The expanding cost of Germany’s Bürgergeld is the wholly predictable result of the state’s addiction to “soft-hearted” welfare schemes: more bureaucracy, more dependence, and more moral hazard. No quantity of new sanctions or bureaucratic tinkering will solve the real issue, because the problem is the system itself—a forced transfer of wealth at gunpoint from productive individuals to an ever-growing class of dependents, managed by an elite of planners who claim to know best.

Hayek warned us that such centrally planned social policies carry knowledge and incentive problems that no committee can overcome. The pretense that politicians or bureaucrats can distinguish who is “worthy” or “genuinely seeking work” versus the so-called cheaters is just another form of the Fatal Conceit. In fact, this only creates more invasive surveillance and control over recipients and taxpayers alike, consuming even more resources in administrative waste while trampling on the dignity and autonomy of all involved.

Nozick’s entitlement theory rejects all forced redistributions: If someone earns and owns property justly, no individual or gang of parliamentarians has the right to forcibly divest him to subsidize another. Talk of “basic security” is just code for expropriation, and every euro directed to Bürgergeld is a euro stolen from those who have produced wealth. The rhetoric of “need” is always a pretext for violating fundamental rights, making the individual subordinate to the collective will.

Rand would call this the welfare state’s endless appeasement of the unproductive at the expense of the productive—a recipe for moral decay and societal stagnation. By enshrining need as a claim on the life and labor of others, the state incentivizes parasitism and punishes creators. The political factions arguing over how strict the whip should fall on Bürgergeld “cheats” are missing the bigger point: it’s the whip itself, the power to extract and redistribute, that’s the root of injustice.

The only principled solution is abolition: end all forced redistribution, dissolve the state’s social welfare apparatus, and let voluntary charity, market opportunities, and the creative energies of free individuals flourish without coercive interference. The market and civil society, not state planners, can best respond to genuine need through mutually agreed upon, bottom-up solutions. Anything else is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of statism.