You Don’t Grow by Squeezing the Economy
Speaking on the Watcher Post Podcast, Antonios Nestoras, Founder and President of the European Policy Innovation Council (EPIC), delivered a blunt message on Europe’s economic direction: growth will not come from new taxes, new levies, or new “own resources.”
Europe’s debate on competitiveness has drifted toward a dangerous reflex. When growth underperforms, the instinct is to look for revenue. When budgets tighten, the answer becomes taxation. When ambition rises, the solution is redistribution.
This logic is backward.
Prosperity is not created by taxing existing activity. It is created by expanding the space for production, investment, and innovation. No economy has ever taxed itself into dynamism.
Europe’s fixation on new fiscal instruments distracts from the real constraints on growth: excessive regulation, fragmented markets, limited scale, and a political environment that treats risk as a problem rather than a prerequisite for progress.
Taxes compress margins. Regulation increases uncertainty. Fragmentation prevents firms from scaling. Together, they discourage investment long before any “own resource” can be collected.
If Europe wants growth, it must stop suffocating the conditions that produce it. Deregulation where rules block entry and scale. Integration where borders still divide markets. And policy restraint where intervention rewards arbitrage instead of production.
The intervention on the Watcher Post Podcast underscored a clear conclusion: Europe does not need to redistribute a shrinking pie. It needs to grow one.
Unleashing growth requires room to breathe. And growth, once unleashed, does far more for public finances than any new tax ever could.
