The Dutch Ate the Businessman Who Ended Their Golden Age
This Week’s Inequality Roundup: April 4, 2025

Alchemists long tried to turn lead into gold. None succeeded. President Donald Trump, however, is the anti-alchemist. He has succeeded in the much easier task of turning gold into lead.
I don’t think any leader of any country at any time in history has so quickly, gleefully and purposely caused so much ruin. The American golden age is over.
No golden age lasts forever, of course. History shows us that these eras come and go. But you can speed up the ending, and Trump isn’t the first leader to do it.
With new tariffs tanking the stock market and hastening our fall, this seems to be the first time that many Trump supporters are finally realizing that their guy was never a good businessman. He just played one on TV.
What we can learn from the Dutch golden age
Because I married a citizen of the Netherlands, I have leaned into Dutch culture. Copies of Dutch paintings hang in my dining room. My front walk is lined with tulips. I painted my kitchen floor Delft blue to coordinate with Dutch tiles.
And I learned some history, especially about the Dutch golden age, which ran from about the 1580s until about 1672. You know about Vermeer and Rembrandt, who painted during that period. You probably learned a poem about Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who discovered bacteria.
For better or worse, the Dutch invented the modern stock market and helped invent capitalism. (If nothing else, you learned about the Dutch East India Company in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.)
What I’m saying is, they were leaders in art, science, business and more.
While most of Europe was ruled by monarchies, the money-minded Dutch decided it would be better to put a businessman in charge. Johan de Witt was friends with the leaders of the wealthy merchant class.
The Dutch might well have asked, “What could possibly go wrong with putting a businessman and his rich friends in charge of running the country?”
De Witt ruled successfully for about 20 years, but then in 1672 came the Het Rampjaar: The Disaster Year. The country was involved in multiple wars, but instead of dealing with that, De Witt focused on the economic interests that were making him and his supporters ever richer.
The slogan for that year is: “Het volk was redeloos, de regering radeloos, en het land reddeloos.”
Translation: “The people were irrational, the government helpless, and the country beyond salvation.”
Eventually, the Dutch people had enough
A mob attacked De Witt and his brother, hung them and then literally cannibalized them. I learned about this when I saw the painting The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers by Jan de Baen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It depicts the brothers hanged and mutilated. (I do not have a copy of that painting hanging in my dining room.)
As with the French, when the Dutch lost patience with a ruler, they were not subtle.
‘Eat the rich’
During the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau quipped, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” It’s become a political slogan for the extreme left, but I don’t think anybody has taken it quite as literally as that Dutch mob did.
Here’s some delicious irony: Although De Witt had done all he could to keep the royal House of Orange from power, ultimately an Orange man replaced him. (Their Orange man was superior to ours.)
This is our terrible year
Our people are irrational – they put a madman in charge.
Our government is helpless – nobody seems able to combat the madman.
I fear our country is beyond salvation.
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And now, here’s this week’s inequality roundup:
Shared by Ariana Jasmine
Shared by Ariana Jasmine
Shared by Lesley
What do we do with our money while we’re preparing for a potential fall of democracy?
Danielle Nava, CFP
I am watching as Trump dismantles our government bureaucracies. I am concerned about how that will affect me financially. I also want to be in a position to leave the country if I need to. Sounds crazy even saying this …but here we are.”
Thoughts On Poverty …
Joan DeMartin, The Poverty Trap
In an article for Time published in 2023, Mark R. Rank, the Herbert S. Hadley professor of social welfare at Washington University in St. Louis, makes the case that America looks at poverty “all wrong”, saying we view poverty through the myths we’ve been taught about the poor, and in a larger sense, the American Dream—that we are all capable of “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps” and supporting ourselves. And if you haven’t been able to achieve that status, you have made poor life choices—you are the “other”, far removed from mainstream American society. To the contrary, Rank points out….
1 Trillionaire and 8 Billion Homeless People
Michelle Teheux, Untrickled
The gulf between the rich and the poor just keeps widening. At this point, the rich people and the poor people can barely make each other out in the distance.
Perhaps my children will see this system reach its natural conclusion: One trillionaire who holds all the world’s wealth and 8 billion homeless people who own nothing.
If that happens, most Americans will strongly defend the trillionaire: “It’s his money! He earned it. He can do whatever he wants with it!”
April 2, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American
Just five months ago, on October 19, 2024, The Economist ran a special report on America’s economy. That economy was, the magazine said, “the envy of the world.” Today, stock market futures plummeted after President Donald J. Trump announced that he will impose a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with higher rates on about 60 countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices, including China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea, as well as the European Union.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures lost more than 1,000 points upon the news, falling by 2.5%; the S&P 500 dropped 3.6%.
Trump’s erratic approach to the economy had already rattled markets, which dropped significantly in the first quarter of this year, and consumer confidence, which recently hit a twelve-year low. Trump waited until the stock market had closed today before he announced the new tariffs. Then, in a speech in the White House Rose Garden, he said: “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. But it is not going to happen anymore.” Instead, he said, tariffs would create “the golden age of America.”
I bet there are some people who want to do to Trump et al what the Dutch did to the De Witts.
When I worked in SW Michigan, I learned the phrase: “If you’re not Dutch, you’re not much.”