They are killing their lifeblood
Brussels and The Hague have an autoimmune disease. The patient is called the Netherlands.
Jacobus van Merksteijn · 19 June 2026
No rhetoric. Three reports from this week.
\n\n15 June 2026
\nDutch stables are being dismantled and rebuilt in Poland, Sweden, Croatia, Peru, and Ukraine. It is precisely the young stables that are leaving. They are the most valuable.
\n \n16 June 2026
\nESB calculates: the nitrogen buyout policy costs €212.795 per kilo. A kilo of nitrogen in compound feed costs €1,50. The policy is 140.000 times more expensive than the problem.
\n \n12 June 2026
\nRabobank: agricultural added value –20% in one year. Fertilizer +26%. Energy +17%. Those who stay pay more for less.
\n \nOne week. Three sectors of the same victim.
\n\nAnd the farmer is not alone. DGA: business succession taxed up to 70%. Box 3: tax on profits that do not exist. Industry: CBAM is driving away Tata, Nyrstar, and the chemical industry. Craftsman: regulatory pressure and VAT are breaking the mkb sector. Brussels: approves more buyouts, blocks lab-grown meat, pushes through CBAM.
\n\nOne leadership. Six sectors. One pattern.
\n\nThe citizen has one lifeblood: production. That is where the money comes from for healthcare, education, defense, AOW. No production, no money, no society. A simple calculation.
\n\nThat artery is now being severed by the leadership that lives off it.
\n\nAnd for what? For goals from 2019, in a climate of 2026. The plants have already moved. The tree line is shifting northward. Nature moves along. The leadership does not. They buy out farmers based on calculation models that reality has already outpaced. That is not stubbornness. That is the clinical picture.
\n\nWhy does nobody think?
\n\nHow can this be? Educated people. Advisors. Models. And yet, this.
\n\nTrue thinking requires three things.
\n\nObserving what is. The diseased leadership only sees its own models.
\n\nDoubting one's own assumptions. Within the diseased leadership, doubt is treason.
\n\nTaking responsibility. Within the diseased leadership, responsibility lies nowhere — it came from the model, it was in the directive, it was a European mandate.
\n\nThose who do not observe, do not doubt. Those who do not doubt, do not decide. Those who do not decide, do not think.
\n\nThis is why calls for \"better policy\" do not work. A non-thinking system does not think better just because you ask it to.
\n\nThe disease has a name
\n\nIn medicine, we know this. Autoimmune disease. The body attacks its own organs. Pancreas, joints, myelin, thyroid, intestines.
\n\nThe attacking cells are not malignant. They are doing their job. The problem lies in recognition. One's own tissue is mistaken for an enemy.
\n\nThe immune system cannot see its own error. Every attempt at correction is treated as a threat and neutralized.
\n\nRead this description again. Replace \"body\" with \"the Netherlands\". Replace \"immune system\" with \"Brussels and The Hague\". It fits word for word.
\n\nThis is not a metaphor.
\nThis is a clinical picture.
\nUntreated, it leads to death — in humans within years, in a country within a decade.
\nWhy a new minister solves nothing
\n\nThe cell line is diseased, not the individual cell.
\n\nA new minister comes from the same university, the same career path, the same models, the same committees. He cannot do otherwise than make the same decisions. The ministry produces them, not him.
\n\nIn medicine, this was learned long ago: broad immunosuppression — suppressing the symptoms — makes the patient weak and dependent. Healing requires something else.
\n\nRemoving the cell line and forming a new one.
\n\n![\"Five](\"../../assets/wat-opkomt/actor-vervanging/medisch-politiek-tableau.svg\")
\n Five ascending treatment routes — medical and political side by side.
\nThe treatment
\n\nFive medical routes. Five political translations.
\n\n1 · Suppressing symptoms
\nSubsidies, allowances, purchasing power packages. Prolongs the disease. Makes the patient dependent on the attacker. Do not do it.
\n\n2 · Removing specific institutes
\nJust as CAR-T kills the faulty B-cell line. Concretely, this week:
\n- \n
- Lbv-buyout: stop. \n
- Box 3 fiction: gone. \n
- CBAM: withdraw. \n
- BOR-tightening: roll back. \n
- AERIUS: start over, different premises. \n
Five decisions. One hundred days. Non-negotiable.
\n\n3 · Full reset
\nConstitution, electoral system, abolishing ministries. Works — or destroys. Only if routes 2 and 4 are refused. Held in reserve.
\n\n4 · New organs alongside the old ones
\nNot reforming the FNV — founding a productive workers' movement alongside it. Not persuading the CPB — establishing a Bureau for Productive Future that does factor in BiCRS. Not pluralizing the NOS — citizen foundations for media. Not adapting the Eerste Kamer — a Bondsraad in which farmers, mkb, craftsmen, and inventors hold seats.
\nBuilding up next to tearing down. The old becomes irrelevant of its own accord.
\n\n5 · The nutritional base
\nOwn energy through BiCRS. Own food. Productive currency. Wealth for employees and the mkb. Without this, nothing will last.
\n\nThe prescription
\n- \n
- Route 2 + 4 + 5. Combination. In that order. Fast. \n
- Route 1 deliberately phasing out. Those who make the patient dependent feed the disease. \n
- Route 3 in reserve. Only if the patient actively refuses 2 and 4. \n
![\"The](\"../../assets/wat-opkomt/actor-vervanging/revolutie-routekaart.svg\")
\n From diagnosis to goal — four steps, no more.
\nWhat if we do nothing
\n\nThe course of the disease is documented. Other countries have already gone through it.
\n\nProductive people leave. Basic organs fail. Healthcare waiting lists are growing. Defense cannot pay for itself. Capital follows the farmers to Poland.
\n\nTen years. Then recovery is no longer possible.
\n\nTo you
\n\nThe leadership is not going to heal itself. An autoimmune system does not recognize its own error.
\n\nYou do.
\n\nYou are the farmer whose stable is disappearing to Poland. The DGA whose succession has been made unaffordable. The mkb owner whose bill is exploding. The employee whose wage is shrinking.
\n\nYou are also the healthy counterforce. The Treg cell that can support the recovery. But only if you rouse yourself.
\n\nAcknowledge the disease. Name it. Demand treatment. Do not wait for the patient.
\n\nThey are killing their lifeblood.
\nWhoever reads this sentence and thinks \"it won't be that bad\" — they have already succumbed to the disease.
\nWhoever reads and knows what to do — they are a Treg in the making.
\nThe recovery begins with you.
\n
Jacobus van Merksteijn
Malta
Publisher of Het Open Vizier. Systems thinker on climate, energy and democracy.