Dear reader,

This is the heaviest piece I have written so far. Not heavy to read — heavy to write down. Because it is about something I knew was there, but had to force myself to say out loud.

It is about how Europe is plundering its productive citizens. The entrepreneurs, inventors, family businesses, factories — five percent of the population carrying fifty percent of prosperity. We have decided that their surplus must be skimmed to finance the bottom and the middle. First we plunder them. Then we constrain them so they can no longer keep up with China. Then we judge them when their factories close. That is not a society that sustains itself. That is a society that eats itself, and then blames those who were still willing to feed it.

I did not write this out of indignation, nor out of political preference. I wrote it because I laid the numbers side by side — DGB, FNV, Bundestag, Dutch Parliament, Assemblée Nationale, the Draghi report, Eurostat, Statistics South Africa — and could not avoid the conclusion. South Africa is the mirror. What happened there between 2000 and 2020 is happening here now.

It is a five-part series — five interconnected pieces — with a colophon above in which I openly state my sources and my intention. For those who do not have time to read it all, there is a short version: the entire five-part series in five paragraphs.

Read The Great Plunder on openvizier.org

A request — not to sign, not to like, not to share for sharing's sake. But: to read, to think it through, to criticise where it does not hold, and — if you are in a position to do so — to show it to someone in policy, politics, or governance. One reader who sees it and tries something different is worth more than a thousand readers who only nod.

Warm regards, Jacobus van Merksteijn Malta