The supply line
The courage to say that it is not right is lacking through a lack of self-knowledge — a structural error, not a character flaw. All of Europe has bricked up its detours; all laws are designed to ensure that no real decision can ever be made. The laws of those who came before us do not know the future; nature does, and must once again take precedence.
By Jacobus van Merksteijn · Malta, June 2026
Food in the supermarket is our sustenance. When we decide that supermarkets earn too much, and undermine them through price regulation, taxation and compliance — we are not destroying “shareholders’ profits”. We are destroying our food supply line. Empty shelves, imported leftovers from countries where the same rules do not apply, higher prices for lower quality. That is not justice; it is self-amputation.
This principle applies everywhere. The farmer, the entrepreneur, the SME, the exporter, the industrial investor, the education provider: they are all supply lines. Whoever says that they earn too much, and that their scope must therefore be restricted, is cutting into the circulatory system of the entire system. Not out of malice — out of thoughtlessness about the workings of a living organism.
The supermarket case
What feeds us, and how we destroy it
The Dutch supermarket — Albert Heijn, Jumbo, Lidl, Aldi, Plus — feeds 17.5 million people. Three times a day. Every day. Seven days a week. No one complains of famine; the shelves are full; prices are relatively low; the quality is overwhelmingly good.
Margins in the Dutch supermarket chain are 2.1 to 3.4 per cent — lower than those of Spanish, German and Italian retailers. The large profits do not lie with the supermarket itself; they lie with the supplying oligopolies (dairy, bread, meat processing, soft-drink brands). But in the public imagination — fuelled by politicians looking for an enemy — the supermarket is the profiteer.
What happens when we restrict supermarket margins through legislation, introduce price controls, or impose additional requirements through competition law? The chain loses investment capacity. Distribution centres are not modernised. Fresh-food shops close. Logistics are taken over by foreign competitors unfamiliar with the rules. Shelves become less well stocked, less fresh and less varied. The consumer loses more than they gain through price regulation.
Worse still: when the supermarket chain is weakened, the Dutch farmers who supply it are weakened too. The outlet becomes unreliable. Farmers leave the sector. Imports fill the gap. The food supply line now runs through Romania, Brazil and Vietnam — and it is more expensive, more vulnerable and shorter than before.
This is not an argument for “unlimited profits”. It is a warning that the supply line that literally feeds us is not an abstraction. It is measurable in calories, kilos, filled baskets and available choice. Whoever constricts it gets not justice, but less food.
The supply line as a law of nature
The supermarket is one supply line. But the principle is universal. Everything that lives has a supply line. The body has respiration, nutrition and circulation. A community has agriculture, crafts and trade. A business has revenue and labour productivity. A state has a productive sector that generates tax revenue. A civilisation has an energy system that makes its work possible. Cut into any of these supply lines, and the system above it contracts or collapses.
This is not ideology. It is a physiological and thermodynamic fact. Every organisation — from a single cell to a transnational state — requires a net inflow of energy and nutrients greater than its losses. When outflow exceeds inflow, breakdown occurs. Not tomorrow, not in ten years — but inevitably.
The principle of the supply line
Nothing lives without a supply line. Not the cell, not the farm, not the business, not the supermarket, not the municipality, not the nation, not the European Union. Whoever demands preservation without protecting the supply line that pays for that preservation is engaged in self-elimination — regardless of their intentions.
Replacement is what a healthy supply line continually does. Cells are replaced. Crops change. Businesses are renewed. Technology is superseded. Not as loss, but as a condition for survival. A system that blocks replacement blocks its own supply line.
Three forces, one fallacy
Three political forces in Europe share the same structural fallacy: they want to preserve plus more, without acknowledging what this does to the supply line.
The Brussels climate authority
Wants to preserve: the climate zones of 1990, the species of 1990, the landscape of 1990. Plus extra: a 55 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, biodiversity at 1970 levels, net zero in everything. At the same time: more regulation, more subsidies, more civil servants, more compliance.
Supply line: Europe’s productive sector. It is being constricted through ETS prices, CBAM tariffs, energy prices, regulation and compliance costs. Result: the German car industry is disappearing to China (500,000 FTEs already gone since 2023), energy-intensive industry is relocating to the United States, farmers are leaving the sector en masse, and prosperity is shrinking. The Brussels climate authority can achieve its objective only by constricting the supply line from which its own budget comes.
The Dutch left-wing parties
GroenLinks-PvdA, D66 in its left-wing variant, BIJ1, Volt: want to preserve — the welfare state of 1980, the minimum wage, employee protection and pensions. Plus extra: more healthcare, more education, more housing, more climate action, more accessibility, more redistribution.
Supply line: the Dutch SME sector, the self-employed entrepreneur, the owner-director, the exporter and innovative industry. They are being constricted through corporation tax, increases in taxation in Box 2, income-tax rates, self-employed regulations, permit procedures, nitrogen compulsion and growth taxes. Result: entrepreneurs move to Portugal or Dubai, families with growing wealth emigrate, and the SME sector contracts. The left-wing coalition can achieve its objective only by constricting the supply line from which it obtains its redistribution.
The trade unions
FNV, CNV, sectoral unions in healthcare, education, construction and industry: want to preserve — permanent jobs, fixed wages, fixed pensions, a fixed working week and fixed rights. Plus extra: higher wages, a shorter working week (32 hours), more days off, more continued pay, greater job security and stronger protection against dismissal.
Supply line: the same employers from whom members receive their wages. They are being constricted through collective-agreement increases that can no longer be absorbed by productivity improvements. Result: employers either automate, go bankrupt or relocate — and the jobs the trade unions wanted to protect disappear. The trade union can achieve its objective only by constricting the supply line from which its members’ jobs arise.
The shared error
All three want to preserve plus impose additional demands, in complete disregard of the supply line that must pay for it. None of the three asks itself: where does the money come from to pay for this, and what happens to that source if we place it in a vice?
When the supply line disappears, the additional demands become impossible first, then preservation itself, and ultimately the entire system collapses. That is not a prediction — it is how organisms, businesses, municipalities and states have perished for thousands of years.
No self-knowledge, no revolution
Here we reach the deepest layer. It is not that leaders are too cowardly to say that it is wrong. It is not that they lack backbone. It is that they lack the self-knowledge to know that it is wrong — and that is a structural flaw, not a character flaw.
Self-knowledge is the ability to judge for yourself whether something is right or wrong, independently of what the majority, the law, the curriculum or the committee thinks. Self-knowledge does not arise from books. It arises from personally going down the wrong path, personally feeling that a road leads nowhere, personally bearing the pain of a wrong choice, and personally learning from it. That is what gives a person self-knowledge: mistakes lived through.
A system that excludes mistakes also excludes self-knowledge. An education that makes every path safe does not make people wiser — it makes them incapable of becoming wise. We have educated three generations in an environment in which every decision had already been made for them, every answer had already been filled in, and every turning had already been signposted. The result: an entire governing class without a single genuinely lived mistake to its name. Not because it would not have dared to make one — but because the system never gave it the opportunity.
The structural flaw
Revolution — in the sense of daring to say that something is wrong and that there is another way — requires self-knowledge. Self-knowledge requires mistakes lived through. Mistakes lived through require the right to go astray. That right has been taken away by three generations of safe education, safe government, safe procedures and safe career paths.
What remains is a governing class that adopts everything it is supposed to do on authority, because it has no internal anchor from which to say, “this is wrong”. Not out of cowardice — through a lack of the necessary instrument. The instrument is called self-knowledge. It was never granted to them.
This is why criticism from within the system remains superficial. Those who grew up within the system can be critical only in the system’s own vocabulary. They can say, “this procedure could be more efficient”, but not, “this procedure as a whole is wrong”. They can say “more subsidy” or “less subsidy”, but not “no subsidy”. They can say “net zero by 2030” or “net zero by 2035”, but not “net zero is the wrong unit of measurement”. They cannot even formulate the radical question — whether the concept itself is sound — because their language was shaped within the concept.
The revolution that is needed is therefore not a political one. It is epistemic: restoring self-knowledge as a legitimate source of judgement. Only those who know what they know — because they have lived it themselves, and not because a textbook or committee has told them — can say that the emperor has no clothes. Anyone whose knowledge comes exclusively from the emperor’s clothing factory sees clothes where there are none.
The system reflexively expels its rebels
Here, a second mechanism operates at a deeper level. Our entire society — our institutions, procedures, decision-making, education, our entire model of civilisation — is built on evolutionary action and thought. Small steps, consensus-building, gradual change, caution. Those who operate within it are recognised and accepted. Those who move beyond it are, by definition, alien to the system.
The revolutionary is not someone who goes too far. He is someone who goes beyond the logic on which the system itself is founded. He asks questions that cannot be asked within the system. He sees patterns that are invisible within the system. He proposes directions that the system cannot address. That does not make him right by default — but it does make him indigestible to the system that produced him.
And so something profoundly and disconcertingly human happens: we expel him without really thinking about him. Not out of anger, not after consideration, not through a rebutting argument. Reflexively. He is marginalised in the press, not cited in research, rejected by committees, and not appointed to positions. His ideas are either deemed incomprehensible — “I do not understand that, so it cannot be right” — or attractively framed as “conspiracy theory”, “extremist”, “not the scientific consensus”, “unrealistic”, or “not feasible”. All words that say nothing about the substance of what he claims. All words that say only: he does not fit in with us.
Three examples from our own reality
BiCRS / ethanol from equatorial biomass: an evolutionary solution to the CO₂ question — a carbon cycle rather than enforceable net zero — that simply works elsewhere in the world (Brazil, Indonesia) and is systematically rejected in Europe. Not because the figures are wrong. But because it falls outside the ETS+CBAM paradigm on which the entire climate bureaucracy is built. Anyone proposing BiCRS is not a candidate for an EU position.
VMP — a voluntary-mandate party: a political form that is not bound by voters and can therefore take decisions that voters may dislike. On paper, precisely what is needed for the transition. In practice: unprecedented, uncategorised, not in line with “how we do things in the Netherlands”. Not refuted — unread.
The Consequences Map: a diagnostic instrument that shows, for each voting position, what the welfare drain is. Something that lies fundamentally outside the scope of voting advice tools. But it is not taken up by existing political science, discussed by the press, or examined by committees. Not because of errors in the matrix — because of an inability to think beyond the framework itself.
The pattern is the same everywhere: it is not the substance of what the rebel says that is examined, but his position in relation to the system. “Who is he, anyway?” — instead of “what does he say?” “Where does he stand?” — instead of “is he right?” That is not maliciousness; it is reflex. The system has its antibodies, and they work automatically.
The evolutionary trap
Evolutionary action works as long as the environment changes evolutionarily — slowly, predictably, with enough time for consensus-building. We face an environment that is changing revolutionarily: AI in months, China-speed in weeks, the climate in years rather than decades. At such a moment, a purely evolutionary system is not safe but deadly — it has no mechanism for changing course quickly.
At precisely this turning point, we have deprived ourselves of the capacity to recognise revolutionaries. Not because they do not exist — they do, and there are more of them all the time. But we have developed a reflex against them. The result: the people who can still save us are expelled before we have even read them.
This is not a plea to assume that every outsider is right. Many rebels are wrong — that is precisely why we built our evolutionary system. But the problem is not that we are sceptical of rebels; the problem is that we no longer investigate. We have replaced scepticism with reflex. A healthy society would test the revolutionary on the basis of his arguments. A calcified society expels him on the basis of his form.
Europe has walled off its detours
Anyone who thinks this is a Dutch problem, a French problem, a German problem — is mistaken. The problem has taken root across the full breadth of the European continent, in such a way that there is no detour left. Not through another country, not through another coalition, not through another law. Every route has been walled off by laws serving the same purpose: ensuring that nowhere can a genuine decision still be made.
Look at how the pattern runs through every layer of European society:
- Legislation: every decision must first pass through 27 member states, then the European Parliament, then the Court of Justice, then 27 national parliaments, then 27 national courts, then municipalities, then courts of appeal, then stakeholders. Ten to fifteen years later, the decision has been diluted beyond recognition.
- Planning permission: building a new factory takes an average of seven years in the Netherlands, five in Germany, and eight in France. Not because the factory is complex — because the procedure has been made complex by an accumulation of decades of protective legislation from which nothing can now be removed.
- Education: teachers are no longer allowed to fail, schools are no longer allowed to be strict, and universities may no longer create rankings that cause offence. Everyone is guided safely through the system. No one ever reaches a dead end. So no one learns that they were wrong.
- Labour market: dismissing someone costs a fortune, hiring creates long-term obligations, and automation is penalised through the tax system. Employers no longer dare to decide — so no decision is made, and productive employment moves abroad.
- Government: ministers may not decide without committees, committees may not decide without consultation, consultations may not decide without peer review, and peer reviews may not decide without a hearing. There is no place left where the decision is made.
- Climate policy: ETS, CBAM, RED-III, Fit-for-55, the Green Deal, and Just Transition — each instrument is designed so that no member state can still withdraw, no parliament can deviate from it, and no future government can reverse it. Today’s laws have already made tomorrow’s laws impossible.
A closed system
The pattern is the same everywhere: every law makes it impossible to make the next law differently. We do not live in a democracy in which we can change course. We live in a closing cocoon of laws made by people who could not know the future — and who no longer allow us to discover that future for ourselves.
The laws of those who came before us cannot know the future. They were written for the world they saw. We face a different world. But we are not allowed to decide — because their laws forbid it.
Nature knows more than our laws
If all routes have been walled off by human laws, one guiding principle remains that cannot be abolished by committees, lawyers, or majorities: nature. Nature knows no quorum, no veto, no consultation process. For three billion years, it has continuously made decisions, gone wrong, and learned. It knows far more than any legislator — because it has lived what we can only predict.
What would happen if we took nature as our guide once again, instead of the laws of people who cannot know the future?
- Material cycles instead of net zero: nature knows no “net-zero CO₂”. It knows a carbon cycle in which every gram that comes out of the ground is stored somewhere else — in biomass, oceans, or soil. BiCRS follows that cycle. ETS and CBAM try to freeze it.
- Replacement instead of preservation: nature is constantly replacing things. Cells, leaves, species, biotopes. What is no longer adapted to its environment disappears; what fits gains ground. Our laws try to do the opposite: preserve everything, whatever the cost.
- Diversity instead of monoculture: healthy soil contains thousands of microbial species alongside one another; a healthy economy contains thousands of types of entrepreneurs alongside one another. Our laws produce monocultures — one type of education, one type of business, one type of employment contract, one type of supplier.
- Adaptively acting swiftly instead of consulting endlessly: an organism that spends too long “deliberating” when a predator approaches is dead. Nature rewards speed of decision. Our laws reward delay in decision-making.
- Local adaptation instead of central uniformity: in nature, no biotope is identical to another. Our laws impose one rule on the whole of Europe, from Lapland to Sicily, as if soil, climate, and culture did not exist.
The difference between a law and a law of nature is this: the law made by people is contingent — it applies as long as the majority supports it, and may be different tomorrow. The law of nature is necessary — it applies whether you recognise it or not. Whoever pursues policies contrary to gravity falls. Whoever pursues policies contrary to the food chain goes hungry. Whoever pursues policies contrary to replacement dies out.
The guide back to nature
Europe has placed its laws above nature and has thereby become locked inside itself. The only way out is not better laws — it is to put nature first again. Not as sentiment, not as religion, not as a “biodiversity target”. But as the factual teacher that has three billion years of experience surviving continual change.
Our laws must adapt to it, not the other way around. That is not an anti-modern statement; it is the only remaining chance of knowing the future at all — because the people who want to determine it in advance cannot, by definition, do so.
The case of education
We are educating people for yesterday’s world
The Netherlands trains approximately 8,500 engineers each year at its universities of technology. These students begin their studies in September 2026, complete them in 2031 or 2032 (bachelor’s degree) or 2034 (master’s degree), and enter the labour market with knowledge shaped over six to eight years — knowledge formed by curricula established somewhere between 2018 and 2023.
Over that same period, GPT-4 (2023) has given way to GPT-5 (2024), Claude 3 (2024), Gemini-2 (2025), GPT-5.5 (2025), the first agentic AIs, and the first fully autonomous software-engineering agents. An AI system in 2026 can already perform more typical engineering tasks than a graduate junior engineer can — faster, more accurately, and without sick leave.
This does not mean that engineers will become redundant. It means that the type of engineer we are training now — a generic knowledge-holder, a graduate of a 2018 textbook — will no longer be economically viable in 2032. The student of 2026 who graduates in 2032 will enter a market where AI is already doing their work. They will become structurally unemployed, or will still have to retrain for something AI cannot do: judgement, ethical negotiation, physical-spatial work, complex multi-stakeholder management.
The Dutch education sector is not keeping up with this. Curricula are adapted more slowly than the technology itself evolves. Universities are institutionally configured for stability, not agility. Teachers’ trade unions resist radical restructuring. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science works with multi-year plans that are, by definition, already behind the curve. The result: 8,500 engineers each year entering a world for which they have not been trained.
The costs of this mismatch are enormous and avoidable:
- Student finance: €20,000–35,000 per student × 8,500 × 6 years = €1.0 to 1.8 billion per cohort that ends up in the wrong place.
- Retraining after graduation: €15,000–25,000 per person × approximately 40 per cent of the cohort = €510 million to €850 million extra.
- Lost productive years: an average of 18 months between graduation and the first profitable job in a suitable sector.
- Social unrest: educated professionals unable to find work in their field fuel political instability.
This can be avoided by looking further ahead. What will we need in 2032? Not generic engineers. Rather: BiCRS process engineering, agri-mechatronics for equatorial plantations, ethanol-distillation engineering, complex multi-stakeholder climate-project management, elderly-care work that cannot be done by AI, regulatory negotiation, ethical AI assessment. But we are training people for what we needed in the past. The lifeline of the future labour market is thus cut off before it has even come into existence.
The speed at which other countries are changing course
Now we come to the second major problem: even when we recognise that we need to change course, we do so far too slowly.
This is an acceleration gap that grows larger every year. China reorients itself in months where Europe takes years. The United Arab Emirates implements in a working week what the Netherlands needs a parliamentary term to achieve. India builds national infrastructure in two years while we spend fifteen years discussing it.
The cause is structural. Our decision-making proceeds through:
- Polder consultation: months of consultation, seeking consensus, and stakeholder rounds.
- Coalition constraints: four parties, each able to deploy its blocking minority.
- Trade-union opposition: fighting every reform proposal through collective bargaining negotiations.
- Judicial review: the Council of State, Supreme Court, European Court — multiple bodies, each taking several years.
- Public consultation procedures: publication for inspection, objection periods, and avenues of appeal.
- Subsidy administration: application, assessment, and accountability cycles.
There is something to be said for care and due process at each individual stage. But taken together, they produce a country that is permanently running behind. China decides on Thursday and builds on Monday. We decide after six rounds of consultation, three years later, and build — if the permit is approved — only in year seven.
The cost of slowness
Every two years that the Netherlands is slow to make a particular shift, while other countries do it in two months, means a 22-month delay. Multiplied across twenty moments of change in a decade, that means more than four years of permanent delay. We are never in a position to lead; we follow what others have already invented, established, and mass-produced. The income we lose as a result — as nations, companies, and individuals — is structural and cumulative.
The reality of CO₂, separate from the methane panic
Finally, an explanation of the climate itself, because this is where the fundamental misunderstanding lies that justifies the entire attack on the lifeline.
Government methodology treats methane as the main problem because the GWP figure (28–30) sounds high. But methane has an atmospheric half-life of approximately nine years. After ten to fifteen years, the vast majority has broken down through reaction with the hydroxyl radical — to 1 g CH₄ → 2.75 g CO₂ + 2.25 g H₂O. Today’s methane liability will be a CO₂ liability in 2040.
CO₂, by contrast, remains in the atmosphere for 100 to 1,000 years. That is the real cost issue. Not methane. Not nitrogen. Not livestock. CO₂ is the long-term problem, and CO₂ is what we really need to remove.
The difference is fundamental:
- Methane approach = regulating what breaks down by itself within fifteen years. Farmers, supermarket chains, and SMEs pay the price for a gas that will no longer exist as methane by 2040.
- CO₂ approach through BiCRS = removing from the atmosphere what would otherwise remain for 1,000 years. One carbon price (€40/tonne), equatorial plantations, liquid injection on site, market forces — not 580,000 EU bureaucratic FTEs suffocating the lifeline.
What the lifeline demands
Anyone who takes the lifeline seriously arrives at four demands:
One — the lifeline must breathe. Cells replace themselves; entrepreneurs renew products; workers learn new skills; crops shift; technology is superseded. That is not damage — it is health. Preservation subsidies, job-retention packages, sector protection, and layers of regulation all work against replacement.
Two — the lifeline must not be constricted. Every additional tax, every additional rule, every additional compliance requirement reduces capacity. An entrepreneur who spends sixty per cent of their week on administration cannot devote the remaining forty to production.
Three — the productive base must be sustained through adaptation, not preservation. Making something different today from what it was thirty years ago. Every attempt to freeze the current state — dairy farming, the coal industry, gas-based energy, education based on the 2018 curriculum — weakens the productive base because it cannot evolve freely.
Four — we must move as quickly as our global competitors. Not at the speed of consensus-building. Not at the speed of coalition commitments. Not at the speed of litigation. Market speed. Decide in weeks, implement in months, evaluate over years. Those who are slow lose income, jobs and relevance.
What holding on costs — what adapting costs
| Component | Holding on | Adapting | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| CO₂ target | ~€260bn/year Green Deal | ~€40/tonne BiCRS | −83% |
| Methane regulation | ~€1.8bn/year NL | €0 — becomes CO₂ in 10–15 years | −100% |
| EU climate bureaucracy | ~580,000 FTE | ~50,000 FTE | −91% |
| Subsidy layer | ~€95bn EU budget | €0 — the market decides | −100% |
| Productive employment | 0 (preservation FTE) | ~840,000 FTE/year BiCRS chain | +840,000 |
| Dutch agriculture | Buy-outs, contraction, sclerosis | Shifting crops, market forces | +returns |
| Supermarket chain | Price regulation, margin pressure | Market forces + low prices | +purchasing power |
| Education | 2018 curriculum for the world of 2032 | Forward-looking curricula, on-demand retraining | −€1.5bn/year avoidable costs |
| Response time | 2 years on average per transition | 2 months on average (Asian pace) | 10× faster |
| Net European gain | ~€350bn saved/year + 580,000 productive jobs + a breathing productive base + competitive parity | ||
One final comparison
I am 67. My body does what it has always done: it replaces cells, it adapts, it becomes different from what it was. No cream, no treatment, no law can prevent that. I can choose to move with that replacement — live more healthily, adopt different priorities, pursue different ambitions — or I can spend a fortune on the illusion that I will remain 35. The second will never work; the first does.
For twenty years, Dutch and Brussels politics have been attempting the second. They are spending trillions on the illusion that the world of 1990 can be preserved — the climate zones, the species, agriculture, industry, employment, the wage structure, pensions, the welfare state, the curriculum, the supermarket chain — while, in the meantime, the productive base that must pay for all this is being strangled by the combination of climate coercion, left-wing redistribution demands and trade-union pressure.
The productive base is patient, but it is not inexhaustible. When it stops breathing, the additional demands go first, then the preservation projects, and finally the entire system. The Germans are learning that now, in real time, with their car industry. Farmers are learning it too. The next to be affected is the European tech sector. Then European healthcare. Then European pensions. Then the supermarket chain.
Or we turn around. We recognise that everything is a replacement market. We protect the productive base — supermarkets, farmers, SMEs, exporters, entrepreneurs and education — instead of strangling it. We do what others do in two months, not two years. We train people for what we will need next, not for what we wanted in the past. We calculate climate policy using a single carbon price instead of a thousand rules. We let farmers shift towards whatever is profitable in the new climate. We let industry shift towards what is productive. We let the market regulate what, in a free economy, has always been regulated by the market.
The productive base is not an ideological preference. It is the physiological precondition for everything we ask of it. Whoever disregards it — government, party, union or voter — withers and dies. And no idealism, no law, no majority can prevent that.
WRITTEN BY JACOBUS VAN MERKSTEIJN WITH EDITORIAL AI ASSISTANCE
