Taxed Over 50%: Europe's "Pro-Business" Liberals Betrayed the Entrepreneur

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Every entrepreneur who builds a company, hires staff, and generates wealth is, under current European tax laws, generally working the first six months of the year exclusively for the state. Classical liberal parties accept this arrangement or at least do not challenge it aggressively. And they even have the audacity to call it "freedom".

Let us be precise about what a 55% tax burden actually means. It means that the engineer who founds a startup, the manufacturer who risks her savings on a new production line, the consultant who builds a client base over twenty years: each of them surrenders the majority of what they earn to a bureaucratic apparatus they did not choose and cannot meaningfully hold to account.

The state takes first, takes most, and takes regardless of whether it spends wisely. The citizen or entrepreneur collects what remains and is invited to feel grateful.

This is not a social contract. It is a protection racket with better branding.

Every franc, pound or euro confiscated above what is strictly necessary to run a lean state is capital that will never fund a company, never pay a salary, never drive an innovation. It is wealth that simply disappears into the bureaucratic void.

Europe's "pro-business" classical liberals have chosen to forget: that every tax is a forced transfer of decision-making from the individual, who has skin in the game, to the official, who does not.

The entrepreneur who keeps his or her capital will invest it where it generates the highest return. The ministry that confiscates it will allocate it where it generates the most votes. These are not equivalent outcomes.

One builds prosperity. The other builds dependency.

The economically "liberal" parties of Europe have spent decades justifying their surrender with the vocabulary of responsibility. The "welfare" and "social" commitments are too large to unwind, they say. The electorate is too attached to entitlements. Reform must be gradual, consensual, careful.

What they mean is that they have calculated the political cost of telling the truth and decided it is too high. So instead they govern and campaign like social democrats and wonder why their voters eventually defect to parties with fewer scruples about consistency.

The state should only tax for security, justice, diplomacy and education. Sometimes a safety net, but only for real hardship cases. Nothing more. Not a cent more.

Everything else, every subsidy, every quango, every ministry of industrial strategy and office of social cohesion, is deadweight funded by people who had better uses for the money and were given no choice in the matter.

Cut the burden to 25%. Eliminate the ministries that cannot justify their existence in a single sentence. Return capital to the people who generated it. Watch what they build. That is not ideology. That is the only economic policy that has ever actually worked. The evidence has been available since 1776. Europe's classical liberals have simply stopped reading.