The Destruction in Plain Sight
The European economy is not struggling. It is dying.
Germany, the industrial engine of the continent for over a century, has been contracting since 2021. Its manufacturing sector is in outright collapse. Factories that survived two world wars are closing permanently, their machinery sold for scrap, their workers scattered. Energy costs have made production physically impossible in some industries, with gas representing ninety percent of total costs in certain processes. The skills that took generations to develop will vanish within a decade.
France operates without a budget, its government paralyzed, its debt spiraling past 112 percent of GDP. The eurozone limps along at growth rates below population replacement levels. The ECB projects this misery extending through 2028 and beyond, which means the central bankers themselves expect permanent decline and have simply accepted it.
But growth rates do not capture the true horror. Real wages have been falling for years. Savings are being vaporized. Young Europeans cannot afford homes, cannot afford children, cannot afford hope. The middle class that took centuries to build is being liquidated in a single generation.
This is not an accident. This is not bad luck. This is the mathematically inevitable result of sustained, systematic theft.
One Rule
The formula for prosperity is so simple that economists have spent careers obscuring it: do not steal.
When people keep what they produce, they produce more. When they can save without fear of confiscation, they save. When they can invest knowing their capital is secure, they invest. Savings become capital. Capital increases productivity. Productivity generates wealth. Wealth compounds across generations.
This process requires exactly one condition: that no one, not criminals, not neighbors, not governments, may take what belongs to another without consent.
The Spanish Scholastics understood this in the fifteenth century. The American founders encoded it in their Constitution. The nineteenth century proved it empirically, generating the greatest increase in human prosperity in recorded history precisely where property rights were most secure. Ordinary laborers in 1900 enjoyed amenities that would have seemed magical to kings a century before.
We have not forgotten this knowledge. We have deliberately rejected it. And now we are paying the price.
The Mechanics of Destruction
Theft operates through three primary mechanisms in the modern West: taxation, inflation, and regulation. Each alone would impoverish a nation. Together, they are annihilating civilization.
Taxation is the most visible theft. A worker earns one hundred euros. The government seizes forty before he sees a cent. From what remains, he pays value-added tax on purchases, fuel duties, property taxes, fees, and levies beyond counting. By the time the process ends, he keeps perhaps thirty cents of every euro his labor created.
But the damage compounds. Knowing that most of his additional effort will be confiscated, he works less. The entrepreneur, calculating that success will be punished with higher tax brackets, takes fewer risks. The investor, watching capital gains taxed at rates approaching income, deploys less capital. Production that would have occurred does not occur. Wealth that would have existed is never created. The capital stock that took generations to build is consumed rather than replenished.
Europe's tax burden now exceeds forty percent of GDP across most of the continent. This means governments have claimed nearly half of everything produced. They have, in effect, reduced their populations to tenant farmers, allowed to work the land but forbidden to keep the harvest.
Inflation: The Corruption of Money and Minds
Modern economists have performed a sleight of hand with the word "inflation." They use it to mean rising prices, as if prices simply float upward of their own accord, like balloons. This is a lie designed to obscure the crime.
Inflation is the increase in the money supply. Rising prices are merely the consequence, the symptom of the underlying disease. When central banks create currency out of nothing, they do not create wealth. They create claims on existing wealth, diluting every unit already in circulation. The thief is the central bank. The rising prices are the evidence of the theft.
Since 2009, the M2 money supply in the United States has increased by 185 percent. Nearly a quarter of all dollars in existence were created since January 2020 alone. The eurozone has followed the same trajectory. The ECB's balance sheet peaked at 69 percent of GDP, the Federal Reserve's at over $8.9 trillion. These numbers represent currency conjured from nothing, backed by nothing, redeemable for nothing.
But the damage extends far beyond the erosion of purchasing power. Monetary inflation poisons the very mechanism by which a market economy coordinates production across time.
In a sound money system, the interest rate reflects the collective time preferences of society. When people save more, interest rates fall, signaling to entrepreneurs that resources are available for longer-term projects. When people save less, rates rise, warning that capital is scarce. This price signal, perhaps the most important in any economy, allows millions of independent actors to coordinate their plans without central direction.
Central bank inflation destroys this signal utterly.
When the central bank creates new money and injects it into the banking system, interest rates fall artificially. They no longer reflect genuine savings. Entrepreneurs, seeing cheap credit, embark on long-term projects that the economy cannot actually sustain. Factories are built, equipment is purchased, workers are hired, all on the assumption that the capital exists to see these projects through to completion. But the capital does not exist. Only the money exists, and money is not capital.
This is the boom. It feels like prosperity. Asset prices rise. Employment expands. Everyone congratulates themselves on the brilliant management of the economy. But the boom is built on a lie, on false signals, on the confusion of money with wealth.
The bust is inevitable. Eventually, the artificial credit expansion must slow or the currency will be destroyed entirely. When it slows, interest rates begin to reflect reality. The projects that seemed profitable at two percent become catastrophic failures at five percent. The factories that should never have been built must be abandoned. The workers who should never have been hired must be fired. The capital that was malinvested must be written off.
The bust is not the disease. It is the cure, the painful process by which the economy purges the malinvestments caused by the inflationary boom. But central banks, terrified of the consequences, respond to each bust with more inflation, more artificial credit, more false signals. Each cycle requires larger interventions. Each recovery is weaker than the last. The accumulated distortions grow until the entire structure becomes unsustainable.
This is where we are now. Decades of inflation have so thoroughly corrupted price signals that rational economic calculation has become nearly impossible. Entrepreneurs cannot distinguish genuine demand from credit-fueled speculation. Investors cannot assess risk when interest rates are manipulated to near zero. Savers cannot preserve wealth when the currency itself is being debased. The market economy, the most sophisticated information-processing system ever developed, has been blinded by its own central bank.
Death by Regulation
Regulation is theft of time, energy, and opportunity. Every permit required, every form filed, every compliance officer hired represents productive capacity diverted to satisfying bureaucrats rather than customers.
The European Green Deal alone has imposed 2.3 billion euros in additional administrative costs on small and medium enterprises, and that represents only fifteen of over seventy regulations in the package. The General Data Protection Regulation costs European technology firms twelve percent of their profits. Add labor regulations, environmental requirements, zoning restrictions, licensing regimes, and the cumulative effect is to make productive activity progressively impossible.
German firms now spend more on compliance than on research and development. French entrepreneurs describe starting a business as navigating a hostile occupation. Young Europeans with talent and ambition emigrate or give up. The human capital that built the continent's prosperity is being driven out or destroyed.
Each regulation represents a claim by government on the life of a private citizen. Comply or be punished. Submit or be destroyed. The cumulative effect is totalitarian in practice if not in name. The productive are enslaved to the bureaucratic, the innovative subordinated to the credentialed, the free made servants of the state.
The Fairness of Honest Exchange
Critics claim that markets create inequality. They are correct. Markets do create unequal outcomes. But inequality is not injustice.
Every voluntary exchange benefits both parties. The buyer values the good more than his money; the seller values the money more than his good. Both emerge wealthier than before. This is not exploitation. It is cooperation. The wealth that accumulates through millions of such exchanges reflects value provided, not value stolen.
The entrepreneur who builds something millions want becomes wealthy because millions voluntarily gave him their money in exchange for something they valued more. His fortune is the sum of benefits he provided. He did not take from anyone. He gave, and was compensated for giving.
Contrast this with redistribution by force. When governments seize from producers to fund programs, they destroy value in the taking, destroy it again in the bureaucratic processing, and destroy incentive to produce in the future. The society grows poorer with each transfer. The productive are punished for production. The unproductive are rewarded for political connection. Merit yields to pull. Achievement yields to graft.
True fairness lies in equal rules: no one may steal, from anyone, for any reason. Not the criminal. Not the corporation. Not the state. Under such a regime, outcomes will be unequal but just. Each person keeps what he creates and trades only by consent.
The Imminent Collapse
The current system cannot continue. This is not pessimism but arithmetic.
Debt levels have passed the point of mathematical sustainability. No conceivable rate of growth can service what has been accumulated. Demographic collapse means fewer workers supporting more dependents with each passing year. The productive are fleeing or dying. The capital stock is being consumed rather than replenished.
Central banks have no remaining tools. Interest rates cannot fall below zero without destroying the banking system entirely. Money printing has already pushed asset prices to absurdity while wages stagnate. Each intervention creates the conditions for the next, larger crisis. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet stands at $7.2 trillion, down from nearly $9 trillion but still eight times pre-2008 levels. These are not policy positions. They are life support for a dying patient.
The boom-bust cycle has been running for over a century, each bust met with more aggressive inflation, each recovery weaker and shorter than the last. We are now in the terminal phase, where the doses of monetary stimulus required to prevent collapse are themselves causing collapse. The central banks face a choice between hyperinflation and deflationary depression. There is no third option. There is no soft landing. The accumulated malinvestment of decades must be liquidated one way or another.
The insiders know. That is why central banks hoard gold while telling citizens to trust paper. They purchased over one thousand tonnes annually for three consecutive years, the highest levels in decades. That is why billionaires sold $650 billion of their own stock in 2007, just before the financial crisis, and why insider selling reached $464 billion in 2024. The rats are leaving the ship. The ordinary passengers have not been informed.
When the collapse comes, it will not be gradual. It will not be managed. The last fifty years of fiat currency experiment will unwind in months, perhaps weeks. Prices will become meaningless. Supply chains will fracture. The complex interdependencies of modern life will reveal themselves as fragilities. And the economists who created this catastrophe will express surprise that their models failed to predict it.
The Cure
The cure is as simple as the disease is severe. Stop stealing.
Abolish the income tax. Abolish the central bank. Abolish the regulatory apparatus that strangles enterprise. Return to sound money that cannot be inflated, that preserves its value, that transmits accurate price signals to entrepreneurs trying to coordinate production across time.
Protect property with the same vigor now reserved for the prerogatives of bureaucrats. Enforce contracts. Punish fraud. And otherwise, leave people alone.
A society that protects property, enforces contracts, and refuses to manipulate its money will accumulate capital with mathematical certainty. Savings will compound. Investment will flow to genuinely productive uses rather than credit-fueled speculation. Entrepreneurs will calculate accurately because prices will tell the truth. Living standards will rise, not through programs, but through the irrepressible energy of free people building their own lives.
This is not utopian fantasy. It is historical fact. The nineteenth century proved it. The early American republic proved it. Every period of genuine prosperity in human history shared the same characteristics: secure property, sound money, minimal interference. When these conditions prevail, ordinary people achieve in decades what previous generations could not imagine in centuries.
The first nation to embrace this principle fully will outcompete its neighbors within a generation. Its people will grow wealthy while others grow poor. Its currency will strengthen while others collapse. Its industries will thrive while others die.
The rest will continue their descent into ruin, managed by the same experts who created the disaster, explained by the same economists who failed to predict it, funded by the same currencies that are becoming worthless.
Conclusion
The hour is late. The damage already done will take decades to repair even under the best policies. But the alternative to reform is not stability. It is collapse.
The path forward requires no new theories. It requires no expert commissions or international summits. It requires only the courage to state the obvious: that what governments have been doing to their citizens is theft, that theft destroys wealth, and that the destruction must stop.
Do not steal. Three words. One rule. The foundation of all prosperity and the remedy for our ruin.
The choice remains ours. But not for long.
