On bike lights and liberty

The Dutch slowly get the picture, just not the bigger picture.

A remarkable headline caused quite an uproar in the Netherlands the other day. On October 30, the council of Dutch police chiefs announced that the police would as of then enforce the law concerning bicycle lights more strictly. Anyone biking at night without working head and tail lights attached to their bicycle risked getting a fine.

Many in the big Dutch cities own rusty old bikes, because these will less likely be stolen when parked at the train station or outside the bar at night. Rather than equipping them with permanent head and tail lights powered by a dynamo, people often choose to attach portable battery-powered lights to their jacket. If the police would have gotten their way, this practice would have come to an end.

There are more bikes than people in the Netherlands, which perhaps explains the outrage that followed the announcement. The Second Chamber of Parliament immediately called upon transportation minister Camiel Eurlings to change the law, so as to allow the use of portable bike lights, after which the minister rushed to announce that he would probably do so indeed. In addition, many police officers themselves stated that their list of priorities includes far more urgent tasks, and to the general public, the story smacked of a police state encroaching upon the country.

Of course, these portable lights are perfectly safe, and one is tempted to suspect that the police's true motives are to meet their arbitrarily set targets rather than the promotion of traffic safety. The similarly useless -- but financially very attractive -- practice of photographing and fining car drivers who exceed the speed limit by five miles per hour on an empty highway, indeed comes into mind.

The public outcry against the police's decision, however, makes one wonder why the Dutch do not protest more often against their government's arbitrary use of power. Quite recently, the coalition announced its decision to impose an additional home owners tax on houses worth more than one million euro. The fact that few people own such expensive houses -- and that this new policy is therefore largely symbolical, except, of course, to those targeted -- probably helps to explain why hardly anyone objected.

The same goes for the European Commission's plan to ban the use of additive sugars in the production of wine, a usual practice among wine producers in northern Europe seeking to raise the alcohol percentage of their product. At the same time, the Commission also aims to stop subsidizing the production of concentrated grape juice, which these farmers add to their product for the same purpose.

It is fantastic that the EU stops using my tax money for sponsoring the production of alcoholic beverages, but why farmers should be forbidden to add a completely innocent commodity to their grape juice is beyond me. The EU cannot allow the overproduction of wine to reach fifteen percent of total output, farm commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel stated. If that is indeed the case, the market itself will correct it by forcing producers to produce less, and/or pushing some of them out of business. If Ms. Fischer Boel gets her way, every single Dutch wine farmer will be out of business in the blink of an eye. Yet the Dutch seem rather indifferent about this, not least because the wine industry is hardly a sector of any real significance in the Netherlands. Except, again, to those whose lives will be in shambles all of a sudden, thanks to a completely arbitrary decision by an unelected bureaucrat in Brussels.

These latter two examples stand in sharp contrast to the public indignation over the bicycle lights incident, and clearly the fact that most Dutch people do not own million-euro houses nor work in the wine industry, but do in fact ride a bike, has something to do with it.

The Dutch rebellion against the European Constitutional Treaty in 2005 similarly stemmed from a widespread fear that more Europe would also mean more troubles. The imposition of the euro, which robbed the nation of ten percent of its wealth, and the immigration of Polish construction workers, which led to the loss of jobs, constituted hard evidence for this fear. Not surprisingly, mainly lower- and middle-class citizens voted against the Constitution, while the majority of higher-educated upper-class citizens voted in favor. The very fear that the EU Constitution threatened people's paychecks, if not their jobs, led them to their sixty-five percent vote against it.

But the arbitrary use of power by an ever-expanding government goes beyond the imposition of undemocratic European institutions and, seemingly more trivial, writing tickets for not having proper lights on one's bike. As long as the Dutch keep learning from their liberal media that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the redistribution of income or interfering with individual liberty for reasons other than public security, they will never see the larger lesson behind their frustration.

This is exactly why immigration has become so controversial in recent years while other issues have not. Few things have had a more obvious negative impact on our cities than a flood of people with completely different backgrounds and traditions. The late Pim Fortuyn and now Geert Wilders told the Dutch what they had felt all along.

But Mr. Fortuyn had more to say, and I fear that his message has far from come across yet. The easy public acceptance of "free" school books, socialist EU laws, and plenty of other government interferences into our lives, stands testimony to that.