I — The diagnosis

Chapitre I

THE DIAGNOSIS: WHY EVERYTHING IS BROKEN

Look around you. Abyssal debt. Inflation eroding wages – that invisible tax nobody voted for. Suffocating taxation. Bureaucracy proliferating like ivy on a wall. And rulers who seem to live on another planet.

These symptoms have a common cause: the State has no limits. No real limits. No walls it cannot cross.

The cycle is immutable. A government is elected on promises. These promises are expensive. Money comes from taxes, but raising them is unpopular. So they borrow. Debt accumulates. To repay it – or pretend to – they print money. Inflation sets in. Purchasing power melts. Citizens demand aid. The State grows. And the wheel turns, again and again. This is not a conspiracy, it’s a mechanism — what sociologists call unintended consequences [9]: each decision is locally rational, but the sequence produces a result nobody wanted. Add cognitive limitations when facing complex systems [10], and you get a machine that runs wild without a pilot.

Figure 1.1 — The debt spiral

Meanwhile, the citizen votes once every four or five years. Then watches, powerless, as their representatives trample their commitments. No recourse. No way to sanction before the next deadline. The democratic contract has become a blank check.

Pure libertarianism offers a radical solution: reduce the State to the bare minimum, or even eliminate it. Seductive on paper. But this vision crashes against stubborn realities. Some functions cannot be handled by the market alone. Some investments interest no private actor. Some people, without a support structure, would be abandoned in the street.

We must therefore think differently. Not a minimal State by principle, but a State limited by architecture. Not the absence of public power, but its framing so strict that it can no longer overflow. Not the end of democracy, but its transformation into permanent control.

This is the purpose of this document.