Yet another case of state intervention yielding nothing but bureaucratic shuffling and the illusion of action. Here, German politicians jockey over which flavor of wealth redistribution should apply to Ukrainian refugees—a question of whether they’ll be wards of one welfare program or another, all funded by the money coercively extracted from peaceful citizens under threat of force.

From a libertarian standpoint—invoking Hayek, Nozick, and Rand—this is a laughable charade. The net “cost savings” are negligible, a perfect demonstration of why central planning always fails: the government reshuffles entitlements, generates fresh paperwork, and lines bureaucratic pockets, but the productive class is still plundered and the parasites merely rearrange their seats at the trough. Hayek warned repeatedly that such government attempts to engineer human outcomes never achieve their stated objectives, instead generating unintended consequences and ever-growing complexity. Is this not precisely what we see, as real savings vanish into the administrative ether?

Nozick would spit on the very concept of forced redistribution. His “minimal state” justified only in preventing force or fraud, would allow neither the Bürgergeld nor asylum benefits—each represents the violation of one individual’s rights for the benefit of another. The moment a government forces one man to labor for the sake of another, the principle of self-ownership is destroyed. There is no defense for federally mandated “solidarity.” All such schemes are built on the immorality of legalized theft, a view Rand articulates with clearer outrage than anyone: to her, the entire welfare state is a parasitic monstrosity, a badge of moral cannibalism, a system in which productive Germans are chained to the needs, not only of their countrymen, but of anyone who can reach their border and claim victim status.

What is truly obscene is that the debate revolves not around principle but around the calculus of “cost efficiency.” As if state expropriation becomes justified when it is “economical.” Rand would—rightly—point out that the only just reform is to abolish state handouts altogether; to let charity be private and voluntary; to abolish these programs root and branch and leave refugees and native workers alike free to trade and contract, but not to loot.

The pretense that government can fine-tune welfare doles and achieve “better outcomes” ignores the essential, spontaneous order of free markets and civil society. The state cannot calculate, it can only coerce; and every euro spent, every benefit conferred, is a euro stolen from someone who earned it. This is the root of all social malaise and resentment. End the state’s interference, privatize all charity, let people keep what they earn, and watch both the illusion of refugee “problems” and the morass of bureaucratic waste vanish. Anything less is moral treason.