We do not fleece our rich to lift up our poor, but to allow ourselves to die just as 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 figures, for they do not lie.

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

Of the Draghi plan — our own official diagnosis, written by our own former prime minister — we have implemented fifteen percent after nearly two years. Fifteen percent. A man we hired to tell us what needs to be done wrote three hundred pages of recommendations, and we have done next to nothing with them. Not because we do not believe him. Because none of his recommendations suit 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 work 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 defense cannot all be paid for from what remains. One of the three must give way, or money must come from somewhere. We have not cut any of the three. So we take the money from somewhere.

The three paths, and which one we chose

There are three ways out of this vice.

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

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

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

We vote for parties that promise to increase taxes on wealth. We vote against parties that say the retirement age must go up. We applaud on talk shows when there is talk of a "fairer contribution from the rich". We remain 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 rich must be fleeced. We find it just. And tomorrow, when the consequences become visible, we will be amazed.

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 confederation DGB demands a one-time levy of ten percent on all assets above ten million euros, spread over twenty years. Yield: 350 billion euros. Plus the return of an annual wealth tax starting from one million. The DIW, the German Institute for Economic Research, funded by German taxes, advocates for two percent per year. The German voter approves.

France. Exit tax starting from a portfolio of 800,000 euros or a fifty percent stake in a single company. Social levies increased in January from 17.2 to 18.6 percent. 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 thirty-eight percent on unrealized stock gains, payable after twelve years — even if never sold. A fiscal claim that haunts you across the border and strikes you after a decade. The Norwegian Labour Party passed this with a large majority. The voter subsequently re-elected them.

Netherlands. On 12 February 2026, our House of Representatives passed the actual return tax Box 3 with 124 votes in favor. Starting in 2028, an exit levy on startup shares and foreign real estate. The protective assessment on the substantial interest in your own BV: unlimited in time. A shadow that walks with 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, end of non-dom regimes. In the United Kingdom, 16,500 millionaires left in one year with an estimated 87 billion euros in wealth. The British voter shrugs. They are just the rich.

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 from 2028 to 2034. Above all this hangs the proposal of French economist Gabriel Zucman: two percent per year on wealth over one hundred million, with the explicit right for states to tax those who depart as residents for "five to ten more years". Serfdom with a bank account.

We did not just allow this. We ordered it. With our vote.

The South African mirror image

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.

In the nineties, South Africa chose to plunder its productive class. Not through taxes 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 is 32.7 percent. Broadly measured, including people who have given up looking for work, 43.7 percent. Nearly one in two economically active South Africans has no job. Youth unemployment among 15- to 24-year-olds is 60.9 percent. Three out of ten young people who want to work find a job.

By 2026, electricity production has fallen for six consecutive quarters. A country with gold in the ground can no longer keep its own lights on. Heavy industry shrank for the sixth time in a row in the first quarter. Technical talents are departing by the thousands at a time. According to estimates, the South African tech sector is experiencing a talent exodus so severe that 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 left behind are looking for a scapegoat. In June 2026, tens of thousands of South Africans march through the streets demanding that "the migrants must go". Not the migrants with villas and companies — there are hardly any of those left. The poor migrants. The Zimbabwean refugee who still finds a job. The Mozambican market vendor. The Malawian in a cleaning service. The popular rage does not turn against the system that has impoverished them. It turns against the weakest others in that same system.

That is how a civilization dies. Not suddenly. Not spectacularly. Statistically, decade after decade, with a growing resentment against anyone who still has something.

What we have not learned

We have seen this — we have watched the South African documentaries, we have read the NRC articles, we have talked about Mandela's legacy while shaking our heads — and we are doing it again. Not in a far-off land. In our own Europe.

We have turned our entrepreneurs into suspects. In the Dutch media, the entrepreneur with a BV is an avoider 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 mimics that of South Africa in the nineties: moral revulsion towards productive people, presented as progressive justice.

We have taught our younger generation that building is suspicious. A twenty-five-year-old in Eindhoven who sees how his uncle with a metal company is treated learns that he is better off becoming a civil servant. A thirty-year-old in Stuttgart considering taking over a factory sees the Wegzugsteuer and the R&D deduction limits and chooses a government job. A twenty-four-year-old in Milan with a talent for fashion prefers a corporate position at a French group rather than starting on her own, because entrepreneurship "no longer pays off".

In two generations, we have nearly wiped out entrepreneurship as a way of life. We have treated the people who still do innovate as if they were doing something shameful. And we get what we ordered: a continent without builders.

We have told our older generation, which built our prosperity, that its success was indecent. The sixty-five-year-old manufacturer who spent his life building a family business hears from his grandchildren that his wealth is "unfairly distributed". He remains silent, because any explanation is dismissed as a self-defense of privilege. We have stripped him of his voice before we strip him of his money.

What this really is

This is not redistribution. In redistribution, money flows from those who have extra to those who lack it, and there it is made productive. Here, it flows from those still building into a state budget that consumes 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 funded. To civil servants' salaries that are no longer proportional to production. 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. Then everyone is left 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 continue to choose it. And we will keep screaming that the rich must pay even more, when it is already long too late to reverse the pattern.

Who is in the trenches

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

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

Those being plundered are the people who still actually run a factory in Tilburg, exploit a patent from Eindhoven, turn an innovation into a product in Groningen. The family that wants to transfer its manufacturing company to the third generation. The inventor with twenty patents who has his lab in Delft. The mid-sized chemist in Geleen who wants to modernize his production process. The very people we need to escape our productivity trap are the ones we treat as cash cows.

That is not a policy mistake. That is a choice we make. Our choice. To place the burden of a failed economic model on those who still work, rather than on those who benefit from it. On the manufacturer in Tilburg, not the civil servant in The Hague. On the chemist in Leverkusen, not the consultant in Brussels. On the inventor in Milan, not the retiree on the Côte d'Azur.

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

Conclusion

This is not a war against wealth in the sense of a noble struggle for justice. This is a common clearance sale of what others have built, executed by a political class we have chosen to do exactly this.

And it will be maintained until we get what we asked for: a poor, production-less people on a graying continent. Just like 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 surprised that the bread has vanished.

In Part II, I describe the walls we have built to lock in our own builders before they depart. 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 are doing this ourselves. We vote for it. We applaud it. And when the consequences catch up with us, we will pretend it is something that just happened to us.

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

PART II OF FOUR