Approaching the hollowing out of effort and intelligence
The Exile of Intelligence: When Democracy Becomes Confiscatory
In our countries, where we supposedly enjoy popular sovereignty, we suffer from the prisoner’s syndrome: when someone is locked up and does nothing. Because nothing is done, submission deepens, and the desire to rebel against an unjust situation fades.
We are reaching a point of total disregard for the citizen, and we appeal to no alternative, convinced that this degeneration of the democratic system remains the least bad among all forms of government considered.
The middle class has discovered a bitter truth: one is no longer a citizen, but a financial asset of the State.
Official rhetoric insists that fiscal absolutism is inevitable, the price of coexistence. But for professionals, entrepreneurs, workers and creators, that price has shifted from contribution to vital expropriation.
The Middle Class Hostage
The middle class lives under a condition of administrative exploitation.
It is the only socioeconomic stratum that is not poor enough to receive assistance, nor influential enough to obtain exemptions.
It exists in the worst of fiscal worlds: every attempt to rise above mediocrity triggers a higher degree of plunder, and if no attempt is made, formal compliance itself pushes it downward through relentless requisition.
On its shoulders rests the weight of a system that:
Sets fictitious values. The State decides what your home or your car is worth, not for market purposes, but to calculate how much more it can extract from you.
Punishes success. Effort is taxed through a progression that borders on the punitive. Every additional hour of work becomes, in practice, a growing forced donation to a bureaucracy that appropriates it without accountability.
Meanwhile, the hypocritical argument that one “owes something” to those who have less benefits only the political redistributor, who then returns to extract more.
Monopolizes services. You pay taxes for security you do not receive, healthcare that delays and mistreats you, and education that prevents genuine self-improvement.
You must then pay again, in the private sector if you can, for everything you already paid for, never received, or received deficiently, under the impunity of an authorized thief.
This is the double toll of existence.
The Export of Talent: The Flight of the “Expropriated”
The most tragic effect of this modern absolutism is not merely the loss of money, but the export of the future.
Talent, effort and youthful contribution during productive years—this “grey gold” that requires no smokestacks to generate value—has understood that upward mobility is impossible when the State imposes a glass ceiling of taxes and public prices designed to strip life down to survival.
“They do not leave for lack of opportunities; they leave for lack of ownership over their own lives.”
When a programmer, an engineer, a worker or an artist decides to emigrate to a place where they are respected and enjoy greater economic freedom, they are not fleeing civic duties.
They are fleeing a systemic deception that uses the word “democracy” to camouflage a suffocating structure of bureaucratic, political and technological vassalage.
For these young people, the phrase “that’s democracy” sounds like sarcasm.
They know that a democracy that only allows them to vote, while confiscating 50 or 60 percent of the fruits of their talent and sacrifice—through direct and indirect taxes, inflated public tariffs and dysfunctional services—has ceased to be a society of free individuals and has become a political-bureaucratic estate where citizens are livestock.
The Fate of the “Absolutist State”
Even worse than the French monarchs of the eighteenth century, whose heads were at stake, today’s governments ignore that the most volatile capital is not money in the bank, but hope.
By expropriating saving capacity and private property under bureaucratic arbitrariness, the State is engineering its own ruin, and inevitably, that of its exhausted exploited base.
It is securing total control over a territory emptied of ambition, inhabited only by those who cannot escape and by a political class that, in its blindness, still believes that the power to set amounts is the power to annihilate wealth.