We are not plundering our wealthy to lift our poor. We are plundering them to let ourselves die equally poor.

No redistribution. No justice. Plunder with a calculator.

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

How far we have fallen

Start with the numbers, because they do not lie.

The eurozone shrank by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2026. 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 trail China and South Korea.

Of the Draghi plan — our own official diagnosis, written by our own former prime minister — we have implemented fifteen per cent after nearly two years. Fifteen per cent. A man we hired to tell us what needed to happen wrote three hundred pages of recommendations, and we have barely acted on them. Not because we disbelieve 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 fewer per year than in 1995 — three full working weeks less, annually. 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, healthcare and defence cannot all three be paid from what remains. One of the three must give way, or money must come from somewhere. We have cut none of the three. So we find the money somewhere.

The three paths, and which one we chose

There are three ways out of this bind.

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

The second: distribute less. Lower benefits. More modest pensions. Fewer public services. That is political suicide, because the majority now lives from 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 transfers, their departure. That is what we chose. Not once, not by mistake, but at every election.

We vote for parties that promise to raise taxes on wealth. We vote against parties that say the pension age must rise. We applaud on talk shows when someone speaks of a "fairer contribution by the rich". We stay silent when the factory in Roermond closes and production moves to Poland.

There is no malevolent outsider doing this to us. No Brussels bureaucrat. No American billionaire. No Chinese exporter. We are doing this ourselves. We, the majority, have decided that our wealthy should be plucked. We find it just. And tomorrow, when the consequences become visible, we will be surprised.

What we ordered in June 2026

Let us enumerate what was ordered this year. 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. Revenue: 350 billion euros. Plus return of an annual wealth tax from one million. The DIW, Germany's institute for economic research, funded by German taxes, advocates two per cent per year. The German voter approves.

France. Exit tax from a portfolio of 800,000 euros or a stake of fifty per cent 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 nearly 38 per cent on unrealised share gains, payable after twelve years — even if nothing was ever sold. A fiscal claim that follows you across the border and hits you after a decade. The Norwegian Labour Party passed this by a large majority. The voter re-elected it afterwards.

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

Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom. The same pattern. Exit taxes, wealth levies, end of non-dom regimes. In the United Kingdom, 16,500 millionaires left in a single year, taking 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 across all member states. Plus 11 billion euros per year in new levies for the European budget 2028 to 2034. Above all this hangs the proposal of French economist Gabriel Zucman: two per cent per year on assets above one hundred million, with the explicit right for states to tax those who leave as "residents for five to ten years". Serfdom with a bank account.

We did not merely allow this. We ordered it. With our votes.

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 on its continent.

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

Now read the figures from Statistics South Africa, June 2026. Official unemployment: 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: 60.9 per cent. Three in ten young people who want to work find work.

Electricity production has fallen for six consecutive quarters in 2026. A country with gold under its soil can no longer keep its own lights on. Heavy industry contracted in the first quarter for the sixth consecutive time. Technical talent is leaving in their thousands. Estimates suggest the South African tech sector faces a talent exodus so serious it threatens national security. Young doctors, engineers, AI specialists — to Australia, to America, to England. Wherever they are still valued.

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

That is how a civilisation dies. Not suddenly. Not spectacularly. Statistically, decade by decade, with growing resentment towards those who still have something.

What we have not learnt

We have seen this — we watched the South African documentaries, we read the newspaper articles, we shook our heads about Mandela's legacy — and we are doing it again. Not in a distant country. In our own Europe.

We have made our entrepreneurs into suspects. In the Dutch media, the entrepreneur with a BV is an evader until proven otherwise. In the German media, the Mittelständler is a tax dodger. In the French media, the patron is an exploiter. It is a cultural climate that precisely mirrors South Africa's in the nineties: moral contempt for 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 metalworking business is targeted learns that he would be better off as a civil servant. A thirty-year-old in Stuttgart considering taking over a factory sees the Wegzugsteuer and the R&D deduction restrictions and chooses a government job instead. A twenty-four-year-old in Milan with talent for fashion chooses a corporate role at a French conglomerate rather than starting his own company, because entrepreneurship "no longer pays".

In two generations, we have almost extinguished entrepreneurship as a way of life. We have treated those who still do it as though they are doing something shameful. And we get what we ordered: a continent without builders.

We have told our older generation — the one that built the prosperity — that its success was indecent. The manufacturer of sixty-five who spent his life building a family business hears from his grandchildren that his wealth is "unfairly distributed". He stays silent, because every explanation is dismissed as self-defence of privilege. We stripped him of his voice before we stripped him of his money.

What this really is

This is not redistribution. In redistribution, money flows from those who have surplus to those who lack it, and it 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 that are no longer covered. To civil-service salaries that are no longer proportionate to output. To subsidies for 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. After that, everyone stands empty-handed. The end of such a cycle is not equality in prosperity, but equality in poverty.

We chose this. Time and again. We keep choosing it. And we will keep screaming for the rich to pay still more, when it has long been 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 contributed most over the past forty years: the entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, family businesses, patent-holders.

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

Those being plundered are the people who still run a factory in Tilburg, exploit a patent from Eindhoven, turn an innovation into a product in Groningen. The family that wants to hand its manufacturing business to the third generation. The inventor with twenty patents who has his laboratory in Delft. The medium-sized chemical firm in Geleen that wants to modernise its production process. Precisely the people we need to escape our productivity trap, we treat as a cash cow.

That is not a policy mistake. That is a choice we make. Our choice. To place the burdens of a failed economic model on those who still work, rather than on those who benefit 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 retiree on the Côte d'Azur.

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

Conclusion

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

And it will be sustained until we get what we asked for: an impoverished, productionless people in an ageing continent. Like South Africa. With the same figures, on a delayed timeline, in a different climate, under a different flag. But with the same outcome. A people that drove out its builders and wonders where the bread has gone.

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

For now the diagnosis suffices. We are doing this ourselves. We vote for it. We applaud it. And when the consequences catch up with us, we will act as though it is happening to us.

Outrageous is too weak a word. The right word is: deliberate.

PART II OF FOUR