Statism is theft

Question: Why are savings so much lower in aging Europe than in countries with younger demographics?
Answer: because those Europeans who did save money for their old age have had it stolen by their governments to ensure a comfortable retirement for state employees. As Zero Hedge reports:

Financial News explains how France has "seized" €36 billion worth of pension assets: "Asset managers will have the chance to get billions of euros in mandates in the next few months for the €36bn Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), the French reserve pension fund, after the French parliament last week passed a law to use its assets to pay off the debts of France’s welfare system. The assets have been transferred into Cades, the state’s social debt sinking fund. The FRR will continue to control the assets, but as a third-party manager on behalf of Cades".

FN condemns the action as follows: "The move reflects a willingness by governments to use long-term assets to fill short-term deficits, including Ireland’s announcement last week that it would use the country’s €24bn National Pensions Reserve Fund “to support the exchequer’s funding programme” and Hungary’s bid to claw $15bn of private pension funds back to the state system." In other words, with the ECB still unwilling to go into full fiat printing overdrive mode, insolvent governments, France most certainly included, are resorting to whatever piggybanks they can find.

 Financial News misses the point - as soon as he got into power in 1997, Brown assaulted the British private pension funds, at that time the best funded in Europe. He did it for purely ideological reasons, with every intention of using the money to privilege and vastly increase the number of state employees.

Statists hate individual autonomy. Their overriding aim at all times is to discourage or drive away those who aspire to a better life, and to expropriate the provident. Whenever they achieve absolute power, they commit genocide with the professed aim of clearing the way for "the new man", a termite-like creature that unthinkingly does what it is told.