. It goes to pensions no longer covered. To civil-service salaries no longer in proportion to production. To subsidies to sectors that would not exist without those subsidies. It is consumed, not invested.

That is plunder, not redistribution. Capital is converted into current consumption until the capital is gone. Then everyone stands empty-handed. The end of such a cycle is not equality in prosperity, but equality in poverty.

We have chosen this. Time and again. We keep choosing it. And we will keep shouting that the rich must pay still more, long after it is too late to reverse the pattern.

Who lies in the trenches

The irony is cruel. The group we are now fiscally emptying is the same group that has contributed most over the past forty years: the entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, family firms, patent holders.

Not the speculators. They have their structures elsewhere long since. Not the heirs of colonial fortunes. They sit in Monaco and the Bahamas. Not the financial traders. They have moved their jobs to Singapore and Dubai already.

Plundered are the people who still do run a factory in Tilburg, exploit a patent from Eindhoven, turn an innovation into product in Groningen. The family that wants to transfer its manufacturing business to the third generation. The inventor with twenty patents whose lab is in Delft. The medium-sized chemist in Geleen who wants to modernise his production process. Precisely the people we need to escape our productivity trap, we treat as a milk cow.

That is no error of policy. That is a choice we make. Our choice. To lay the burdens of a failed economic model on those who still work, rather than on those who profit from it. On the manufacturer in Tilburg, not on the civil servant in The Hague. On the chemist in Leverkusen, not on the consultant in Brussels. On the inventor in Milan, not on the pensioner on the Côte d'Azur.

We have in our majority decided that this is fair. And we insist we have nothing to do with the consequences when they arrive.

Close

This is not a war against wealth in the sense of a lofty struggle for justice. This is an ordinary sell-off of what others have built up, carried out by a political class we have chosen to do precisely this.

And it will be maintained until we get what we asked for: a poor, productionless people on an ageing continent. As in South Africa. With the same figures, on a delayed timeline, in a different climate, under a different flag. But with the same result. A people that has driven out its builders and is astonished the bread has vanished.

In Part II I describe the walls we have built to lock up our own builders before they leave. In Part III: what happens when we get what we ordered. In Part IV: whom we have chosen to do this for us.

For now the diagnosis suffices. We do this ourselves. We vote for it. We applaud it. And when the consequences catch up with us, we shall pretend it is happening to us.

Scandalous is too weak a word. The right word is: wanted.

PART II OF FOUR