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 wise political decision that turns our course around before the damage becomes permanent does not know their history. Reform always comes after the crash. Never before. And by that time, what could have been reformed has 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 of 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 this — 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 borrowing was masking the difference. Our debts grew, but that was "temporary".

Phase 3 — Crisis. Europe, 2008 to now. The bill became visible. We tried to bridge the deficit by taxing the productive class more heavily. It began to respond with departure, avoidance, or silence. State revenues started faltering. Our political polarisation increased. This is where we are now.

Phase 4 — Shock. Coming. When, nobody knows precisely. 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 will we see what we have done.

We are in phase 3, in its second half. Denial still works. Fiscal tightening continues. The exodus accelerates. State revenues falter. Polarisation is acute. What is missing is the shock. It is coming.

Why we will not reform before the shock

Three reasons, and they are structurally unavoidable.

One — we vote rationally for our own poverty. Those of us who live from pension, benefit, or civil service salary have no reason to vote for lower taxes on capital. It is not our money being picked. It belongs to someone else, in another city, in another life.

Do the arithmetic. In the Netherlands, 5.2 million people work in the market sector. The electorate is 13 million. Who has the majority? Not the market. Not the entrepreneurs. The others. And those others have no direct stake in entrepreneurship they do not practise themselves. Democracy without a productive majority cannot democratically decide to become productive again. The mathematics is merciless.

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

It is rational to harvest today and pass the bill to 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 others will give something up. No wonder we get what we get.

Three — our institutions defend themselves. A bureaucracy that would shrink under reform never shrinks voluntarily. A tax authority that would simplify never simplifies. A European Union that derives its raison d'être from coordination always coordinates more, never less.

The system optimises itself for self-preservation, not for its mandate. 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. Nearly one in two economically active South Africans has no work or has given up looking. Youth unemployment is 60.9 per cent. Seven out of ten young people who want to work cannot find any.

Electricity production has fallen for six consecutive quarters. A country with gold beneath its soil can no longer keep its own lights on. Industrial output contracted in the first quarter of 2026 for the sixth consecutive time in heavy industry. What was once an industrial nation is no longer an industrial nation.

Talents are leaving by the thousand. AI specialists to Australia. Doctors to England. Engineers to Canada. The South African tech sector is suffering an exodus so severe it threatens national security. What remains fights over scarcity.

And the people who stayed behind are searching for a scapegoat. They find it 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 needs to be sold. In June 2026, tens of thousands of South Africans march through the streets demanding that "the migrants must go". Not the wealthy migrants — there are barely any. The poor migrants.

Popular anger does not turn against the system that impoverished them. It turns against the weakest others within that same system. That is what the losers of plunder always do: they find someone even weaker to blame.

This is what awaits us. Not tomorrow, but within fifteen years. The pension payment that does not arrive. The civil service salary in devalued euros. The healthcare waiting list that stretches into years instead of months. The power cut that is no longer a cut but the norm. And the popular anger that does not aim at the policy that caused this — because we chose that policy ourselves — but at the migrant, the old neighbour, the wealthy uncle, the foreign student.

That is how a civilisation dies. Not suddenly. Not spectacularly. Statistically, decade by decade, with a growing resentment towards whoever still has something. Until there is nothing left to resent.

Three peoples that have driven out their producers

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

The Roman Empire in the third century. The Roman state raised taxes on large landowners until they abandoned their enterprises and placed their assets in the hands of local rulers. The emperors responded with still higher levies, exit prohibitions, and the familiar colonatus legislation that bound peasants to their land. The empire was not reformed; it was carved up.

The Roman senators did not die wealthy 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 to their own endgame.

Spain after 1580. At the height of its power, the Spanish state plundered its own productive bourgeoisie to finance the wars in the Low Countries and court expenditure. 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 dilapidated palaces. Living on credit from the Dutch people they had tried to subjugate. 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 the nobility and the clergy. When the system collapsed at the Estates-General of 1789, revolution came. The nobility that had refused to reform lost its heads within two years. The clergy that had profited was expropriated. The people who had demanded redistribution ended up ten years later under Napoleon, mobilised for wars they had not chosen.

The pattern is the same everywhere: plunder escalates until the system breaks. And when it breaks, it is not the plundered who suffer — they left long ago — but the plunderers. Because they have tied their fate to a state that can no longer deliver what it 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 are already creaking audibly. The German generational accounting does not add up. At some point — probably within ten years — a large fund will have to cut its payouts by twenty or thirty per cent. Not only for the poorest participants. For everyone. The anger this provokes among people who have contributed throughout their lives will not lead to reform. It will lead to scapegoat-hunting.

Currency crisis. A euro sustained by shrinking productivity and growing state debt is not viable. 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 their savings in months. Deflation evaporates their job in years. Neither option is recoverable without the productive class we have driven away.

Defence crisis. A real war — Ukraine, the Middle East, or a new conflict — that forces defence expenditure to levels where the current fiscal architecture breaks entirely. At some point we will 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 accumulation. The healthcare waiting list that is no longer a wait but never comes. The benefit that no longer covers. The school with no teacher. The police that sends no officer. When people discover that the state has become fictional while they are still obliged to finance it, a legitimacy crisis arises that no election can repair.

One of these shocks is coming. Perhaps several simultaneously. And then — not before — what is now politically impossible becomes possible. Lower taxes on production. Reduction of the state. Protection instead of plunder of those still building. But by that time, what could have been reformed has long since gone.

Who truly suffers — the cruellest lesson

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

When the shock comes, it will not be the entrepreneurs, inventors, and patent holders who suffer most heavily. They will have left long ago, or arranged their structures so the plunder cannot reach them. Their wealth is spread across three jurisdictions. Their intellectual property sits in an Asian holding company. Their children study in Texas or Singapore. We drove them away, and they adapted.

It is we who will suffer. We who trusted the state most completely.

The pensioner in Leiden whose state 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 payment is cut because the treasury is empty. The university employee in Bologna whose chair is eliminated. The care worker in Madrid whose wage is frozen to dampen the systemic collapse.

We have tied our lives to promises of a state that can no longer deliver. The entrepreneur tied their life to the market, which can be hard, but which they understand. We chose the security that has turned out not to be security. We get what we chose.

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

We will march through the streets with the same slogans as the South Africans in June 2026. "They must go." "They did this to us." "Make them come back with what they took." But they will not come back. Because what they took with them is their knowledge, their appetite for risk, their capacity to build something. No law can compel that. No state can claim that. We lost it when we treated them as enemy rather than ally. And what is lost does not return.

Conclusion

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 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. An impoverished, productionless Europe, ageing and resentful, astonished that 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 in two generations we have driven out the knowledge, the capital, and the people that made it possible.

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

And we will demand more plunder. That is the pattern. A people that has plundered keeps plundering until there is nothing left. It cannot do otherwise, because every other choice would acknowledge that the earlier plunder was a mistake. And that is psychologically impossible.

We vote for the camps. Not openly, not all at once, but at every election again. And when we are there — too old to work, too weak to build, too angry to do anything but complain — we will not remember that we had every chance to do it differently.

We will remember that we were the victims.

That is the outcome.

PART IV OF FOUR