This entire scheme is a classic example of state paternalism run amok, a betrayal of future generations at the hands of a kleptocratic coalition desperate to buy votes with other people’s money. Let’s be clear: forcibly extracting billions more from taxpayers to cement a politically determined replacement rate for state pensions is theft masquerading as social compassion. All the lofty rhetoric about “social stability” and “guaranteeing dignity in old age” is just the velvet glove over the iron fist of government coercion.

Hayek would be aghast: here we see the spontaneous order of the market—individuals saving and investing for their own futures—being overruled by centralized planning and a total disregard for “knowledge problems.” The “halt line” severs any feedback between demographic reality (an aging society, too few contributors) and actual pension outlays. The political class has literally banned the application of economic rationality with their “sustainability factor” suspension—sacrificing the adaptability and signals of a functioning market for vote-winning promises and bureaucratic fiat.

Nozick’s framework makes it even more damning: any system that compels one group (younger workers, entrepreneurs, private sector producers) to finance another (retirees, but especially politically favored retirees) through taxation is fundamentally unjust. Benefits for mothers of children born decades ago, more handouts, and ever-growing liabilities—none of this is arrived at through voluntary association or mutual benefit. These are transfers at gunpoint, however prettily disguised by state paperwork. There is no “entitlement”—just state-backed redistribution.

Rand would see in this nothing less than the morality of sacrificial collectivism triumphing over the virtue of self-responsibility. The refusal to allow private retirement savings to flourish in Germany is not a consequence, but an intention of the welfare state: to keep people dependent, infantilized, expecting to be bailed out. The message is clear—your future is not yours to plan; it belongs to the state, and the state’s promises are your only option, no matter how fiscally ruinous or economically irrational. Moral hazard is not a bug, but a feature, sustaining political power at the expense of innovation and liberty.

Germany’s pension politics are a damning illustration of why the state cannot be trusted with our lives, our savings, or our futures. Social insurance coerces the productive to serve the unproductive, ignoring all questions of justice, sustainability, and individual sovereignty. The only moral and rational alternative is complete privatization: allow every individual to save, invest, or spend for themselves, and abolish the pyramid scheme of forced generational transfers. Let markets, not bureaucrats, determine the shape and scope of our old age. Anything else is theft, and a recipe for both economic and moral decay.