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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

Since the businesses of relatives work/-ed for some time with big German businesses I heard from them locally unheard stories about cash only payments for the delivery drivers and re labeling the products with “made in Germany stickers” big style. I also used to work with experienced Siemens guys. They told me about old Siemens business development practices. Bribing clients was so normal like eating lunch every day. And now Germany has a chancellor involved in CumEx business in the past. For me Germany is another corrupt shady country with rich puppeteers pulling the strings from the shadows. Paragon of virtue is elsewhere.

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>Paragon of virtue is elsewhere.

Genuinely curious which countries HN users think are actually paragons of virtue.

Multiple times, I've had the experience of thinking a country is a paragon of virtue, then finding a thread here or on reddit full of people from that country complaining about it...

Seems like Singapore, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, and the Netherlands are the "paragon of virtue" countries people complain about the least.

Singapore is an authoritarian one-party state and Netherlands has the tax haven problem. I'd at least count them off.

The Netherlands are captured by narcotics “gangs”. They have corrupted courts and politicians. Too much money for too small country.

As an continental European, first time I heard about Netherlands as a "paragon of virtue". Is this some UK/US talking point?

If you're from the US you don't think of the Netherlands as a thing pretty much at all.

There’s a subset of people who see the Netherlands as a public transport/biking perfection utopia.

No idea how true it is.

For British people, the Dutch are seen as plain-spoken and very socially liberal. Also they were the last country to successfully invade, although with some handy PR we now call it The Glorious Revolution rather than “the time the Dutch conquered us”

Probably just my ignorance as an American. I have vague positive associations with the Netherlands due to: bicycles, legal weed, advancements in agricultural technology and ocean control, historical contribution to the development of capitalism/merchant republic history, plain-spoken culture, and Dutch friends of mine.

They also seem very stable, and have been allies with the USA for longer than pretty much any other country.

> Singapore

Basically a dictatorship

> Denmark

Only if you are Danish.

> Norway

Yeah, Norway gets some things right.

> Switzerland

Slow transition away from tax haven.

> Finland

Can't complain too much.

> Netherlands

An actual narco state in the heart of Europe, just don't tell the Dutch, they get upset when you tell them this.

I'm Dutch, and I am upset we have gotten close to a narco state.

It's still nowhere close to true that drug dealers are being elected at the national level here, nor are national politicians clearly being pressured by drug dealers. But at the municipal level, there are a few cases of elected drug dealers and many cases of extortion.

More worryingly is the infiltration of this business into wider society. Farmers who are asked to rent out sheds, and getting blow-back if they say no is a common example. Rampant corruption and extortion of dock-worker in Rotterdam is another example.

I do want to note that the problem here isn't that we legalized weed. The problem is that Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. Antwerp (in Belgium, another country) is facing similar problems because of their port.

What doesn't help either is our 'financial services industry'. Read: tax-haven and ownership hiding. Those are legitimate (though probably immoral) but it is a great climate for money-laundering. Both because there is lots of other money flows to hide amongst, and because the experts that could do it are already here. All they need is convincing to do illegal work.

> I do want to note that the problem here isn't that we legalized weed.

Part of the problem is that the Netherlands didn't legalize weed.

The current policy in the Netherlands leaves the actual wholesale production, supply and distribution in the hands of drug cartels and gangs.

Only the retail sale and consumption is legal.

> The problem is that Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. Antwerp (in Belgium, another country) is facing similar problems because of their port.

Yep. Except the problems more limited in Belgium for some reason. Tonnes of cocaine is smuggled through Antwerp, but there is less of the associated violence.

You also seem to forget that the vast majority of amphetamine and MDMA marketed in Europe is manufactured in illicit labs in the Netherlands.

There's a huge environmental issue with the wastes from these labs being dumped in the Dutch countryside.

> What doesn't help either is our 'financial services industry'. Read: tax-haven and ownership hiding.

Tbf, that is a BeNeLux wide problem, with Lux being the worst offenders.

I wonder if the Netherlands would be a good place to experiment with the libertarian approach of just legalizing everything.

Like, if the drugs are manufactured in the Netherlands already, legalization won't change that.

The hope would be that legalization would reduce the associated violence and corruption. You'd have legitimate, "above-board" producers outcompeting the assholes, with state power on their side.

Just have to do it quickly before state power gets totally corrupted.

I guess the best counterargument would be that export is the key issue, and receivers of Dutch imports would cut those imports off of if the Dutch aren't making even a token effort to restrict illegal-in-recipient-country drug smuggling.

> I wonder if the Netherlands would be a good place to experiment with the libertarian approach of just legalizing everything.

No, for two reasons. First the political climate here is turning against legalization. We are pushing back on the free sale of weed, and production was never legalized, and attempts at legalizing production are consistently pushed back.

Second, our production of non-weed is inherently criminal. Legalizing it will only give these criminal enterprises a legitimate facade. The production is part of a bigger criminal organization, so legalizing it won't actually turn them away from crime. The criminal organizations are not 'small time doing crime to pay the bills'. Our most notorious captured criminal was recently suspected to be attempting to hire mercenaries from the Balkans (I forget which country) to break him out of prison with a helicopter escape. That is intentional criminality.

If the Dutch are a nargo state the US should elect some drug dealers because they seem to be supportive of bicycle lanes.

Tyler Cowen had an interesting post about Finland where he points out that it is the world's happiest country, and yet birthrates keep dropping:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/08/fi...

It's interesting to me that Finland is right next door to Russia and yet so different. I suppose that goes for Baltic states like Estonia as well though. (Speaking of which, does anyone have dirt on Estonia?)

> Denmark

One might want to know about the barbarism Denmark has been committing against the Inuit in Greenland: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942173

Upsetting... have they been a paragon over the past 40 years though?

Try New Zealand.

Wikipedia has a list of political scandals here, which is mostly fairly laughable if you are from most other countries, with headline numbers being $100,000: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_i...

I remember an Israeli acquaintance laughing hysterically at our lack of problems, because the front page of a major NZ newspaper was about a large seal that had got onto a motorway and was causing trouble. Seriously, our major news items often read like we all live in some hick back-country village. That’s a good thing, by the way.

One of the 3 major “scandal” highlights from 2015: “National cabinet minister Murray McCully is involved in the controversial setting up of a sheep farm in Saudi Arabia in partnership with Saudi businessman Hamood Al-Ali Al-Khalaf, seemingly to negate the risk of Al-Khalaf suing the New Zealand government”. Another highlight from 2017: “Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei reveals that she had at one time committed benefit fraud during the 1990s”.

We apparently had no scandals at all in 2012.

Honestly I feel like most of the ones in the UK — until Boris — were just as parochial, only scaled up a bit. BJ was a walking scandal who has forever sullied British politics, and it’s no surprise that the various PPE scandals that are coming out happened on his watch.

Sorry, but what 'scandals'? The one where he had a handful of people in his garden? I mean theoretically during COVID administrative actions, but in practicality it has nothing to do with anything at all other than optics? BoJo was clownish, but he was not doing deals with Russians or stealing money.

Angela Merkel made massive deals with Putin for expansion of energy integration which was a key economic driver in a massive war in Europe. Gehard Schroder cut a deal with Russian Oil companies after he was voted out as Chancellor, just as he was leaving office whereupon he took Board Positions on said Russia Oil companies literally the day after being out of office including massive monetary payments. Which is beyond conflict of interest, just straight corruption, that of course also put Germany - and Europe including the UK on a trajectory to war.

Justin Trudeau was caught wearing Blackface. Twice. And there are other instances of this, as he has hinted 'he doesn't remember how many times he did it'. He implemented extrajudicial measures to quell a protest that was threatening his political legitimacy, while lying to the public that it was at the behest of the RCMP, whilst they in fact denied it was at their request. Those measures included the ability to seize individuals finances. He's allowing local provincial leaders in Quebec and Alberta to literally ignore the Constitution without a challenge. His family accepted $500 000 in consulting fees and travel from an entity his cabinet subsequently awarded a $1 Billion 'no bid contract' to. He bullied his Justice Minister into not investigating SNC-Lavalin, a massive international construction firm. There is $32 Billion in unaccounted for COVID payments. The $5M/year government payroll project is now close to a Billion dollars in cost.

Those are mostly 'material issues' meaning the scandals in these circumstances affect the nature of our governance, some of it in existentially consequential ways (aka 'extrajudicial actions').

I have no love or support for Boris Johnson - but 'scandal' is how the press (especially even outside the UK) turned his floozy escapades into material issues while they ignored nearly criminal actions elsewhere.

'Forever sullied British Politics' ... you must be young.

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