Good morning! The announced pension system reforms, as well as the details from which the outlines of the Europe Now 2 programme can be seen, speak of the fact that the state of Montenegro could finally stop treating its citizens like small children.
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Gross salaries in hand payments
Most citizens of Montenegro never find out how much they are actually paid for their work. The state itself, through the employer, takes and distributes a part of our salaries. A great deal of it. It disposes of it, because it believes that the citizens are not up to the task. If your gross salary is €1,000, you receive €818 in hand. The rest is allocated by the state and employer for your pension, for contributions to various funds, tax surcharges for local self-government, for the Chamber of Commerce.
In this way, the burden of responsibility is removed from citizens and taxpayers. The state takes care of you, no need for you to take care of your own lives and having to make decisions about your own life. Perhaps the state should be given your entire salary, so that it chooses for you what you will eat and wear, where you will drink coffee and how much you will spend monthly on the betting shop.
Freedom has its price, and the state is a means of coercion. In an ideal world, the state should only take care that our freedom does not violate the limits of the freedom of other members of society. But the partocratic state creates parasitism and a political class, which lives on those €1,000 minus €818 of our earnings and on those huge taxes, levies and excise duties, from which they finance the party armies that are employed in the offices where they pretend to be working.
A part of those people really work, bloody hard, but the majority parasitize, working a couple of times every 4 years, when it is necessary to gather voters into the fold and deliver the election result that will guarantee a part of the budget cake.
If citizens would decide for themselves where and what to do with their money, if they would pay for their own health insurance, choose companies, or create their own pension fund, or pay as they want and when they want funds for their retirement, maybe this society would be fairer and richer.
But that requires the courage of political elites.
It takes courage to remove people from the state’s udder. Because Montenegrins (citizens of Montenegro) are used to the state and the party taking care of everything – hiring us, preparing us for life, providing housing, etc. The only thing left is that they also choose our spouses, raise and train our children, and that’s it. Spartan ideal.
If we want to progress, to be a rich society, we should be ready to take our destiny into our own hands. Let’s try to be economically independent and strong. If we are like that, we will be more independent and ready to stand up to the political class that buys us for a pittance. If we take that step, we will make politicians not masters, but servants, who are obliged to provide us with conditions for quality life and work without interfering in our private lives and without putting their hand in our pocket. But you have to reach it, you have to work on it.
That’s it for today. We wish you a pleasant rest of the day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
