State intervention has once again distorted what should be a freely evolving, mutually beneficial relationship between young apprentices and firms. Rather than allowing the natural dance of supply and demand to define the contours of apprentice training, the German state clamps down with legal minimum wages, contract restrictions, working hour caps, and mandatory insurance. Unsurprisingly, the result is a predictable horror: companies, constrained and coerced, slash the number of training opportunities for young people just when they need them most.

Nozick’s principle stands glaringly violated here—who owns the right to contract one's labor if not the individual? If a 17-year-old wishes to sign up for a 50-hour workweek in order to secure advanced skills or a higher wage, why should bureaucrats—distant, unaccountable, and ultimately ignorant of local contexts—prohibit it in the name of 'protection'? This is pure paternalism. The fiction of “informed consent” is invoked through mandatory contract reviews while denying the fundamental right to negotiate, innovate, and enter freely into arrangements as adults.

In Hayekian terms, the knowledge problem is gigantic: Politicians and ministries cannot possibly know the optimal wage or working hour for each training relationship or sector. The imposition of 'apprentice minimum wage' actively destroys vocational training markets for marginal sectors—tourism, hairdressing, small workshops—where the productivity of beginners simply does not justify such costs. Here the state acts like a blindfolded central planner, sowing stagnation and unemployment in the name of ‘fairness’.

Rand cuts to the heart of this parasitism—these regulatory shackles usurp the moral right of free men and women to trade value for value. It is the productive minority—entrepreneurs, shop owners, even daring would-be barbers—who must drag the regulatory yoke, financing social insurance, statutory sick pay, insurance bureaucracy, and council 'advisors' (whose very jobs are born from the labyrinth the state has constructed). These apprentice 'protections' are not benevolence; they are expropriation, thinly masked as social justice.

Notice the insidiousness: When the state creates a mountain of mandates and costs, the pool of available positions shrinks by design. Then, when prospects dry up, politicians blame “economic crisis”—when the real destroyer is the interventionist state, always hungry to expand its fief and purchase the moral credit of ‘protecting’ the citizen.

The solution is not more regulation, advice, or wage guarantees. It is radical economic liberty: Abolish minimum wages for apprenticeships; let adults—or young people with parental assent—contract however they wish. If an apprentice values experience over pay, let them choose a free market path, not be shackled by legal paternalism. Let insurance and working conditions arise voluntarily—not from diktat, but from the competitive discovery Hayek valorized.

Germany’s ongoing apprenticeship crisis is the result of the road to serfdom—step by step, liberty surrendered for a mirage of safety. Refuse the premise. Trust free people and spontaneous order, not the decrees of central planners.