Belgian car salesman becomes prince after DNA test proves royal parentage (cnn.com)

85 pointsby MilnerRoute5 hours ago66 comments

acheron 4 hours ago

Oh, I saw this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ralph

thomasfl 3 hours ago

The Fresh Prince of Bel...gium.

ninjagoo 4 hours ago

So 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 4 hours ago

Like the good nepotistic society we are

zdragnar 4 hours ago

I'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 4 hours ago

All 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 4 hours ago

Or Plato's Republic, if one prefers older books.

waterheater 2 hours ago

You 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

tbrownaw 3 hours 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 an hour ago

Expert nobody is spending anything on the new prince?

jackb4040 3 hours ago

Aristocracies 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 3 hours ago

So what's stopping the Belgian people from grabbing torches and pitchforks, marching to the castle, and demanding that this injustice be immediately reconciled?

hyperman1 an hour ago

The 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.

skrebbel 4 hours ago

Wealth gain? How?

Retric 3 hours ago

Inheritance, or more quickly the ability to borrow against that inheritance.

bell-cot 4 hours ago

Are 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 4 hours ago

100% inheritance tax would be ideal, but it's never going to happen in practice.

afh1 4 hours ago

Remove the greatest incentive for long term investment, what could go wrong?

omgwtfbyobbq 3 hours ago

Depending 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 3 hours ago

"you can't just abolish nepotism, that's tantamount to abolishing capitalism!"

yes

98532468997522 26 minutes ago

"People bequeathing their own property is literally nepotism" - Tankies and their idols Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong Un

analog31 an hour ago

What are some of our greatest long term investments? I can think of a few: The national parks, university system, Federal Reserve, NIH...

artisinal 2 hours ago

My father has a wonderful collection of model trains. It’s rather valuable in money. I have been playing with his trains since I was a young boy. Good memories.

Are you telling me that if I can’t afford to pay the state the full value of that train set, the trains will go to a government auction?

Rumple22Stilk 44 minutes ago

Yes? Why would you deserve free money?

98532468997522 31 minutes ago

You should be expropriated. Why would you deserve property?

bombcar 24 minutes ago

So if his father gives him the trains before death, it's fine, but at or after is not? Fun times ahead!

Also the value of model trains and the selling price are highly different numbers.

AnimalMuppet 11 minutes ago

Turn that around, though: Why would the state deserve 100% of my stuff, just because I died? Why can't I dispose of it as I see fit?

tecleandor 3 hours ago

He 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 27 minutes ago

I mean that's a straight loss of 7 characters, 8 letters if you count it that way. Bad deal!

vl 3 hours 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 3 hours ago

he can now borrow against that inheritance

jstanley 3 hours ago

You know or you merely speculate?

tyromaniac 3 hours ago

The 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 3 hours ago

I 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 3 hours ago

Sounds like the definition of monarchy?

zuzululu 3 hours ago

If 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 3 hours ago

Yeah, people leave their things to their children. It's been happening for quite some time now. You should look into it.

afpx 2 hours ago

Wait, you mean there's a place in the world where people with merit, effort, and capability thrive?

fragmede 12 minutes ago

Yes. 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.

geremiiah an hour ago

His ancestors murdered and stole a whole lot for him to gain that priviledge.

dgellow 43 minutes ago

That’s what royalty is

mrtksn 23 minutes ago

Sounds like any rich kid ever TBH.

ck2 15 minutes ago

could 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)

grubbs 4 hours ago

Damn! All those Hallmark movies just became documentaries!

hmokiguess 4 hours ago

So 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 4 hours ago

But 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 3 hours ago

Or the plot to The Princess Diaries. Like, every adolescent in a certain era experienced that.

artisinal an hour ago

Prince Laurent is likely very happy that his son is a completely normal guy. Illegitimate children of royalty typically end up a bit eccentric.

xz18r 4 hours ago

I'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.

NDlurker 4 hours ago

Saxe-Coburg? Are these guys cousins to the British royal family? Time to do some googling

kabes 3 hours ago

Aren't all EU royalty related somehow?

mschild 3 hours ago

Somewhat

https://royalconstellations.visualcinnamon.com/

hyperman1 an hour ago

It'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.

johnbarron 4 hours ago

I love Hereditary Dentists....

shevy-java 3 hours ago

Finally those emails from Nigeria were right after all!

throw21x 3 hours ago

weird people are still treating some like kings/gods in this day and age

AnimalMuppet 13 minutes ago

Well, you know, some actually are kings in this day and age.

stephbook 4 hours 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.

TacticalCoder 2 hours ago

As 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 2 hours ago

It'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

hrdwdmrbl 4 hours ago

I'm king of the world. DM me if you want a title.

johnbarron 4 hours ago

I am also Sovereign. Will do it for half the price this one is asking for.

hmokiguess 4 hours ago

which world though

dgellow 41 minutes ago

Sent you a DM