The supply line
The courage to say it is wrong is absent through lack of self-knowledge — a structural fault, not a character flaw. All of Europe has bricked up its detours; all laws are designed to ensure that nowhere can a real decision still be made. The laws that people before us made do not know the future; nature does know it and must lead again.
By Jacobus van Merksteijn · Malta, June 2026
The food in the supermarket is our nourishment. When we decide that the supermarket earns too much, and we dismantle it through price regulation, taxation and compliance — we are not destroying "shareholder profit". We are destroying our supply line. Empty shelves, imported scraps from countries where the same rules do not apply, higher prices for lower quality. That is not justice; that is self-amputation.
This principle holds everywhere. The farmer, the entrepreneur, the SME, the exporter, the industrial investor, the training provider: they are all supply lines. Anyone who says they earn too much, and that their room must therefore be curtailed, is cutting into the circulatory system of the entire body. Not out of malice — out of thoughtlessness about how a living organism works.
The case of the supermarket
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. Nobody complains of famine; the shelves are full; prices are relatively low; quality is overwhelmingly good.
Margins in the Dutch supermarket chain run from 2.1 to 3.4 percent — below those of Spanish, German and Italian retail. The large profits do not sit with the supermarket itself; they sit with the supplying oligopolies (dairy, bread, meat processing, soft-drink brands). But in the public imagination — fed by politicians searching for an enemy — the supermarket is the profit-maker.
What happens when we constrain supermarket margins through legislation, introduce price controls, or impose additional requirements via competition authority? The chain loses investment capacity. Distribution centres are not renewed. Fresh-food stores close. Logistics are taken over by foreign competitors who do not know the rules. Shelves are less filled, less fresh, less varied. The consumer loses more than she gains through price regulation.
Worse still: when the supermarket chain is weakened, so are the Dutch farmers who supply it. The sales line becomes unreliable. Farmers quit. Imports fill the gap. The supply line now runs through Romania, Brazil and Vietnam — and it is more expensive, more fragile and shorter than before.
This is not a plea for "unlimited profits". It is a warning that the supply line that literally feeds us is not an abstraction. It is measurable in calories, kilograms, filled baskets, available choice. Throttle it, and you get not justice, but less food.
The supply line as natural law
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 company has revenue and labour productivity. A state has a productive sector that generates taxes. A civilisation has an energy system that makes its work possible. Cut into any of those supply lines, and the system above it shrinks or collapses.
This is not ideology. This is a physiological and thermodynamic fact. Every organisation — from a single cell to a transnational state — needs a net inflow of energy and nutrients greater than its loss. When outflow exceeds inflow, breakdown begins. 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 company, not the supermarket, not the municipality, not the nation, not the European Union. Anyone who demands preservation without protecting the supply line that pays for that preservation is engaged in self-dissolution — regardless of their intentions.
Replacement is what a healthy supply line does continuously. Cells are replaced. Crops rotate. Companies renew. Technology is succeeded. Not as loss, but as condition for continued existence. A system that blocks replacement blocks its own supply line.
Three forces, one thinking error
Three political forces in Europe share the same structural thinking error: they want to preserve plus have more, without acknowledging what that 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: emission reduction of 55 percent by 2030, biodiversity at 1970 levels, everything net-zero. At the same time: more regulation, more subsidies, more civil servants, more compliance.
Supply line: the European productive sector. Which is being throttled through ETS prices, CBAM tariffs, energy prices, regulation and compliance costs. Result: the German car industry disappears to China (500,000 FTE already gone since 2023), energy-intensive industry relocates to the US, farmers are leaving the sector en masse, prosperity shrinks. The Brussels climate authority can only meet its goal by throttling 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, worker protection, the pension. Plus extra: more healthcare, more education, more housing, more climate action, more accessibility, more redistribution.
Supply line: Dutch SMEs, the self-employed entrepreneur, the DGA, the exporter, innovative industry. Being throttled through corporate tax, box-2 increases, income tax rates, self-employed rules, permit procedures, nitrogen compulsion and growth taxes. Result: entrepreneurs move to Portugal or Dubai, families with growing wealth emigrate, SMEs shrink. The left-wing coalition can only meet its goal by throttling the supply line it takes its redistribution from.
The trade unions
FNV, CNV, sectoral unions in healthcare, education, construction, industry: want to preserve — permanent jobs, permanent wages, permanent pensions, permanent working week, permanent rights. Plus extra: higher wages, shorter working week (32 hours), more days off, more sick pay, more job retention, more dismissal protection.
Supply line: those same employers from whom members receive their wages. Being throttled through collective agreement increases that can no longer be absorbed by productivity improvements. Result: the employer automates, goes bankrupt, or relocates — and the jobs the unions wanted to protect disappear. The union can only meet its goal by throttling the supply line from which its members' jobs come.
The shared error
All three want to preserve plus make extra demands, in complete disregard of the supply line that must pay for it. Not one of them asks the question: where does the money come from that pays for this, and what happens to that source when we put it in a vice?
When the supply line disappears, the extra demands fail first, then preservation itself fails, and ultimately the whole system collapses. That is not a prediction — that is how organisms, companies, municipalities and states have perished throughout thousands of years.
No self-knowledge, no revolution
Here we reach the deepest layer. It is not that administrators are too cowardly to say 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 fault, not a character flaw.
Self-knowledge is the capacity to judge from within yourself whether something is right or wrong, independent of what the majority, the law, the curriculum or the committee thinks about it. Self-knowledge does not arise from books. It arises by yourself going wrong, yourself feeling that a path is a dead end, yourself bearing the pain of a wrong choice, and yourself learning from it. That is what gives a person self-knowledge: lived mistakes.
A system that excludes mistakes also excludes self-knowledge. An education that makes all paths safe does not make people wiser — it makes them unqualified to become wise. We have educated three generations in an environment where every decision had already been made for them, every answer already filled in, every turn already signposted. The result: an entire administrative layer without a single genuinely lived mistake to its name. Not because it would have lacked the courage to make them — but because the system never gave it that chance.
The structural fault
Revolution — in the sense of daring to say it is wrong and that there is another way — requires self-knowledge. Self-knowledge requires lived mistakes. Lived mistakes require the right to go wrong. That right has been taken away by three generations of safe education, safe governance, safe procedures, safe career paths.
What remains is an administrative layer that adopts everything it must do on authority, because it has no anchor point of its own from which to say "this is wrong". Not out of cowardice — out of lack of instrument. The instrument is called self-knowledge. It was never granted to them.
This is why criticism from within the system stays on the surface. Whoever grew up inside the system can only be critical within the system's own vocabulary. They can say "this procedure could be more efficient", not "this procedure as a whole is wrong". They can say "more subsidy" or "less subsidy", not "no subsidy". They can say "net-zero by 2030" or "net-zero by 2035", not "net-zero is the wrong unit of measurement". The radical question — whether the concept itself holds — they cannot even formulate, because their language was formed 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 someone who knows what they know — because they have lived it themselves, and not because a textbook or a committee told them — can say the emperor has no clothes. Everyone who obtained their knowledge exclusively from the imperial clothing factory sees clothes where there are none.
The system reflexively expels its rebels
Here a second mechanism comes into play, one layer deeper. Our entire society — our institutions, our procedures, our decision-making, our education, our entire model of civilisation — is built on evolutionary action and thinking. Small steps, consensus-building, gradual change, caution. Whoever moves within it is recognised and accepted. Whoever moves outside it is by definition foreign to the system.
The revolutionary is not someone who goes too far. They are someone who goes outside the logic on which the system itself is founded. They ask questions that cannot be asked within the system. They see patterns that are not visible within the system. They propose directions that cannot be addressed within the system. That does not automatically make them right — but it does make them indigestible to the system that produces them.
And so something dismayingly human happens: we expel them without truly thinking about them. Not out of anger, not out of consideration, not out of a rebutting argument. Reflexively. They are marginalised in the press, not cited in research, refused for committees, not hired for positions. Their ideas are either found inexplicably obscure — "I don't understand it, so it can't be right" — or neatly framed as "conspiracy theory", "extremist", "no scientific consensus", "not realistic", "not feasible". All words that say nothing about the content of what they claim. All words that only say: they do not fit with us.
Three examples from lived reality
BiCRS / ethanol from equatorial biomass: an evolutionary solution to the CO₂ question — carbon cycling instead of enforceable net-zero — that already works perfectly well 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 who proposes BiCRS is not a candidate for an EU position.
VMP — a voluntary mandate party: a political form not tied to voters and therefore capable of taking decisions that voters do not like. On paper exactly 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, per voting position, what the prosperity drain is. Something that is fundamentally beyond StemWijzers. But it is not picked up by existing political science, not discussed in the press, not examined by committees. Not because of errors in the matrix — because of an inability to think the framework outside itself.
The pattern is the same everywhere: not the content of what the rebel says is examined, but their position relative to the system. "Who are they, really?" — instead of "what are they saying?" "Where do they stand?" — instead of "is it right?" That is not malice; that 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, climate in years-not-decades. At such a moment, a purely evolutionary system is not safe, but lethal — it has no mechanism for switching course rapidly.
At precisely this tipping point we have stripped ourselves of the capacity to recognise revolutionaries. Not because they do not exist — they do, and in increasing numbers. But we have developed a reflex against them. The result: the people who can still save us now are expelled before we have even read them.
This is not a plea to give every outsider the benefit of the doubt. Many rebels are wrong — that is precisely why we built our evolutionary system. But the problem is not that we are sceptical about rebels; the problem is that we no longer investigate. We have replaced scepticism with reflex. A healthy society would test the revolutionary on their arguments. A hardened society expels them on their form.
Europe has bricked up its detours
Anyone who thinks this is a Dutch problem, a French problem, a German problem — is mistaken. The problem has established itself across the full breadth of the European continent, and in such a way that there is no detour left. Not through another country, not through another coalition, not through another law. All roads have been bricked up by laws that serve the same purpose: to ensure that nowhere can a real 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 through the European Parliament, then through the Court of Justice, then through 27 national parliaments, then through 27 national judges, then through municipalities, then through courts of appeal, then through interested parties. Ten to fifteen years later the decision has been diluted to unrecognisability.
- Permitting: building a new factory takes an average of seven years in the Netherlands; five in Germany; eight in France. Not because the factory is complex — because the procedure has been made complex by decades of accumulated protection laws from which there is no exit.
- Education: teachers may no longer fail pupils, schools may no longer be strict, universities may no longer create rankings that cause offence. Everyone is safely guided through the system. Nobody ever reaches a dead end. Nobody ever learns they were wrong.
- Labour market: dismissal costs a fortune, hiring creates long-term obligations, automation is fiscally penalised. The employer no longer dares to decide — so no decision is made, and productive employment emigrates.
- Governance: ministers may not decide without committees, committees may not decide without consultation, consultations may not decide without peer review, peer reviews may not decide without hearings. There is no longer any place where the decision falls.
- Climate policy: ETS, CBAM, RED-III, Fit-for-55, Green Deal, Just Transition — each instrument is designed so that no member state can exit it, no parliament can deviate from it, and no future government can reverse it. The laws of today have already made the laws of tomorrow 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 self-closing cocoon of laws made by people who could not know the future — and who no longer permit 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 may not decide — because their laws forbid it.
Nature knows more than our laws
When all roads have been bricked up by human laws, one guide remains that cannot be abolished by committees, jurists or majorities: nature. Nature has no quorum, no veto, no consultation round. 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 again, instead of the laws of people who do not know the future?
- Cycling instead of net-zero: nature has no "net-zero CO₂". It has a carbon cycle in which every gram extracted from the ground is stored somewhere else — in biomass, in oceans, in soil. BiCRS follows that cycle. ETS and CBAM try to freeze it.
- Replacement instead of preservation: nature replaces continuously. 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, at whatever cost.
- Diversity instead of monoculture: a healthy soil has thousands of microbial species alongside each other; a healthy economy has thousands of entrepreneurial species alongside each other. Our laws produce monocultures — one type of education, one type of company, one type of employment contract, one type of supplier.
- Fast adapted action instead of endless deliberation: an organism that "deliberates" too long when a predator approaches is dead. Nature rewards speed of decision. Our laws reward delay of decision.
- Local adaptation instead of central uniformity: in nature no biotope is identical to another. Our laws impose one rule for all 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 that people make is contingent — it holds as long as the majority supports it, and can be different tomorrow. The law of nature is necessary — it holds whether you recognise it or not. Whoever governs against gravity falls. Whoever governs against the supply line starves. Whoever governs against replacement becomes extinct.
The guide back to nature
Europe has placed its laws above nature and has thereby locked itself inside itself. The only way out is not better laws — it is letting nature lead again. Not as sentiment, not as religion, not as a "biodiversity goal". But as the actual teacher with three billion years of experience in surviving under constant change.
Our laws must adapt to nature, not the reverse. That is not an anti-modern statement; it is the only remaining chance to still know the future — because the people who want to fix it in advance cannot, by definition, do so.
The case of education
We are training people for yesterday's world
The Netherlands trains approximately 8,500 engineers annually at its technical universities. These students begin their studies in September 2026, graduate in 2031 or 2032 (bachelor) or 2034 (master), and enter the labour market with knowledge formed over six to eight years — formed by curricula established somewhere between 2018 and 2023.
In that same period, GPT-4 (2023) gave 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 graduating junior engineer — faster, more accurately, and without sick leave.
This does not mean engineers become redundant. It means that the type of engineer we are training now — generic knowledge carrier, student-of-the-2018-handbook — is no longer viable in 2032. The 2026 student who graduates in 2032 enters a market where AI already does their work. They become structurally unemployed, or must retrain into something AI cannot do: forming judgements, ethical negotiation, physical-spatial work, complex multi-stakeholder management.
The Dutch education sector is not keeping up with this. Curricula are updated more slowly than the technology itself evolves. Universities are institutionally configured for stability, not agility. Teachers' unions resist radical restructuring. The Ministry of Education works with multi-year plans that are by definition behind. The consequence: 8,500 engineers delivered annually into a world they were not trained for.
The costs of this mismatch are enormous and avoidable:
- Student financing: €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 percent of the cohort = €510 million to €850 million additional.
- Lost productive years: an average of 18 months between graduation and first viable work in a suitable sector.
- Social unrest: trained professionals who cannot find work in their field feed political instability.
This can be avoided by looking further ahead. What do we need in 2032? Not generic engineers. What is needed: BiCRS process management, agro-mechatronics for equatorial plantations, ethanol distillation engineering, complex multi-stakeholder climate project management, elderly care work that AI cannot do, regulatory negotiation, ethical AI assessment. But we are training for what we needed before. The supply line for the future labour market is being cut before it even comes into existence.
The speed at which other countries are switching
Now we come to the second major problem: even when we acknowledge that we must switch, we do so far too slowly.
| Country / region | Recent structural switch | Lead time |
|---|---|---|
| China | EV volume production BYD: from 0 to 4 million units/yr | ~36 months (2021–2024) |
| China | Solar cell production: from 60% to 90% world market | ~24 months (2022–2024) |
| China | Lockdown shift to reopening (zero-COVID policy reversed) | ~2 months (October–December 2022) |
| United Arab Emirates | Income tax for entrepreneurs from 0% to 9% | ~9 months preparation + 0 months implementation (2023) |
| Singapore | AI curriculum in primary and secondary education nationally | ~18 months (2023–2025) |
| India | UPI payment system national rollout | ~24 months national adoption (2016–2018) |
| Netherlands | Benefits affair correction | 5+ years (2018–2026, not yet completed) |
| Netherlands | Nitrogen approach (since Council of State ruling 2019) | 7+ years, still unresolved |
| Netherlands | Adaptation of education curriculum to AI | (not yet started) |
| Brussels | Reform of Green Deal/CBAM | (politically off the table until ~2030) |
This is an acceleration gap that grows larger every year. China reorients in months where Europe takes years. The United Arab Emirates implements in a working week where the Netherlands needs a full cabinet term. India builds national infrastructure in two years where we debate for fifteen.
The cause is structural. Our decision-making runs through:
- Polder consultation: months of public input, seeking support, stakeholder rounds.
- Coalition binding: four parties each of which can deploy its blocking minority.
- Union resistance: every reform proposal fought out in collective agreement negotiations.
- Judicial review: Council of State, Supreme Court, European Court — multiple instances, each taking multiple years.
- Public consultation procedures: inspection periods, objection deadlines, appeal options.
- Subsidy administration: application, assessment and accountability cycles.
For each individual step there is an argument for carefulness. But added together they produce a country that is permanently chasing the cart. China decides on Thursday and builds on Monday. We decide after six rounds of consultation, three years later, and build — if the permit comes through — in year seven.
The cost of slowness
Every two years that the Netherlands is slow on a particular switch, while other countries do it in two months, means: 22 months of lag. Multiplied across twenty switching moments in a decade, that means more than four years of permanent lag. We are never in a position to lead; we follow what others have already invented, set up and produced at scale. The income we lose by this — as nations, as companies, as individuals — is structural and cumulative.
The CO₂ reality, separate from the methane panic
Finally, a note on the climate itself, because here lies the core misunderstanding that justifies the entire supply-line attack.
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 great majority has broken down through reaction with the hydroxyl radical — to 1 g CH₄ → 2.75 g CO₂ + 2.25 g H₂O. The methane account of today is a CO₂ account in 2040.
CO₂, by contrast, remains in the atmosphere for 100 to 1,000 years. That is the real cost question. Not methane. Not nitrogen. Not livestock farming. CO₂ is the long-term problem, and CO₂ is what we genuinely need to remove.
The difference is fundamental:
- Methane approach = regulating what breaks down by itself within fifteen years. Farmers, the supermarket chain and SMEs pay the price for a gas that by 2040 no longer exists as methane.
- CO₂ approach via BiCRS = removing from the atmosphere what would otherwise hang there for 1,000 years. One carbon price (€40/tonne), equatorial plantations, liquid injection on site, market operation — not 580,000 FTE EU bureaucracy throttling the supply line.
What the supply line requires
Anyone who takes the supply line seriously arrives at four requirements:
One — the supply line must breathe. Cells replace themselves; entrepreneurs renew products; workers learn new skills; crops rotate; technology is succeeded. That is not damage — that is health. Preservation subsidies, job-retention packages, sector protection and regulation stacking all work against replacement.
Two — the supply line must not be constricted. Every extra tax, every extra rule, every extra compliance requirement is a reduction in capacity. An entrepreneur who spends sixty percent of their week on administration can only devote the other forty to production.
Three — the supply line must be fed by adaptation, not preservation. Making something different today than thirty years ago. Every attempt to fix the current state — farmers with dairy cattle, industry with coal, energy with gas, education with curriculum-2018 — weakens the supply line because it cannot evolve freely.
Four — we must be as fast as world competitors. Not polder-consultation-fast. Not coalition-binding-fast. Not legal-proceedings-fast. Market-fast. Deciding in weeks, implementing in months, evaluating in years. Whoever is slow loses income, jobs and relevance.
What holding on costs — what adapting costs
| Component | Holding on | Adapting | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| CO₂ target | ~€260 bn/yr Green Deal | ~€40/tonne BiCRS | −83% |
| Methane regulation | ~€1.8 bn/yr NL | €0 — becomes CO₂ in 10–15 yrs | −100% |
| EU climate bureaucracy | ~580,000 FTE | ~50,000 FTE | −91% |
| Subsidy layer | ~€95 bn EU budget | €0 — market chooses | −100% |
| Productive employment | 0 (preservation-FTE) | ~840,000 FTE/yr BiCRS chain | +840,000 |
| Dutch agriculture | Buyout, contraction, sclerosis | Rotating crops, market operation | +returns |
| Supermarket chain | Price regulation, margin pressure | Market operation + low prices | +purchasing power |
| Education | Curriculum-2018 for world-2032 | Forward-looking curricula, retraining-on-demand | −€1.5 bn/yr avoidable costs |
| Response time | 2 years average per switch | 2 months average (Asian tempo) | 10× faster |
| Net European benefit | ~€350 bn savings/yr + 580,000 productive jobs + breathing supply line + competitive parity | ||
A final comparison
I am 67. My body does what it always does: it replaces cells, it adapts, it becomes different from what it was. No cream, no treatment, no law can stop that. I can choose to move with that replacement — live more healthily, different priorities, different ambitions — or I can spend a fortune on the illusion that I remain 35. The second never works; the first does.
Dutch and Brussels politics has been trying the second for twenty years. They spend trillions on the illusion that the world of 1990 can be preserved — the climate zones, the species, the agriculture, the industry, the employment, the wage structure, the pensions, the welfare state, the curriculum, the supermarket chain — while all the while the supply line that must pay for all of this is being throttled by the combination of climate compulsion, left-wing redistribution demands and union pressure.
The supply line is patient, but it is not inexhaustible. When it stops breathing, first the extra demands go, then the preservation projects, and then the whole system. The Germans are learning that now, in real time, with their car industry. The farmers are learning it too. The next wave is the European tech sector. Then European healthcare. Then European pensions. Then the supermarket chain.
Or we turn around. We acknowledge that everything is a replacement market. We protect the supply line — supermarket, farmer, SME, exporter, entrepreneur, education — instead of throttling it. We do in two months what others do in two months, not in two years. We train people for what we will need next, not for what we used to want. We account for climate policy on one carbon price instead of a thousand rules. We let farmers shift to what is profitable in the new climate. We let industry shift to what is productive. We let the market regulate what in a free economy has always been regulated by the market.
The supply line is not an ideological preference. It is the physiological precondition for everything we ask for. Whoever disregards it — government, party, union, voter — withers. And no idealism, no law, no majority can stop that.
WRITTEN BY JACOBUS VAN MERKSTEIJN WITH EDITORIAL AI SUPPORT
