If you’ve ever wanted to witness the slow-motion collapse of a Ponzi scheme, you might want to keep an eye on Germany’s public pension system.

Rhetorically and politically sugar-coated as a “pay-as-you-go” system—where today’s workers finance the retirement of yesterday’s—this bureaucratic redistribution leviathan is utterly dependent on an ever-growing pool of contributors. The problem is that Germany is aging, shrinking, and losing its industrial base.

Just in time for this demographic crunch—declining birth rates, increasing life expectancy, and longer pension payout durations—policymakers have decided to torch what’s left of the country’s industrial foundation in a green frenzy. Year after year, around €70 billion in value creation is being sent up the chimney, while more than half a million jobs have disappeared in recent years. That’s half a million fewer contributors to the pension Ponzi.

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My wife’s relatives live in a socialist country north of Germany. They too are having to raise taxes to cover all the free shit they give everyone, including illegal invaders