Affordable Participation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Why Europe Risks Taxing Itself Out of the Future

 In a recent Substack essay, Mr. Green, an American economic commentator, put a precise figure on a reality that many households already feel. He argued that USD 140,000 has become “the price of participation” in the United States. By participation, he did not mean wealth or privilege, but the minimum income required to live a stable, socially integrated life: access to housing, healthcare, education, mobility, and the ability to prepare for retirement without constant insecurity.

This framing is important because it shifts the debate away from ideology and toward economics. Participation is not about fairness in theory; it is about affordability in practice. When participation becomes too expensive, societies do not merely become unequal. They begin to exclude.

From a European perspective—and particularly from Belgium—USD 140,000 still appears excessive. Belgium continues to offer participation at a lower nominal income. A household can typically achieve a comparable level of social stability with a gross income of roughly €60,000 to €75,000. Healthcare is socialised, education is affordable, and the welfare state absorbs many risks that American households must cover privately. Yet this apparent advantage rests on a model that is increasingly misaligned with global economic reality.

Housing shows why the gap is smaller than it appears. In the United States, median home prices exceed USD 400,000, with far higher thresholds in dynamic metropolitan areas. In Belgium, median prices are lower, roughly €250,000 for an apartment and up to €385,000 for a detached house. However, high registration duties, notary fees, and heavy taxation of labour income substantially reduce Belgian households’ effective purchasing power. Once disposable income and transaction costs are considered, the affordability gap narrows sharply. Participation is not determined by sticker prices, but by what remains after the system has taken its share.

This matters because Belgium’s participation model depends on high taxation of labour to finance social security. That model is now colliding with two structural forces: demographic ageing and artificial intelligence. Pension and healthcare costs are rising, while the working-age population is stagnating. At the same time, artificial intelligence is transforming the nature of economic growth itself.

Artificial intelligence does not simply automate tasks. It shifts the source of value creation away from human labour and toward capital, scale, and innovation. Productivity gains increasingly come from algorithms, data, and computing power rather than from additional workers. In this environment, the traditional socialist battlefield—workers versus owners—loses much of its meaning. There are fewer workers to tax, fewer stable jobs to redistribute, and far more value generated outside classical labour structures.

The United States has adapted, often instinctively, to this new reality. Its system pushes households toward investment, entrepreneurship, and capital participation. Retirement savings are large, capital markets are deep, and failure is tolerated as a by-product of innovation. Participation is expensive, but the path to participation is aligned with how the economy actually creates value.

Europe, by contrast, remains anchored to a labour-centric worldview. Employment is treated as the primary source of income and dignity, and redistribution is organised around taxing wages. Innovation, artificial intelligence, and entrepreneurship are approached defensively, regulated before they are scaled, and taxed before they mature. Belgium exemplifies this tendency, with rising taxes on dividends, the introduction of capital gains taxation, and a political narrative that continues to frame capital as an adversary rather than as the future foundation of participation.

This approach is increasingly untenable. Artificial intelligence reduces labour demand structurally. When fewer people earn income primarily through work, there is less labour income to tax. No amount of regulation can reverse this. You cannot regulate innovation away if innovation is the condition for future prosperity. Attempts to do so do not protect participation; they merely raise its cost by shrinking growth and pushing capital elsewhere.

Affordable participation in a global economy is no longer a purely national concept. It is transatlantic. Capital, talent, and companies compare opportunities across borders. When Europe raises the cost of entrepreneurship and caps the upside of innovation, it does not create equality. It accelerates divergence. The result is a higher participation threshold for those who remain, and fewer opportunities for the next generation.

The necessary shift is therefore not ideological but structural. In an economy driven by artificial intelligence, societies must transition from being primarily labour-based to being investment- and entrepreneurship-based. Workers must increasingly become entrepreneurs, shareholders, and investors—not as an elite option, but as a social necessity. Savings, ownership, and capital participation are no longer luxuries; they are the mechanisms through which individuals will remain economically relevant in a post-labour world.

Tax-free and tax-advantaged savings are not giveaways to the wealthy. They are the infrastructure of future pensions, future innovation, and future affordability. When household savings flow into productive investment, they finance the technologies that replace labour and generate the returns that sustain participation when work alone no longer can.

Mr. Green’s USD 140,000 figure describes the American present. Europe’s risk is to arrive at a similarly high participation threshold without the innovation engine, capital formation, and entrepreneurial culture that make such a system survivable. The old socialist confrontation between workers and owners no longer fits a world where artificial intelligence replaces both. Survival now depends on turning citizens into participants in capital and innovation, not shielding them from it.

Affordable participation in the future cannot be taxed into existence. It must be built—through innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment—on a scale that matches the technological transformation underway.

This analysis is written by Alexander Zanzer for the Transatlantic Geopolitical and Technology Observatory.