Part II — The life the design leaves alone

Unprecedented Injustice

A documented case, told from the report of a Dutch parliamentary inquiry.

Parents in the Netherlands who pay for childcare can claim a public allowance towards its cost. In December 2020 a parliamentary committee, which had heard its witnesses under oath, reported on how that allowance had been administered. It called its report Ongekend onrecht: unprecedented injustice.^[1]

The committee found that fundamental principles of the rule of law had been violated. The benefits service of the tax administration had dealt with parents as a group rather than one by one, taken an approach the committee called all-or-nothing, and classed parents as acting with intent or gross negligence; together, it said, these seriously breached the principle of doing justice to each person's situation. Parents were wrongly branded as intentional fraudsters. The reproach did not stop at the administration. The legislature had passed a rigid law with no hardship clause and too little attention to proportionality, the administrative courts had upheld its rigid execution for years, and parliament had repeatedly been given information late, incompletely and incorrectly.^[2]

The allowance belonged to ordinary working life: parents at work, children in care, a claim the law itself offered. The committee's findings describe rules that left no room for a particular family's circumstances, applied to parents as a group, and institutions that each failed to correct the others.

Part II is about that ordinary life: what a person may do without asking anyone's permission, what work, pay and contribution come to, what money cannot buy, the same route to what is owed for everyone, the conditions a life depends on and the creatures owed protection in their own right, the roles people hold in each other's lives, and arrival. It begins with one week in which the rules touch a single person and mostly stay out of sight. The chapters show where each rule reaches and where it stops, and why a pattern seen across a group decides nothing about any one person in it.