Two words that today serve almost only as terms of abuse once had an honourable core. Uncovering this core reveals a principle older than any economic theory: reciprocity.
You have worked. You have contributed. Now what you have earned is given back to you.
Pfründe (prebend, benefice — today: sinecure) — from Latin praebenda, "that which is to be granted"
You perform something that society needs but the market does not reward.
So society provides for you.
Both concepts rest on the same foundation: performance and counter-performance stand in a comprehensible relationship. Today both words are terms of abuse — and rightly so. But the criticism hits the wrong target when it rejects the principle instead of its perversion. The problem is not the pension or rent as such — but the rent without prior performance. The problem is not the benefice as such — but the benefice without social value.
I. The anatomy of highway robbery
What is a highwayman? Someone who positions himself at a bottleneck and collects — not because he performs anything, not because he produces anything, but because he is where others have to pass through. The medieval robber barons sat in castles on trade routes. The modern highwaymen sit at other bottlenecks — but the principle is the same.
The capital provider: you need money to invest. The more urgent your need, the higher his price. His "performance" consists in having something you cannot obtain any other way. The platform operator: you want to sell, but the customers are on his platform. He takes twenty, thirty per cent — his "performance" consists in running a marketplace he has monopolised through network effects. The lobbyist: you need access to decision-makers. His "performance" consists of an address book and the willingness to open it for money.
All these figures have one thing in common: they produce nothing, transport nothing, invent nothing. They position themselves at bottlenecks and extract value that others have created. In the language of the Megamachine, this is the buffered zone seen from below: not who sits in it, but how one gets in — through control of bottlenecks, not through performance.
II. The mathematics of the billionaire
Can a person earn a billion through his own work? A simple calculation: a working life of 50 years, 250 days a year, 10 hours a day — makes 125,000 hours. For €1 billion, every working hour would have to be worth €8,000. Eight thousand euros an hour. Not for one day — for every single hour of a fifty-year working life.
That is not performance. That is mathematically impossible. What generates a billion is never work — it is leverage. And this leverage is always the same: position at a bottleneck, multiplied by time and capital. The billionaire is the robber baron who has built so many castles that there is no longer a road on which one can get past. He no longer has to do anything. The system works for him. The extraction runs automatically.
The rhetoric of legitimation: "I bear the risk" — but who bears the real risk? The investor who at worst loses money? Or the worker who loses his job, his home and his health? "Meritocracy" — the biggest lie. In a real meritocracy, those who achieve the most would earn the most. Instead, those earn the most who most skilfully control bottlenecks. The inversion is perfect: those who achieve the least justify themselves most loudly with "achievement".
III. The victims of the perversion
While some collect "rent" in the economic sense — unearned income from controlling bottlenecks — the real pensions are systematically cut. Whoever has paid into the pension fund for forty years gets less and less back. Reciprocity is revoked — but only for those who perform.
While some enjoy sinecures in the perverted sense — the supervisory board seat for the washed-up politician, the consultancy contract that buys access instead of advice — the real benefices for socially valuable work are disappearing: the teacher who shapes the next generation — underpaid, overworked. The carer who looks after the old and the sick — on the breadline. The researcher who creates fundamental knowledge — from fixed-term contract to fixed-term contract. The artist who sustains culture — precarious, dependent on funding that can be withdrawn at any time. They would be the legitimate recipients of benefices in the original sense. Instead, the funds flow to consultants and office-holders whose social contribution tends towards zero.
IV. The Megamachine dimension
Highway robbery is not the moral failure of individual actors. It is a system function. The Megamachine rewards control of bottlenecks and punishes productive performance — not because anyone decided so, but because the incentive structure is built that way. Deregulation — the cruise control — has systematically removed the rules that limited highway robbery: rent caps, capital controls, competition law, progressive taxation. Every negative feedback that limited extraction was labelled a "market distortion" and removed.
The result is what we described in the crisis-cycle paper: printed paper is turned into real assets — by those who control the bottlenecks, at the expense of those who perform. The money is there. It is just in the wrong places. A return to reciprocity would not mean abolishing capitalism. It would mean taking it at its word: performance should pay? Agreed. Then let performance pay — not position.