Inside the System
Ten Reforms to Destroy the Narrative
Handwerpen — 2026
Preamble: Inside and Outside the System
Handwerpen exists inside and outside the system.
Outside: we denounce. Tax is theft. The Belgian state is a Leviathan that has outlived every justification for its size, its reach, its cost. The pillarised monarchy — its subsidised press, its captive unions, its clientelist parties, its corrupted elites, its confiscatory fiscal apparatus — is not a liberal democracy in any meaningful sense. It is a tutelary democracy, an oligarchy administered by spurious compromise, maintained by degrading dependency.
Inside: we propose. Because liberation, when it comes, must know what to replace the old regime with. And because even before liberation, our compatriots must be awakened and the system exposed. We need transparency, accountability, individual choice.
This essay is an exercise in the latter. Ten unrefusable proposals. None subverts the social democratic consensus, yet — they merely expose it. None requires new spending. All of them shall, when enacted, shift power — modestly, progressively, irreversibly — from the state back to the individual.
That is enough to make them radical.
The emperor is naked. Someone must say so.
The Arithmetic of Dependency
Let us start with the numbers. A statement of fact.
Belgium has 11.8 million inhabitants.1 Of those, approximately 3.14 million are private sector employees — who bear the bulk of social security contributions — and roughly 0.9 million are self-employed as their main activity. That is 4 million people — 34% of the population — whose economic activity generates the entire tax base that funds everything else.
The remaining 7.8 million are carried by that base. Among them: 2.1 million pensioners;3 approximately 0.95 million public sector workers whose salaries are funded by the same private taxpayer;2 526,507 long-term sick or invalid — a record, double the figure of ten years ago;4 approximately 490,000 registered unemployed;5 and 2.4 million in the next generation — minors and students — who represent the future contributors, if the system leaves them anything to contribute to.
The arithmetic is simple.
— before the state takes its 55% cut of GDP.7 A shrinking productive base finances an expanding dependent one.
These numbers are also a democratic tragedy. No politician has an incentive to touch the pervasive clientelist networks. No demographic group votes against its own privileges. And yet Belgian society, as a whole, is bound towards failure — through the unsustainability of public debt, the deepening of polarisation and demagoguery, the continuation of scapegoat politics.
What these ten proposals ask is this: that the system be transparent, honest, and open to the scrutiny of those who fund it. If social democracy cannot survive that test, the problem is not the test.
The Ten Proposals
Your Social Security Statement — See What You Pay
The proposal: Every euro of social contribution paid on an employee's behalf — by both employee and employer — is reported annually under the employee's name. A personal social security account is created for every worker. Citizens receive a yearly statement showing cumulative contributions allocated to health, unemployment insurance, and pension.
Why it matters: Today, the full cost of the Belgian social state is invisible by design. Employers pay social contributions of 25–35% of gross salary on top of employee contributions — most workers have no idea of the total flowing out under their name. The anaesthetic is intentional. Transparency costs nothing and changes everything. Citizens would, for the first time, understand the size of the wealth they are creating — and the scale of the liability the state is building against them.
Budget impact: Neutral. Administrative only.
Precedent — Sweden
Sweden, a social democracy, has operated individual social security accounts with annual statements since the 1990s — credited with transforming public understanding of pension sustainability and building durable support for necessary reform.
Your Pension: What You Paid vs. What You'll Get — The Hidden Debt
The proposal: Each worker's cumulative pension contributions are calculated and disclosed annually. The projected state pension is published alongside: (a) what the same capital would have returned at the risk-free rate; (b) benchmark alternatives — sovereign bonds, a global equity index. No change to the pay-as-you-go structure; information only.
Why it matters: The Belgian pension promise is a fiction maintained by silence. Workers enrol in a contract they are never shown. The gap between what you paid and what you will receive represents an implicit intergenerational levy that is never disclosed. A debt hidden is a debt unpayable. Were Belgium required to account for future pension liabilities on an accrual basis — as any private institution must — its debt ratios would place it in default.3
Budget impact: Neutral.
Precedent — Sweden's orange envelope · IMF reference
Sweden's "orange envelope" — an annual statement comparing individual contributions against projected pension — has operated since 1999 and is cited by the OECD as the global benchmark for pension transparency.
IMF, The Fiscal Cost of Aging in Belgium: Pensions and Healthcare, December 2023: pension spending identified as the single largest long-term fiscal risk. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/selected-issues-papers/Issues/2023/12/19/The-Fiscal-Cost-of-Aging-in-Belgium
Pay Your Taxes Yourself — The Eye-Opener
The proposal: Withholding tax is abolished; current tax rates maintained in full. Every individual files a declaration and pays their annual liability directly by bank transfer, on a visible date. No rate change; no revenue change; only the mechanism of collection changes.
Why it matters: Belgium's tax wedge on labour reached 52.7% in 2023 — the second-highest in the OECD.6 Most Belgians do not feel this, because they never see it. As Bastiat observed of the art of taxation: pluck the goose with the minimum of hissing. When you never hold the money, you never mourn its loss. Make every Belgian write the cheque once a year. The political conversation will change overnight.
Budget impact: Neutral. Receipts unchanged.
Precedent · OECD tax wedge reference
American self-employed taxpayers pay quarterly estimated taxes directly. Survey evidence consistently shows that direct payers are significantly more aware of their tax burden than salaried employees subject to withholding.
OECD, Taxing Wages 2024: Belgium tax wedge on single average worker at average earnings, 52.7% — second highest in the OECD after Germany.
Open the Books — Every Euro, Every Line
The proposal: All public expenditure — federal, regional, and local — published in a structured, searchable, machine-readable format, updated in real time. A single public portal aggregates data across all levels of government.
Why it matters: Belgian general government expenditure represents approximately 55% of GDP.7 The citizen who funds this has access to budget documents designed to be unread. No comparable private enterprise could operate with such opacity toward its shareholders. The refusal of transparency is not a neutral act. It is the protection of the indefensible.
Budget impact: Neutral to positive.
Precedent — UK, US, France
The United Kingdom (HM Treasury), the United States (USASpending.gov), and France (data.gouv.fr) have all implemented full expenditure transparency at minimal administrative cost. Evidence from comparable countries shows transparency reduces wasteful expenditure by deterrence alone.
The School Voucher — Your Child, Your Choice
The proposal: The per-pupil public expenditure already committed is routed through the parent as a redeemable voucher. Parents choose freely among accredited schools; schools compete for enrolment. Education remains publicly financed; only the allocation mechanism changes.
Why it matters: Belgium spends approximately 6.4% of GDP on education — among the highest in Europe — while PISA scores have declined steadily since 2009. The system is captured by ideological pillars that distribute public funding among themselves with minimal accountability to outcomes. The parent — the person with the most direct interest in the child's success — has no leverage. You fund it. They decide.
Budget impact: Neutral. Same aggregate spend; different allocation mechanism.
Precedent — Sweden, Chile · OECD recommendation
Sweden introduced school vouchers in 1992. Chile has operated a nationwide system for four decades. The OECD has explicitly recommended increasing parental choice in Belgian education, noting that competition effects are most beneficial for children from disadvantaged families with the fewest alternatives.
Privatise the State's Commercial Portfolio — Profits for the Few, Risks for All
The proposal: State-owned enterprises operating in competitive markets are privatised over 3–5 years, maximising returns to the public. Public service obligations contractualised separately, management opened to private competition. Privatisation proceeds applied exclusively to public debt reduction.
Why it matters: Proximus competes directly with Orange Belgium and Telenet. Bpost competes with DHL and DPD. Belfius competes with every retail bank in the country. Their continued public ownership does not protect citizens — it protects political patronage: board appointments, employment guarantees, union preservation, and the quiet management of captive institutional advertising budgets that flow to the subsidised press. Belgian gross public debt stood at 105.2% of GDP in 2023.9 The state has no business running a telecom company.
Budget impact: Strongly positive. Privatisation proceeds retire debt; ongoing subsidy and governance costs eliminated.
Precedent — Portugal, Germany, Netherlands · OECD
The OECD consistently recommends privatisation of commercially viable state enterprises. Portugal, Germany, and the Netherlands have privatised telecoms and postal incumbents without public service deterioration. The argument for continued state ownership is not economic — it is political.
National Bank of Belgium, Public Finances, 2023: gross public debt 105.2% of GDP.
Legalise Soft Drugs — Stop Funding the Cartel
The proposal: Soft drugs are legalised, regulated, and taxed under a licensing framework. Retail is licensed; minimum age enforcement replaces criminal prosecution of users. Tax revenues earmarked for public health information campaigns.
Why it matters: Cannabis consumption is widespread and largely unprosecuted in practice — yet its supply is entirely controlled by criminal networks that pay no taxes, respect no age limits, and export profits to narco-states that destabilise Europe. The Belgian state spends resources it does not have prosecuting a policy that does not work. The war on drugs is lost. The only question is who collects the revenue. As documented in Against the Wig: Feuerbach's Line, the prohibition creates the criminal market, the violence, and the public health emergency — then invokes all three to justify its continuation.
Budget impact: Positive. New tax revenues generated; prosecution and incarceration costs freed.
Precedent — Portugal, Colorado, Washington
Portugal decriminalised all drugs in 2001; drug-related deaths and HIV infections fell sharply. Colorado and Washington legalised cannabis in 2012; tax revenues exceeded projections and criminal market share declined. Transform Drug Policy Foundation, The Alternative World Drug Report, 2016.
Close the State Broadcasters. Dissolve UNIA.
The proposal: RTBF and VRT are dissolved and privatised; their public service mandates put to competitive, time-limited, output-linked tender open to any accredited broadcaster. UNIA is dissolved; its legal enforcement functions transferred to ordinary courts under standard procedural protections. Subsidies to private media dependent on institutional advertising are phased out.
Why it matters: The RTBF receives approximately €367 million per year in public funding — 78% of its total revenue. VRT receives approximately €296 million annually — 60% of its budget.8 Together: €663 million per year to fund broadcasters institutionally embedded in the political consensus they purport merely to report. UNIA, meanwhile, has expanded from anti-discrimination enforcement into ideological policing, without the procedural protections of ordinary justice. A state that funds its own press and its own speech regulator does not have a free press. It has managed information.
Budget impact: Positive. €663 million in annual broadcasting subsidies redeployed or eliminated.
Precedent · OECD 2019 Belgium · funding figures
Australia and New Zealand operate public broadcasting under explicit, reviewable mandates with output accountability. The OECD's 2019 Competition Assessment of Belgium explicitly recommended reviewing media subsidy structures.
RTBF Annual Report 2023: state contribution €366.9 million, representing 78% of total revenue. VRT Management Contract 2022–2026 (Flemish Government): public grant approximately €296.4 million annually, approximately 60% of total budget.
One Nation, One Vote — Liberty Requires Coherence
The proposal: Compulsory voting is abolished; participation becomes voluntary; fines for non-attendance are eliminated. A single national electoral district replaces the current communitarian fragmentation: one Belgium, one vote, one citizen.
Why it matters: A right converted into a duty is a right abolished. Compulsory voting produces a large pool of disengaged voters mobilised by the party machines best equipped to reach them: the unions, the mutualités, the pillarised networks. It rewards organisational infrastructure over argument. The communitarian electoral system compounds the damage — by organising political life around linguistic and regional identity rather than individual citizenship, it has institutionalised the compromise, enthroned the community above the person. A single national electoral district would force every party to speak to every Belgian. That single change, more than any other, would break the clientelist geography that sustains the current oligarchy.
Budget impact: Neutral.
Precedent — Netherlands, Switzerland · OECD
The Netherlands abolished compulsory voting in 1967 and operates a single national electoral district — it remains a functioning, high-engagement democracy. Switzerland has never required compulsory voting. The OECD notes that voluntary systems combined with strong civic education produce more genuinely engaged electorates than legal compulsion.
An Independent Judiciary — The Law Must Govern Those Who Govern
The proposal: Judicial appointments, promotions, and disciplinary procedures are transferred to an independent commission with transparent, published, merit-based criteria. The ministerial power to block or direct prosecutions is abolished by constitutional amendment. The judiciary is subject to transparency requirements: budget, caseload, and performance data published annually.
Why it matters: The 1831 Belgian Constitution explicitly guaranteed separation of powers. In practice, judicial appointments pass through political channels; career advancement reflects party affiliation; the prosecutorial hierarchy retains political exposure at its apex. The Conseil d'État issues opinions routinely ignored. The Cour des comptes publishes reports systematically filed. Social democracy, it turns out, is also against judicial independence — it simply prefers not to say so. Let them frame themselves.
Budget impact: Neutral.
Precedent — Netherlands, Denmark, UK · Venice Commission
The Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom all operate judicial appointments through independent commissions with transparent merit criteria. The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe has recommended precisely these reforms for Belgium on multiple occasions.10 https://www.venice.coe.int
To Our Compatriots
This essay is addressed to you.
To the worker who was never sick a day beyond their due. Who never cheated the system, never claimed what they had not earned, never took what was not theirs. Who carried their weight and asked only that others carry theirs.
To those whose payslip bears little resemblance to the wealth they created. Who look at the number at the bottom and think: where did the rest go? Those who see their life projects maimed, their ability to support their children and parents stolen away.
To those who took responsibility for their lives. Who studied without expecting entitlement, worked without expecting sinecure, built without expecting applause. Who pursued independence as a form of dignity. These are the invisible foundation of a system that despoiled them.
To the entrepreneur who created employment, took on risk, generated the jobs. Who was taxed on success, impeded in initiative, and blamed for achievement.
To the pensioner who worked for years, contributed in good faith to a pension system the state turned into a Ponzi scheme, and now watches their purchasing power eroded by state-manufactured inflation.
To the parent who wants more for their child than the school assigned to them by postcode and ideology.
To those who still believe in personal law, in liberty, in the possibility of a Belgium that keeps its word.
You are not asking for revolution. You are asking for honesty. These ten proposals are yours — not as a gift. As a right.
And to the rest — we also speak to you. Withholding contempt. With sincere concern.
To those who retired before earning their full due, ignoring who would bear the cost. To those who found, conveniently, a condition — real or not — that excused them from their peers' work. Those who found comfort in the system's generosity and never asked where it came from. To those who captured institutions, professionalised their privileges, and called it service.
We ask not for shame. We ask for honesty.
Because the deficit you benefit from today will be paid by someone — not by a government, not by a system, but by a person. Your sons, nephews, granddaughters. Those who will inherit a debt they never voted for, a pension system that will only oblige and never pay out, a state that consumed its future to preserve your present.
This is cruelty. The cruelty is for those who don't have a choice.
The tax that funds your idleness destroys the opportunity of someone else. The sinecure you occupy blocks the merit of someone better. The system you protect, with ineluctable inertia, will collapse — and the collapse will not discriminate.
And when it does, it will not spare the people you love.
There is no solidarity in violence.
There is no patriotism in coercion.
There is no humanism in dependence.
We hope you love your children too.
Belgium is not a poor country. It is a badly governed one. The question is not whether we can afford reform. It is whether those who profit from the status quo will allow it.
To each their due.
The Challenge
None of these ten proposals subverts the social democratic consensus — yet. None eliminates a single privilege by force. They do not require a parliamentary majority committed to liberal principles — only one willing to accept, on each item, the weight of the argument.
Each has been implemented in full or in part by comparable democracies. Each has been recommended — some explicitly for Belgium — by the OECD, the IMF, the European Commission, the Venice Commission, or independent Belgian institutions.
Citizens who can read their social security account will eventually ask whether the return justifies the contribution. Citizens who pay their taxes directly will eventually ask whether the rate is just. Citizens whose children hold vouchers will eventually ask why the state should direct education at all.
These proposals have not been enacted. Not because they are impossible. Because they are inconvenient — for the journalists whose broadcasters are funded by the state, the teachers whose tenure is insulated from results, the lawyers whose complexity is billed by the hour, the doctors whose cartel is maintained by the numerus clausus, the party officials whose board appointments depend on opacity.
Those who refuse these proposals must explain, in public, why citizens should not see their social security accounts. Why parents should not choose their children's schools. Why the books should remain closed.
Refusal is confession.
To every Belgian who funded this system in good faith — who paid their contributions, respected the rules, and asked only that the contract be honoured — you deserve these ten things at minimum. Not as a gift. As a right.
The revolution, when it comes, begins here. With the books open. With the accounts visible. With the hand of Antigoon — finally — in the light.
→ Against the Wig: Feuerbach's Line — the legal foundation
→ The Road to Belgium — surveillance, the ratchet, and the indictment
→ Against Privilege — on the legal class
→ For full legal references and source data, see the References Annex.
1 Statbel, Structure de la population, January 2024: 11,822,000 inhabitants. https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/population/structure-population
2 OECD, Government at a Glance 2023: public employment as share of total employment in Belgium, 18.4% (2021). https://www.oecd.org/government-at-a-glance-2023
3 Federal Pension Service Belgium: approximately 2.1 million pension recipients. IMF, The Fiscal Cost of Aging in Belgium, December 2023.
4 INAMI, Statistiques sur l'invalidité, 2023: 526,507 long-term sick and invalid workers at end-2023; cost exceeds €9 billion annually. https://www.inami.fgov.be
5 ONEM, monthly federal unemployment statistics 2023: approximately 300,000 fully compensated job-seeking unemployed per month. OECD registered unemployment Belgium 2023: approximately 489,000. https://www.onem.be
6 OECD, Taxing Wages 2024: Belgium tax wedge 52.7% — second highest in the OECD after Germany.
7 Eurostat, Government Finance Statistics 2023: Belgian general government expenditure approximately 55.1% of GDP.
8 RTBF Annual Report 2023: state contribution €366.9 million (78% of revenue). VRT Management Contract 2022–2026: public grant approximately €296.4 million (60% of budget).
9 National Bank of Belgium, Public Finances, 2023: gross public debt 105.2% of GDP.
10 Venice Commission, Council of Europe: multiple opinions on Belgian judicial independence. https://www.venice.coe.int