![[photo] Mark Jeftovic](https://markjeftovic.ca/wp-content/themes/exile_from_the_heard/library/media/images/markable.jpg)
When I was a child, I was proud of my heritage and the fact that I counted among my distant relations none other than Otto Von Bismarck, the inventor of the modern welfare state as we know it today. As I matured and learned more about things like economics, math and the works of Charles Ponzi, I began to downplay my roots to Herr Bismarck.
Like a politician who’s largest campaign contributor was just pulled over by police, drunk and with the body of a teenage hooker in the trunk, it occurred to me that this connection wasn’t something I should be advertising. And really, he wasn’t a relative per se, it was via marriage. Barely a half-cousin at that.
Bismarck set out to create a pan-German state with progressive social ideals, groundbreaking at the time, and at first glance, would work in perpetuity (so long as the population and the real economy grew indefinitely). It created a social safety net and took a bit of the Darwinism out of life. It looked good on paper until populations realized they could vote themselves ever larger entitlements, and politics became a profession, one where it turned out you could advance your career by promising to redistribute other people’s money.
“Too little attention has been paid to the fact that electoral politics lures disorded, messianic personalities into positions of power.”
– Davidson & Rees-Mogg in The Sovereign Individual
(Read the rest on Wealth.net )
I live in Toronto, Canada with my wife and daughter, I'm the founder and president of 
