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Belgian car salesman becomes prince after DNA test proves royal parentage
- ninjagoo 1mo agoSo no merit, effort or capability-based gains; instead a straight title, prestige, wealth and inheritance gain through DNA, over which no offspring has any control.
- michaeljx 1mo agoLike the good nepotistic society we are
- zdragnar 1mo agoI'm struggling to understand what the desirable alternative is here. Children shouldn't be recognized by their patients? Or only lower class parents should have the burden of sharing their income with their children?
- madaxe_again 1mo agoAll children should be gestated in womb-bladders in state hatcheries, and raised to maturity by the state. Knowing or wanting to know your parents should be considered a deviancy, a perversion. Oh wait that’s Brave New World. Or The Naked Sun, depending on your preferred flavour of SF nightmare.
- alberto-m 1mo agoOr Plato's Republic, if one prefers older books.
- waterheater 1mo agoYou might find interesting an old comment of mine speculating about legal rights of a human being born by an artificial womb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314083
- tbrownaw 1mo ago> what the desirable alternative is here Limits on how much parents can spend other people's resources on their kids. Which goes with civil office being a job rather than a special privilege.
- cromka 1mo agoExpert nobody is spending anything on the new prince?
- Plont 1mo agoHe gets inheritance rights, so he'll inherit money from the royal estate (built up through his ancestors' royal allowances, or through any other means the throne has used to accumulate wealth), even though he doesn't get a royal allowance. However, if he didn't inherit, then his share of that money would have gone to any siblings/other relatives instead, anyway. The royal family as a whole doesn't appear to gain or lose any wealth. Unless, I guess it's possible it could affect inheritance taxes one way or the other, if the state takes inheritance taxes? It sounds like the inheritance is following the agreed terms of a transition away from monarchy. I don't know anything about the specific situation, but in general, I'd think that maybe a generous but peaceful separation agreement with the royal estate might work out to be cheaper (in multiple ways) for the state and the people than a harsher takeover/repossession of royal wealth would be. It really depends on the political situation.
- jackb4040 1mo agoAristocracies should not exist anywhere on earth in 2026, except in ceremonial form. Their ill-gotten gains should be expropriated into the hands of the state. It's dishonest of you to argue that they should be treated like normal citizens while they cling desperately to their distinct and superior position. If they want to be treated as normal people all they have to do is renounce their titles.
- waterheater 1mo agoSo what's stopping the Belgian people from grabbing torches and pitchforks, marching to the castle, and demanding that this injustice be immediately reconciled?
- hyperman1 1mo agoThe king is already mostly ceremonial. He seems mainly a stabilization factor for the country when both halves get a bout of separatism once more: He is the ultimate person every major politician talks to when nobody wants to talk to each other. The king does have some extra rights, but not too much, and the alternative seems worse. King Albert 2 didn't want to become king but nobody else with enough capability was available. So it's not just a fun job. But yes, the discussion to king or not pops up once in a while, and the general response seems to be we got much bigger problems.
- senderista 1mo agoEuropean constitutional monarchies seem much less autocratic than the current US presidency, so I don't see what the big deal is.
- Gud 1mo agoThose are not our only alternatives.
- jackb4040 1mo agoOrganized companies of men with guns, drones, tear gas, and access to the browser history of every person in the country
- Fnoord 1mo agoThere was only one Prince. One does not become Prince.
- taskforcegemini 1mo agothen he always was prince, just nobody knew?
- skrebbel 1mo agoWealth gain? How?
- bell-cot 1mo agoAre you advocating for all children being anonymized and raised in orphanages? Or a 100% inheritance tax? Or just expressing disappointment at your own relative lack of wealthy & famous recent ancestors?
- short_sells_poo 1mo ago100% inheritance tax would be ideal, but it's never going to happen in practice.
- afh1 1mo agoRemove the greatest incentive for long term investment, what could go wrong?
- omgwtfbyobbq 1mo agoDepending on what motivations are, separate controlling interest from personal wealth, at least above some reasonable limit. Obviously easier said than done, but unless the predominant incentive for everyone is just to generate more wealth for themselves/relatives/etc, other existing incentives should be sufficient to invest.
- jackb4040 1mo ago"you can't just abolish nepotism, that's tantamount to abolishing capitalism!" yes
- 98532468997522 1mo ago"People bequeathing their own property is literally nepotism" - Tankies and their idols Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong Un
- jackb4040 1mo agoRNG green username has -1 total karma as I post this
- tecleandor 1mo agoHe got equal inheritance rights as every person gets from his parents. In this case I see it as "You had a kid, you better take charge of that." Also: > But he will not receive a royal allowance, nor will he be expected to take on official duties, and he has no rights to the Belgian throne. Vandenkerckhove could take his father’s family name, Saxe-Coburg, but has indicated he may not choose to.
- bombcar 1mo agoI mean that's a straight loss of 7 characters, 8 letters if you count it that way. Bad deal!
- vl 1mo ago” But he will not receive a royal allowance, nor will he be expected to take on official duties, and he has no rights to the Belgian throne.” So it seems nothing will change for him.
- m3kw9 1mo agohe can now borrow against that inheritance
- jstanley 1mo agoYou know or you merely speculate?
- tyromaniac 1mo agoThe article states he's due for a share of the inheritance, as to if he could get a prodigal son style advance I dont know
- guax 1mo agoI got curious about this but it seems that this is also the case for all his siblings. His bio dad gets it (EUR 300k/y) because of a transitional compromise but the future princes aside from the presumptive heir to the throne will not get it. Not that they might be any close to being destitute given the estate size. As for him, I suppose you can sue for backpay child support.
- terabytest 1mo agoSounds like the definition of monarchy?
- zuzululu 1mo agoIf you view this life as a simulation and that this is the only possible one you will inhibit, it all looks absurd for the very thing you mentioned, the snapshot of it alone suggests chaos stochastic properties with seemingly no order but this isn't your fault as much of Western perspective has judeo-christian roots reject the Eastern philosophy that have preceded it for several milllenias thus I'd argue would be more grounded and accurate seeing that geographically isolated and separated cultures who have never come into contact with other have discovered the same conclusions. The new wave movement in the West frame it as a simulation hypothesis perspective, your DNA is the passport through many simulations you've experienced and it carries the merit, effort and capabilities gained over time. We just call it Buddhism outside san francisco.
- green_wheel 1mo agoYeah, people leave their things to their children. It's been happening for quite some time now. You should look into it.
- afpx 1mo agoWait, you mean there's a place in the world where people with merit, effort, and capability thrive?
- fragmede 1mo agoYes. unfortunately rich people without merit effort and capability are still rich and some of them don't work very hard, so it looks pretty much the same as every other place in the world.
- raincom 1mo agoMoney can mask merit, effort, and capability. However, merit/effort/capabilities alone don't get one to the super elite class.
- geremiiah 1mo agoHis ancestors murdered and stole a whole lot for him to gain that priviledge.
- RhysU 1mo agoWasn't Leopold's line voluntarily offered the throne? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_I_of_Belgium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_I_of_Belgium
- isolay 1mo agoLeopold II had millions and millions murdered in the Congo to make himself rich with rubber, but he wasted it all and in the end the Belgian people had to bail him out. No fortune to get from him.
- dgellow 1mo agoThat’s what royalty is
- mrtksn 1mo agoSounds like any rich kid ever TBH.
- ck2 1mo agocould be worse, there are people all over the world that look startling a lot like Musk including in Africa but he won't do DNA tests (not making this up, google it)
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoThis is reality, meritocracy is the exception, not the rule.
- jrflowers 1mo agoI like this complaint about a guy not using his merit, effort, or capability and taking the shortcut of inheritance to become a… prince
- xz18r 1mo agoI'm Belgian, this has been public knowledge since the guy was born. At least it was dealt with a lot more amicably than the other case (Delphine Boël being the child of King (then Prince) Albert II), which was decades of bad lying and denial.
- hrdwdmrbl 1mo agoI'm king of the world. DM me if you want a title.
- johnbarron 1mo agoI am also Sovereign. Will do it for half the price this one is asking for.
- hmokiguess 1mo agowhich world though
- ptdorf 1mo agoHis mom's basement.
- dgellow 1mo agoSent you a DM
- acheron 1mo agoOh, I saw this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ralph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ralph
- johnbarron 1mo agoI love Hereditary Dentists....
- stephbook 1mo ago> “If I were to sacrifice [my] family name, it would be a betrayal of everything my mother has done for me.” Only a man could entertain this thought.
- pezezin 1mo agoI don't understand what you mean, but then again, I am Spanish and we carry both family names, and nobody changes their family name upon marriage. Anything less than that seems backwards to me xD
- stephbook 1mo agoIt's obvious that women don't betray their families when they marry and take the husband's name (as was and is custom across much of the Western world.)
- pezezin 1mo agoIt would be considered a betrayal in my culture, and as far as I know Spanish-speaking countries represent a sizable chunk of the Western hemisphere ;) Case in point, my GF is Japanese and I told her in very clear terms that I would NOT marry her if she ever thinks about taking my family name. Although I also heard that marriage numbers are going down significantly in Japan because young women don't want to change their name and the stubborn government refuses to change the law, which is funny because they copied it from the Americans; Chinese and Korean women don't change their names because doing so would be a dishonor to their ancestors...
- grubbs 1mo agoDamn! All those Hallmark movies just became documentaries!
- hmokiguess 1mo agoSo he knew when he turned 16 but only got recognized 10 years later. I hope when he was a teenager he got into some friendly brawl and said "Shut up my Dad is the King." and got laughed on and now the other person is seeing the news.
- layman51 1mo agoBut it’s funny because this is a common childhood fantasy. Like maybe as a five year old, you get into a conflict with your parents and you imagine that your dad is actually not really your dad, but is actually some other outstanding member of the community. There was a similar plot point in the Joker (2019) movie too.
- trollbridge 1mo agoOr the plot to The Princess Diaries. Like, every adolescent in a certain era experienced that.
- TRiG_Ireland 1mo agoHis dad is the king's brother, isn't he?
- NDlurker 1mo agoSaxe-Coburg? Are these guys cousins to the British royal family? Time to do some googling
- kabes 1mo agoAren't all EU royalty related somehow?
- mschild 1mo agoSomewhat https://royalconstellations.visualcinnamon.com/ https://royalconstellations.visualcinnamon.com/
- hyperman1 1mo agoIt's German, not British. When Belgium was founded, the fear was it would immediately try to join France. So when a French noble was offered the throne, he actually said no, quite a blemish for the young nation. A surplus German noble was crowned, which was palatable to the English as it balanced things out a bit.
- NDlurker 1mo ago"The British branch was officially renamed to House of Windsor by British king George V in 1917, during the First World War, amid anti-German sentiment." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saxe-Coburg_and_Gotha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saxe-Coburg_and_Gotha
- hyperman1 1mo agoCool. Didn't know that. Maybe, after all the intermarriaging of royal lines, we should just call them european royal houses.
- throw21x 1mo agoweird people are still treating some like kings/gods in this day and age
- AnimalMuppet 1mo agoWell, you know, some actually are kings in this day and age.
- thomasfl 1mo agoThe Fresh Prince of Bel...gium.
- dpflan 1mo agoBel-heir ?
- shevy-java 1mo agoFinally those emails from Nigeria were right after all!
- TacticalCoder 1mo agoAs TFA pointed out, it's not the first time in the belgian royal family (which has no power btw and they're not anywhere near as rich as, say, the royal british family). A few years ago it was revealed that Delphine Boel was the daughter of the then belgian king. And contrarily to his son, prince Laurent, who's been classy and accepted immediately the DNA test, the king refused and went to court but lost his case and had to submit to a DNA test. He later on abdicated IIRC. It's interesting to think of the number of kids from kings and princes that, through the ages, never got recognized because DNA tests didn't exist and they could just deny it, even if the offspring was a near identical copy (in the case of the son of prince Laurent: he looks just like his father). But yup in Belgium we've got a monarchy and king/queen/princes/princesses (princes and princesses either from the royal family or not), counts/countesses, dukes, many barons, a lot of knights and some esquires (I think we have esquires). And even more "Madame/Monsieur": people from the nobility but without any title. The title appears on the identity card but that's basically it: it's more of an historical thing than anything else really. Several of my friends hold such titles: it is not uncommon and it brings you exactly jack fucking shit advantage in life (unless you're really from the royal family).
- dlcarrier 1mo agoIt's not just Belgium, Practically every major monarchy has had some kind of controversy that could have easily been resolved through DNA testing, if it existed at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretender
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- artisinal 1mo agoPrince Laurent is likely very happy that his son is a completely normal guy. Illegitimate children of royalty typically end up a bit eccentric.
- jdeibele 1mo agoWas reading that many European countries have "forced heirship" which means that varying amounts - 50% to 75% is typical - have to be left to spouse/children. I was representative in the US for my aunt and she and her husband specifically disinherited his two daughters from his first marriage. It was interesting that this was simply not allowed in other countries. Anyway, time to take his dad mountain climbing, caving, scuba diving, ... https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5d80ec56-4c29-4db5-8a8f-f3150031ea3d https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5d80ec56-4c29...
- octaane 1mo ago> Four years after that, he contacted his father to share what he’d been told and Prince Laurent agreed to a DNA test. “We went to the hospital together and I remember him saying, ‘I’ll go first so you’re feeling at ease,’” Vandenkerckhove told VTM. Good on the dad for not trying to weasel out on this and stepping up.
- tsoukase 1mo agoThe closest I know, a friend unexpectedly inherited a house from a distant relative.