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

Those who hope for a sensible political decision that reverses our course before the damage is permanent do not know their history. Reform always comes after the crash. Never before. And by then, what could have been reformed has long since disappeared.

The four phases, and where we stand

The American-Russian historian Peter Turchin has described the laws governing 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 large. Capital flowed. Wages rose. Everyone gained. Our parents and grandparents lived through this — and were proud of it.

Phase 2 — Stagnation. Europe, 1980 to 2008. Growth flattened. The productive class shrank in relative terms. The claiming classes — civil servants, pensioners, welfare 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 the present. The bill became visible. We tried to bridge the deficit by taxing the productive class more heavily. It began to respond by leaving, avoiding, or going silent. State revenues started faltering. Our political polarisation grew. This is where we are now.

Phase 4 — Shock. Coming. Nobody knows exactly when. 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. The fiscal tightening continues. The exodus accelerates. State revenues are faltering. Polarisation is acute. What is missing is the shock. That will come.

Why we will not reform before the shock

Three reasons, and they are structurally unavoidable.

One — we rationally vote for our own poverty. Those who live from pensions, welfare, or civil service salaries have no reason to vote for lower taxes on capital. It is not our money being plundered. It is someone else's, in another city, in another life.

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

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

It is rational to plunder 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 that 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 whose raison d'être is coordination always coordinates more, never less.

The system optimises for self-preservation, not for its mandate. And we feed it with our vote, our taxes, our indifference.

What has already happened in South Africa

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

Unemployment is 32.7 percent. Broadly measured, 43.7 percent. Nearly one in two economically active South Africans has no work or has given up looking. Youth unemployment is 60.9 percent. Seven in ten young people who want to work cannot find work.

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

Talent is leaving by the thousands at a time. AI specialists to Australia. Doctors to England. Engineers to Canada. The South African technology sector is grappling with an exodus so severe it threatens national security. What remains fights over scarcity.

And the people left behind are searching for a scapegoat. They find him in the migrant. The foreign worker who accepts lower pay. The Zimbabwean refugee who still finds a job. The Mozambican market trader who still sells what needs to be sold. In June 2026, tens of thousands of South Africans march through the streets demanding "the migrants must go". Not the rich migrants — they barely exist. The poor migrants.

Public anger does not turn on the system that impoverished them. It turns on the weakest others within that same system. That is what losers of plunder cycles always do: they find someone 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 wait that is years rather than months. The power cut that is no longer a cut but the norm. And the public anger that does not target the policy that caused this — because we chose that policy ourselves — but 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 growing resentment towards those who still have something. Until there is nothing left to be resentful of.

Three peoples that drove out their productive class

We are doing nothing new. We are repeating what others did before us.

The Roman Empire in the third century. The Roman state raised taxes on large landowners until they abandoned their estates and placed their assets in the hands of local strongmen. The emperors responded with yet higher levies, exit bans, and the familiar colonate legislation that bound farmers 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 in the barbarians because it could no longer defend itself. The plunderers delivered themselves to their own endgame.

Spain after 1580. At the height of its power, the Spanish state plundered its own productive bourgeoisie to fund 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 they had wanted to subjugate. The plunderers became the beggars.

France before 1789. The French Crown spent decades trying to tax the productive class further without touching the privileges of the nobility and the clergy. When the system collapsed in 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 that had demanded redistribution ended up, ten years later, under Napoleon, mobilised for wars they had not chosen.

The pattern is the same everywhere: the 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

Exactly which event will break our system cannot be said today. But the candidates are few.

Pension crash. The Dutch and Italian pension funds are already creaking audibly. The German generational balance sheet does not add up. At some point — probably within ten years — a major fund will be forced to cut its payments by twenty or thirty percent. Not for the poorest members. For everyone. The fury that this will provoke in people who have paid in their whole lives will not lead to reform. It will lead to a hunt for scapegoats.

Currency crisis. A euro sustained by shrinking productivity and growing sovereign debt is not viable in the long run. 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 destroys his job over years. Neither option is recoverable without the productive class we drove away.

Defence crisis. A real war — Ukraine, the Middle East, or a new conflict — that forces defence spending to levels at which the current fiscal architecture completely breaks down. 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. Not one catastrophe — a statistical accumulation. The healthcare waiting time that is no longer a wait but a permanent absence. The welfare payment that no longer covers the basics. The school without a teacher. The police that sends no officer. When people discover that the state has become fictional while they remain obliged to fund it, a legitimacy crisis arises that no election can repair.

One of these shocks is coming. Perhaps several simultaneously. Only then — not before — will what is currently politically impossible become possible. Lower taxes on production. A smaller state. Protection rather than plunder for those who still build. But by then, what could have been reformed has long since gone.

Who truly suffers — the cruelest lesson

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

When the shock comes, it will not be the entrepreneurs, inventors, and patent holders who suffer most. They will long since be gone, or they will have structured their affairs so that the plunder does not 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 the most.

The retiree in Leiden whose state pension is no longer paid at the promised level. The civil servant in Bremen whose salary is disbursed in worthless euros. The welfare recipient in Marseille whose benefits are cut because the treasury is empty. The university employee in Bologna whose chair is abolished. The healthcare worker in Madrid whose pay is frozen to cushion the system's collapse.

We tied our lives to the promises of a state that can no longer deliver. The entrepreneur tied his life to the market, which can be harsh, but which he understands. We chose the security that 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 jobs. At the young German who moved to Dubai. At the Dutch inventor who set up his 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." "Let them return with what they took." But they will not return. Because what they took is their knowledge, their appetite for risk, their capacity to build something. No law can compel that. No state can reclaim it. We lost it when we treated them as enemies rather than allies. And what is lost does not come back.

Closing

We chose this. Not once, not by accident, but at every election anew. We elected 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 funds 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, outputless Europe, aged and envious, wondering why it is no longer what it was fifty years ago. A continent on which 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 live. Not poorer in absolute terms — our prosperity was high enough to make the fall a long one. But relatively, compared to those who still build, we will fall steadily behind. Our children will emigrate 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 sustain its promises.

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

We vote for the camps. Not loudly, not all at once, but at every election anew. And when we sit 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 things differently.

We will remember that we were the victims.

That is the outcome.

PART IV OF FOUR