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With all due respect, our land has been ruled for many years by ministers who no longer have a clue about their portfolio. Because of their naiveté and ignorance, they are prey for militant groups and cunning lobbyists. As a result, nonsensical rules and laws are made that completely miss the mark. Instead of solving problems, they are created. As U.S. President Ronald Reagan once said, “Government is not the solution to our problems, government
is the problem.”
We see crises piling up. Step by step, every social sector becomes a victim of the administrative ignorance of The Hague. It wants everything we have built to be destroyed in a short time, preferably before 2030.
As a result of all this, in today’s public sector, the motto is: “
We are forbidden to think, we only use protocols and check items off lists.” And those top-down protocols are increasingly coming from fanatical alarmists and bigoted ecologists. What a depressing work environment! The result is that people in the workplace increasingly feel like blunted robots, no longer seeing with any perspective, and eventually drop out sick. That is what is happening now.
The Netherlands is a small and crowded country. Space is at a premium. We need space for homes, offices, and factories, for rail and highways, for agriculture and horticulture, for city parks and nature reserves, etc. This requires sustainably maximizing farm yields per km2. This knowledge-intensive process is the basis of wise choices.
Guus Berkhout is a retired professor of geophysics from the Technical University of Delft and a co-founder of CLINTEL.
Translated from the original Dutch by Andy May, with the help of the translation feature in Microsoft Word.
O
ther English versions of this essay can be seen here and
here