While the left in The Netherlands still rise to any opportunity to express their abhorrence of their companions Mussolini and Hitler, the fascists of the 1940's, their fascism has returned full force to Dutch PM Balkenende's regime. Jan Peter Balkenende's government, already having exposed itself as a traitor to the country and the citizens of The Netherlands by ignoring the people's NO in the 2005 referendum on the European Constitution and its rewrite, the Lisbon Treaty, handing over The Netherlands' sovereignty to Das Vierte Reich, is now dictating what business owners can and cannot do with their own property.
The first step onto this particular path of fascism was taken when the Dutch government forced owners of bars and restaurants to make high investments in air cleaners for their establishments to diminish the effects smoking had on the atmosphere. Reasoning behind this was 'public health', which of course has nothing to do with it. It's up to the establishment's owner whether or not he want to present his personnel and clients with clean air or a blue haze one can cut and fold.
If personnel doesn't like it, it goes to work elsewhere; if clients don't like it, they stay away and the establishment goes bust. Simple as that. The free market will decide what the client likes and thus what businesses will florish and what not.
Allowing private ownership but not the freedom to use that ownership to the owner's advantage is the defintion of (state) fascism. Combined with nationalism, one gets National Socialism, which the left claims to be far right, but which of course is as left as it can get. But hey, the best lies are the ones repeated most often, Goebbels already knew that.
Fascism means one has to pay the cost of property but cannot reap the benefits. When the Dutch government ordered a full smoking ban for restaurants and bars in The Netherlands last July, it took another step onto the path of fascism. Bar and restaurant owners no longer had the freedom to allow or disallow smoking in their establishment as they saw fit.
Now many establishment owners are facing nearing bankruptcy due to this ban, more and more are ignoring the law and allowing clients to smoke again, much to the chagrin of the non-smoking lobby and, surprise, the Association of Bar and Restaurant owners. While one would expect this Association to stand up and fight the government to get the ban lifted, it actually whines that it's not fair that bar owners get fined for breaking the law. Because, they claim, a bar owner is not a policeman, and it's the clients that break the law, not the bar owner. Thus, the client should get fined!
They do have a point, of course, a bar owner is no more a policemen than any other entrepeneur is a tax collector, but still each one of those has to collect, administer and hand over VAT on his activities for/to the national tax extortionists. But the conclusion is invalid. There is no market for non-smoking bars, otherwise they would've been in existence for a long time already. Restaurants already had voluntarily split their space in smoking and non-smoking sections, as second hand smoke is much more of a burden while eating a meal than while chatting and drinking.
Today's practice is that smokers that still visit their bar go outside to have their smoke, and now the anti-smoke lobby wants a ban on smoking in open air, as well as on smoking inside one's car. But as people do not like to have their butt frozen off just for having a smoke, they tend to stay home more as the temperatures drop and the rain pours. Because of this, bars now openly advertise that they will allow smoking.
But that was miscalculating the Dutch government's hunger for power abuse. The state has the monopoly on both power and force, and if it makes a law it will damn well see to it it gets obeyed. So it will start a strict regime on upholding the ban, as bar owners that allow smoking falsificate competition, which is an economical crime, and thus can lead to loss of the business permit, and thus closing of one's livelyhood.
Readers of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged undoubtedly recognise the rant Dr. Ferris presented to Hank Rearden, where Ferris states that governments are after power, and there's no power to be had in obedient citizens. So in order to create criminals, a government will create laws that cannot be obeyed, and then it will excert its power. Written in 1957, Atlas Shrugged frighteningly accurate describes the machinations of today's governments, from nationalisation of banks to taking away all personal freedom from those who create wealth, in order to favour the needy, the greedy, the parasites, of which politicians (and monarchs) are of course a prime example. The more people get dependent on government, the bigger it gets, and the more power it yields.
Before July 1st, a bar owner that conducted his business as he saw fit was a hard working citizen, making his living in a fully legal fashion. Now, without changing anything in the way he conducts his activities, he has become a hunted criminal, only because the state changed the rules, interfering in matters that are way beyond the scope of the state's primary but negated duty: protecting individual rights.
The Dutch are ruled by criminals.
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