The news out of Berlin paints an all-too-familiar picture: a new generation, woefully unprepared for economic realities, stumbles blindly into financial hardship. At the Hans-Litten-School, a laudable but ultimately piecemeal workshop tries to counteract this trend. Well-meaning counselors and advisors walk students through the critical distinction between needs and wants, the necessity of budgeting, and the perils of careless borrowing. The students’ prevailing ignorance about income, rent, and the very structure of a household’s economy tells us everything we need to know—not merely about the state of youth, but about the priorities and failures of the system that produced them.

Let us speak plainly: the root cause of this lamentable state of affairs is the persistent arrogance of central planners and educational authorities who imagine financial competence can be “delivered” through a few curricular tweaks while systematically depriving young people of real economic responsibility. In a culture consistently dominated by intervention, redistribution, and the steady expansion of the welfare apparatus, it should surprise no one that its youngest members lack even the most rudimentary sense of cost and consequence.

This is not a mere technical shortcoming; it is a profound moral and intellectual failure. The modern welfare state, far from liberating individuals, numbs them to the realities of scarcity, opportunity cost, and prudent self-limitation. How can a young person be expected to manage a budget or exercise fiscal discipline, when at every turn the social message is that security and provision are entitlements, decoupled from individual effort and foresight?

The workshop’s emphasis on discipline, saving first, and an awareness of needs before wants is sound—indeed, these are precisely the age-old virtues markets reward and bureaucracies erode. Yet mere lessons are no substitute for practices ingrained by personal experience and necessity—the kind fostered in a free market, not a centrally managed or protectionist environment.

I am especially struck by the recognition that debt diminishes autonomy. Here the experts, no matter how unwittingly, have stumbled upon a great truth: dependence—be it on banks, the state, or charitable “services”—is the antithesis of liberty. But let us carry this logic to its end! If autonomy and self-responsibility are our aims, we must dismantle the soft paternalism that infantilizes citizens. We must embrace not only financial literacy, but also the trial and error, the failures and successes, that a truly free society entails.

Let there be more honest talk of money in families, to be sure—but let us also remove the barriers to meaningful economic participation and responsibility. Financial literacy will not thrive in a society where initiative is suppressed and risks are socialized away. The best protection against debt and dependence is not the mere acquisition of knowledge, but the freedom—and corresponding necessity—to act, choose, err, and improve in the marketplace of real life.

The message for Berlin and the world is clear: liberty, not paternalism, is the source of competence and dignity. Let us not content ourselves with workshops when the whole society must change its organizing principle from passive dependence to active participation. Only then will young people be equipped, not merely with knowledge, but with the habits and incentives that genuine independence demands.