Plunders do not end with insight. They end with exhaustion. And when they end, the plunderers suffer more than the plundered.

Whoever hopes for a sensible political decision that will turn our direction around before the damage is definitive does not know his history. Reform always comes after the crash. Never before. And by that time what could have been reformed is long since gone.

The four phases, and where we stand

The American-Russian historian Peter Turchin has described the regularities of plunder cycles, from the Roman Empire to France in 1789. Four phases.

Phase 1 — Expansion. Europe, 1950 to 1980. We built. The productive class was numerous. Capital flowed. Wages rose. Everyone won. Our parents and grandparents lived through it — and they were proud of it.

Phase 2 — Stagnation. Europe, 1980 to 2008. Growth flattened. The productive class shrank relatively. The claiming classes — civil service, pensioners, benefit-recipients — grew. We did not notice, because we borrowed to mask the difference. Our debts grew, but that was "temporary".

Phase 3 — Crisis. Europe, 2008 to now. The bill came visible. We tried to bridge the gap by taxing the productive class more heavily. They began to respond with departure, avoidance or silence. State revenues began to falter. Our political polarisation increased. This is where we sit now.

Phase 4 — Shock. Comes. When, no-one knows exactly. Five years, perhaps ten, perhaps fifteen. An external or internal event — war, financial crisis, pandemic, currency collapse, pension crash — will break the system. Only then does reform begin, and only then do we see what we have done.

We are in phase 3, in its second half. Denial still works. The fiscal tightening runs on. The exodus accelerates. State revenues falter. The polarisation is acute. What is missing is the shock. It comes.

Why we will not reform before the shock

Three reasons, and they are structurally unavoidable.

One — we vote rationally for our own poverty. We who live off a pension, benefit or civil-service salary have no reason to vote for lower taxes on capital. It is not our money being plucked. It is someone else's, in another town, in another life.

Do the arithmetic. In the Netherlands 5.2 million people work in the market sector. The voter corps is 13 million. Who has the majority? Not the market. Not the entrepreneurs. The others. And those others have no direct benefit from entrepreneurship they do not undertake themselves. A democracy without a productive majority cannot democratically decide to become productive again. The arithmetic is merciless.

Two — our politicians think in shorter terms than systems. A cabinet lasts four years. An election campaign half a year. A fiscal reform that bears fruit only in ten years is electoral suicide.

It is rational to pluck today and push the bill onto successors. That is exactly what we ask of them. We punish every politician who says we must give something up. We reward every politician who promises that others will give something up. No wonder we get what we get.

Three — our institutions defend themselves. A bureaucracy that would shrink on reform never shrinks voluntarily. A tax authority that would simplify never simplifies. A European Union that derives its right to exist from coordination always coordinates more, never less.

The system optimises itself for self-preservation, not for its assignment. And we feed it with our vote, our tax, our indifference.

What has already happened in South Africa

We do not need to speculate about the outcome. We can read it in the June 2026 reports of Statistics South Africa.

Unemployment is 32.7 per cent. Broadly measured 43.7 per cent. Almost one in two economically active South Africans has no work or has given up seeking work. Youth unemployment is 60.9 per cent. Seven in ten young people who want to work find no work.

Electricity generation has fallen for six consecutive quarters. A country with gold under its ground can no longer keep its own lights on. Industrial production shrank in the first quarter of 2026 for the sixth time in a row in heavy industry. What was once an industrial nation is no longer an industrial nation.

Talents leave by the thousand at a time. AI specialists to Australia. Doctors to England. Engineers to Canada. The South African tech sector is coping with an exodus so severe it threatens national security. What remains fights over scarcity.

And the people who stayed behind seek a scapegoat. They find him in the migrant. The foreign worker who works for lower wages. The Zimbabwean refugee who still finds a job. The Mozambican market seller who still sells what has to be sold. In June 2026 tens of thousands of South Africans march through the streets with the demand that "the migrants must go". Not the rich migrants — there are hardly any. The poor migrants.

Popular anger does not turn against the system that impoverished them. It turns against the weakest others in that same system. That is what plunder-losers always do: they find someone still weaker to accuse.

This is what awaits us. Not tomorrow, but within fifteen years. The pension payment that does not come. The civil-service salary in devalued euros. The healthcare queue that becomes years instead of months. The power failure that is no longer a failure but normal. And the popular anger that does not focus on the policy that caused this — for we chose that policy ourselves — but on the migrant, the old neighbour, the wealthy uncle, the foreign student.

That is how a civilisation dies. Not suddenly. Not spectacularly. Statistically, decade after decade, with growing envy of whoever still has something. Until there is nothing left to be envious of.

Three peoples who drove out their productives

We are not doing something new. We are repeating what others have done before us.

The Roman Empire in the third century. The Roman state raised taxes on large landowners until they abandoned their farms and placed their possessions in the hands of local rulers. The emperors responded with still higher levies, exit-bans, and the well-known coloniate legislation that bound peasants to their land. The empire was not reformed; it was cut up.

The Roman senators did not die rich in Rome. They died poor, on a continent that let the barbarians in because it could no longer defend itself. The plunderers served themselves up in their own endgame.

Spain after 1580. At the height of its power the Spanish state plundered its own producing bourgeoisie to finance the wars in the Netherlands and court expenses. The entrepreneurs fled to Antwerp, then Amsterdam, then London. Spain went from world power to peripheral economy within a hundred years.

The Spanish nobility that had profited ended up in shabby palaces. Living on credit from the Dutch they had wanted to subdue. The plunderers became the beggars.

France before 1789. The French Crown tried for decades to tax the productive class extra without touching the privileges of nobility and clergy. When the system collapsed in the Estates-General of 1789, revolution came. The nobility that had refused to reform lost their heads within two years. The clergy that had profited was expropriated. The people that had pressed for redistribution ended up ten years later under Napoleon, mobilised for wars they had not chosen.

The pattern is everywhere the same: the plunder escalates until the system breaks. And when it breaks, the plundered do not suffer — they are long gone — but the plunderers do. For they have tied their fate to a state that can no longer deliver what it had promised.

What the shock in Europe will be

Which event will break our system cannot be said precisely today. But the candidates are not numerous.

Pension crash. The Dutch and Italian funds already creak audibly. The German generational account does not add up. At some point — probably within ten years — a large fund will have to cut its payments by twenty or thirty per cent. Not for the poorest participants. For everyone. The anger this evokes among people who have paid in all their lives will not lead to reform. It will lead to a search for scapegoats.

Currency crisis. A euro carried by shrinking productivity and growing state debt is not sustainable. At some point — probably within five to ten years — the European Central Bank will have to choose between inflation and deflation. Both options impoverish the ordinary citizen. Hyperinflation evaporates his savings in months. Deflation evaporates his job in years. Neither option is recoverable without the productive class we drove out.

Defence crisis. A real war — Ukraine, the Middle East, or a new conflict — that forces defence spending to levels the current fiscal architecture breaks on completely. At some point we shall discover that we can no longer build what we need to defend ourselves. No ammunition, no tanks, no drones, no ships. Not because we do not want to, but because the industrial base has evaporated.

Social crisis. A moment when a large group discovers that the state can no longer deliver what it promised. No catastrophe — a statistical sum. The health queue that is no queue but never arrives. The benefit that no longer covers. The school that no longer has a teacher. The police that no longer sends an officer. When people discover the state has become fictitious while they remain obliged to finance it, a legitimacy crisis arises that no election can repair.

One of these shocks comes. Perhaps several at once. And only then — not before — does politics make possible what is now impossible. Lower taxes on production. Shrinking of the state. Protection instead of plunder of those who still build. But by that time what could have been reformed is long gone.

Who really suffers — the cruellest lesson

Here comes the lesson we do not yet want to hear, but which history has confirmed hundreds of times.

When the shock comes, it is not the entrepreneurs, inventors and patent holders who suffer most heavily. They are long gone by then, or they have arranged their structure so the plunder does not reach them. Their wealth is spread over three jurisdictions. Their intellectual property sits in an Asian holding. Their children study in Texas or Singapore. We drove them out, and they adapted.

It is we who will suffer. We who trusted the state the hardest.

The pensioner in Leiden whose old-age pension is no longer paid at the promised level. The civil servant in Bremen whose salary is paid in worthless euros. The benefit-recipient in Marseille whose benefit is cut because the treasury is empty. The university employee in Bologna whose chair is abolished. The care worker in Madrid whose wages are frozen to cushion the system collapse.

We coupled our lives to promises of a state that can no longer deliver. The entrepreneur coupled his life to the market, which can be hard, but which he understands. We chose the security that turned out to be no security. We get what we chose.

And we shall be furious. Not with ourselves — that is psychologically too heavy. We shall be furious with the entrepreneurs who left. With the foreigners who still have work. With the young German who moved to Dubai. With the Dutch inventor who set up his factory in Singapore. With everyone except ourselves.

We shall march through the streets with the same slogans as the South Africans in June 2026. "They must go." "They did this to us." "Let them return with what they took." But they will not return. Because what they took is their knowledge, their willingness to take risks, their capacity to build something. No law can enforce that. No state can demand it. We lost that when we treated them as an enemy instead of an ally. And what is lost does not come back.

Close

We chose this. Not once, not by mistake, but at every election again. We chose the politicians who design the walls. We praised the academics who justify them. We rewarded the journalists who normalise them. We cast the votes that legitimise them. We paid the tax that finances them. And we gave away the future we had wanted to preserve for our children.

This is not a war between rich and poor. This is a popular decision, with popular executors and popular consequences. A poor productionless Europe, ageing and envious, astonished it is no longer what it was fifty years ago. A continent where our grandchildren will no longer be able to build what their great-grandparents built, because we in two generations drove out the knowledge, the capital and the people that made it possible.

We shall live like the people in South Africa. Not poorer in absolute terms — our prosperity was high enough to let the fall last long. But relatively, compared with those who still do build, we shall systematically fall behind. Our children will migrate to America, Asia, the Middle East. Our cities will age. Our factories will empty. Our streets will become unsafer as the welfare state can no longer carry its promises.

And we shall scream for more plunder. That is the pattern. A people that has plundered goes on plundering until there is nothing left. It cannot be otherwise, for every other choice would acknowledge that the earlier plunder was a mistake. And that is psychologically impossible.

We vote for the camps. Not out loud, not all at once, but at every election again. And when we sit in them, too old to work, too weak to build, too angry to do anything but complain, we shall not remember that we had every chance to do it differently.

We shall remember that we were the victims.

That is the outcome.

PART IV OF FOUR