We all know that there's a cost to doing business - you know what I mean - you take the cost of your material inputs, your labor, and your overhead and try to sell you widget for more than you've paid. This is what makes the world go round. Now take this principle of cost accounting and marry it with the principle from Tort Law of making the injured party whole - you don't want to punish the offending party by adding punitive damages so you limit their financial obligation to simply restoring the injured party to where they normally would have been without the harm that has been caused by one's action.

For a recipe of the bizarre take these two principles and add a dash of Dutch justice and you get:

It is often said that crime doesn't pay, but a Roermond man might beg to differ, having recently been refunded EUR 2,000 for the pistol he used to commit an armed robbery.

In sentencing the 46-year-old man to four years jail last week, Breda Court also ordered him to repay the EUR 6,600 he stole from a bank in the Brabant town of Chaam. But the man had the price of the pistol he bought for the robbery deducted from the amount he was forced to repay.

The director of the public prosecution's dispossession division, Gerard Sta, said it is possible for criminals to have the cost incurred in committing a crime deducted from their sentences, newspaper De Telegraaf
reported on Monday.

[ . . . . ]

Sta said the costs must have a direct relationship to the criminal offence, and be costs that a criminal otherwise would not have incurred. "A second condition is that the criminal offence must be carried out," Sta said.

He said the law stipulates that the financial situation of the bank robber after the sentence is imposed must be the same as what it was prior to the crime. "It sounds a little bit strange, but that is the law," he said.

Another example would be the costs a criminal incurs in a cannabis plantation. If the plantation is seized by police, the criminal can identify to authorities what costs were incurred in setting up the crop and gain compensation.

Ironically, Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot announced on Monday that he would work this year to counter the image of the Dutch as "whore-mongering, coke-snorting child murderers" — a description uttered by a commentator on Fox News recently.

I think that the Dutch are a little confused about who is supposed to be made whole from the criminal transaction - hint: it's not the criminal. The victim shouldn't be forced to pay for the gun that was used in the robbery that victimized them.

Please leave your clever quips in comments.