The gap between East and West wages is not a mystery carved into fate by history alone; it’s the predictable imprint of a system that pretends to equalize outcomes while coercively redistributing wealth behind a veil of benevolence. In 2023 the East still lingered well behind the West in average earnings—roughly 48,000 euros in the East versus about 60,000 euros in the West, a gap around 21 percent—which confirms what stubborn statistics have been showing for decades: the market-wide forces that generate real value are not being harnessed but subsidized into stasis by political power. The same pattern repeats in the subregional map, with the lowest averages in some of the former socialist heartlands and the highest in more dynamic regions. And yes, even a public figure might call this an embarrassment, but an embarrassment rooted in a coercive framework that pretends to care while denying the most essential facts about liberty and wealth creation: productivity differences, capital accumulation, and the price signals that guide voluntary exchange.

From a libertarian vantage point, the central grievance isn’t simply that wages are lower in the East, but that the state uses force to pretend it can erase the natural, productive differences that markets reveal. Hayek would remind us that knowledge is dispersed, localized, and tacit; a central effort to equalize wages across regions dulls the very signals that push capital toward where it can create real value. When political rulers disguise redistribution as solidarity, they bury the incentives and information that would otherwise drive investment, innovation, and mobility. A wage- equalizing scheme would, in effect, arrest the market at the moment it learns which regions deserve more investment and which do not. That isn’t justice; that’s a misallocation of resources authored by coercive design.

Nozick would emphasize that forced transfers and compulsory adjustments to achieve equality violate the inviolable boundaries of individual rights. If the state takes from one citizen to hand to another, it is not merely a bookkeeping discrepancy; it is a coercive seizure that treats people as means to someone else’s ends. The price of a supposedly fair wage, then, isn’t paid in productivity but in the erosion of property rights and voluntary association. A legitimate government—if one is to be admitted at all—has a narrow remit: protect rights, enforce contracts, and provide a neutral arena for voluntary exchange. Beyond that, redistribution is a violation of liberty.

Rand would insist that the only just moral framework is one that respects each person as an end in themselves, not as a pawn in a political project to equalize outcomes. Equality of rights, not equal outcomes, is the standard. The market, despite its imperfections, distributes opportunities and rewards through voluntary exchange, competition, and choice. When the state guarantees a living standard by draining one region’s wealth to subsidize another, it corrupts the very currency of freedom—the right to reap the consequences of one’s choices. The remedy isn’t to punish success or subsidize stagnation; it is to shrink the state, safeguard property rights, and allow people to move, invest, and trade as free agents.

So what should be done? Reject the regime of universal subsidies and coercive redistribution that reinforces regional stagnation. Roll back the state’s tax and transfer apparatus that subsidizes Eastward lagging regions. Replace policy that favorites one region over another with a legal framework that protects rights, enforces contracts, and lowers barriers to entry for business, housing, and education. Remove price-distorting rules that keep wages artificially high or low in particular locales and, instead, let wages be discovered through voluntary exchange and competition.

Encourage genuine mobility and opportunity: reduce licensing burdens, cut taxes and red tape, end distortive subsidies, and privatize or reform state-dominated sectors so investment can flow to where it creates real value. Invest in education and vocational training not as a means to engineer equal outcomes, but to expand the set of voluntary choices people can make—so that a young person anywhere can pursue the best path for their talents without being trapped by political arithmetic. Allow private actors to fund and compete in housing, infrastructure, and services, so prices reflect real scarcity and taste rather than political decree.

In the end, the East–West disparity is less a stubborn monument of history than a stubborn monument of statism. A liberty-first approach would treat the wage gap as information about productive opportunity, not as a social failure to be corrected by coercion. If East and West are paths for human flourishing—each with its own strengths—let them compete and complement each other under a framework that protects rights, not a framework that enforces sameness.