AGAINST PRIVILEGE

The Illiberal Trades — Professional Castes and Their Treason

Published · 2026

Privilege is a cancer. Whoever benefits from it, it corrupts — the beneficiary, the system, and the society that tolerates it.

Privilege is never accidental. It is instituted through law, enforced through coercion, protected by status, and moralised by those who claim to know better. It does not arise spontaneously. It is constructed — deliberately, incrementally, and always at someone else's expense.

The modern Belgian state is not ruled by politicians alone. It is ruled by professional castes who have captured regulation, neutralised competition, and transformed liberty into a licensed activity.

Free markets dissolve coercion because they restore exit, choice, and competition. In a free society, merit, effort, luck, and entrepreneurship determine outcomes — not status, inheritance, or regulatory protection.

The liberal movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were carried by a social class: the bourgeoisie. From it emerged journalists, teachers, lawyers, judges, doctors, bankers — professions that once, in some cases, defended individual liberty against arbitrary power, against the guild and the royal concession.

They no longer do.

They call themselves vrije beroepen — professions libérales. They are neither free nor liberal. They are the greedy inheritors of Antigoon — extracting tribute, blocking passage, and calling it order.

From Liberal Vanguard to Regulatory Oligarchy

The bourgeois professions did not lose power. They changed sides.

They are now the infrastructure of coercion — trading independence for legal monopolies, guaranteed incomes, career insulation, pension privileges, and moral authority without accountability.

They weaponised information asymmetry: sometimes inherent to their trade, more often artificially manufactured through regulatory inflation. Regulation became a moat. The citizen became a captive. Their business model rests on creating complexity, monopolising interpretation, and selling expertise conjured into existence by their own lobbying.

This is not drift. Following the logic Antonio Gramsci described — and would have recognised with satisfaction — these professions ceased to act as counter-powers and became organic intellectuals of the state: shaping consent, normalising coercion, delegitimising dissent.

The following analysis is necessarily succinct. A full account would require dedicated volumes. The depth to which Belgian society — and Western society more broadly — is held hostage by these arrangements is not a subject for a single article. But urgency presses, and what follows is what too seldom gets said.

Worst comes first.

Journalists — The Licensed Voice of Power

Journalism ought to be independent — a counter-power. Neutral if not objective; objective if not neutral. It ought to punish lies, reveal collusion, denounce corruption, and invigorate debate according to the universal values of Western society.

The digital revolution made traditional media financially unviable. Rather than allowing the market to reshape the press, the state stepped in — and took control. Licensing fees were abolished; direct tax funding replaced them. The result was not rescue but capture.

Partisanship in journalism is not new — among others, Jean-François Revel documented it decades ago. But today, prostituting one's voice for institutional subsidy is the full-time occupation of Belgian public and private media alike.

Belgian journalism is structurally dependent:

• Public broadcasters function as state employment pools.
• Private media depend on institutional advertising and subsidies.
• Broadcasting is subject to licensing and political oversight.
• “Disinformation” and “hate speech” laws criminalise dissent.
• Fact-checking bodies act as ideological police.
• The cordon sanitaire is enforced with ritual obedience.

Journalists do not investigate power. They discipline the population.

From Handwerpen, we call for:

• The immediate closure of all public media.
• The termination of all subsidies to media and ideologically oriented organisations.
• The abolition of hate speech and honour-related legislation.
• The closure of all media regulatory bodies.
• The elimination of institutional advertising.
• The liberalisation of radio and television licensing and spectrum frequencies.
• The denunciation of the cordon sanitaire.
• The termination of postal tariff privileges for newspapers.
• The termination of fiscal privileges (VAT exemptions) for newspapers.

Teachers — Indoctrination with Tenure

The democratic premise that public education produces virtuous citizens is not merely optimistic — it is false. And even were it true, it would not justify compulsion. What constitutes virtue is precisely what free societies cannot agree upon — nor should they. Socialism, conservatism, Islam, Catholicism, liberalism: each claims the enlightened child. The state has no business choosing among them with your money.

Schools have always carried ideological freight. What is new is the weight and the direction. Today Belgian schools are transmission belts for radical feminism, ecological catastrophism, neo-Keynesian economics, and the broader apparatus of progressive conformism. Critical thinking is announced and avoided. Socrates is nowhere to be found. In his place: the tenured functionary, exchanging intellectual independence for irremovability.

The bargain is explicit:

• Lifetime employment protection in exchange for compliance.
• Privileged pension regimes funded by the taxpayer.
• Mandatory schooling as a guaranteed captive audience.
• Recurring strikes imposing collective punishment on families.

Education no longer transmits knowledge. It transmits approved moral narratives.

From Handwerpen, we call for:

• The privatisation of the current public education system.
• The termination of public employment status and statutory privileges for teachers, who should be transferred to private sector employment conditions.
• The abolition of government-dictated study plans, syllabuses, and accreditations, to be replaced by market-driven certification defined on a voluntary basis.
• The reinstatement of full parental authority over children's educational paths, including the right to determine the appropriate form and extent of their education.
• The elimination of all barriers to establishing educational institutions at primary, secondary, technical, and university levels.

Lawmakers, Lawyers, Judges — Parasites of Legal Inflation

The rule of law is not a technicality. It is the architecture of liberty: natural rights recognised, power divided, the individual protected from arbitrary authority. Legal professionals — legislators, judges, lawyers — were its designated guardians. They understood, or were meant to, that form and substance are inseparable: a constitution violated by procedure is still violated.

They no longer guard anything. They administer the labyrinth they built.

The Belgian legal order has been systematically hollowed out. The 1831 Constitution — one of the most liberal documents of its age — has been amended beyond recognition, its liberal substance diluted through successive reforms driven by communitarian bargaining and social democratic expansion. Natural rights to property, speech, and linguistic freedom are routinely overridden. Victimless acts are criminalised. Retroactive legislation is applied. The executive legislates by decree while parliament rubber-stamps. The Senate, once a constitutional brake, was castrated by the sixth state reform.

Where is the Conseil d'État when fundamental rights are legislated away? What does the Cour des comptes achieve when its reports are systematically ignored? What remains of the separation of powers when the same consulting firms draft the laws they later invoice clients to navigate?

Belgian lawyers design the maze. Then they charge for the exit.

Institutional betrayal:

• Constitutional revisions have progressively emptied the 1831 text of its liberal content.
• Natural rights — property, speech, linguistic — are pervasively and routinely violated.
• Laws are drafted by executive-commissioned experts who subsequently profit from their complexity.
• Parliamentary debate is procedural theatre.
• The judiciary interprets law in ways that systematically expand state competence.

Private exploitation:

• Legislative hyperinflation makes self-representation practically impossible.
• Procedures are lengthened by design through regulatory accumulation.
• Private contractual freedom is superseded by mandatory statutory regimes.
• Access to justice is rationed by cost, creating a two-tier system.

From Handwerpen, we call for:

• Reform of the legal system to repeal all laws restricting natural rights, including property rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of association, or that prevent exit and choice by the citizen.
• The strict separation of judicial power from legislative and executive power at all levels.
• The elimination of administrative quasi-judicial bodies such as UNIA.
• The reform of criminal law to eliminate victimless offence legislation.
• The strict constitutional observance of non-retroactivity in legislation.
• The reassertion of national sovereignty over directly applicable EU regulations where they conflict with fundamental rights.
• The prevalence of private contracts over positive law wherever no third-party harm is at stake.
• The promotion of arbitration courts as the preferred mechanism for civil dispute resolution.
• The abolition of the notarial monopoly on property transfers, corporate acts, and inheritance, replaced by free competition among qualified legal practitioners.

Medical Doctors — Cartel Lords of Care

Medicine involves genuine asymmetry between physician and patient. Knowledge differentials are real; some barrier to entry is legitimate. The cartel, however, is not a consequence of complexity — it is a construction built upon it. Belgian medical professionals have elevated entry restriction, pricing control, and prescription monopoly into a self-perpetuating system of rent extraction that would make any medieval guild blush.

Every patient oscillates between legitimate gratitude and Stockholm syndrome. The doctor saves you — and holds the keys to everything you need next. That dependency is not accidental. It is architecturally enforced.

The state is the cartel's capo. The pharmaceutical industry its silent beneficiary.

Structural cartelisation:

• The numerus clausus restricts the supply of doctors, functioning as explicit state-enforced price cartelisation.
• Licensing barriers block foreign-qualified doctors from competing and reducing fees.
• The prescription monopoly enforces dependency and generates captive, recurrent revenue.
• Dual pricing — conventioned and non-conventioned practitioners — distorts the market by state design.
• Corporatist self-regulation produces effective immunity from malpractice accountability.
• Collusion with insurers via arbitrary hospitalisation supplements extracts additional rents.
• Doctors have become gatekeepers of social fraud, administering sick leave in connivance with unions.

The Unspoken Scandal: Drug Prohibition

Whatever the gravity of the above, there is an elephant in the room that dwarfs it.

The illegalisation of drugs is among the gravest policy failures of our time — and the medical profession is among its principal architects and beneficiaries. The war on drugs is lost. It has always been lost. It will always be lost. Narco-states and criminal cartels are winning, and will continue to do so until legalisation and free markets dethrone them — as markets once dethroned every previous prohibition.

The direct consequences of illegalisation are measurable and catastrophic:

• Corruption of political, judicial, and law enforcement institutions.
• Dilapidation of vast quantities of taxpayer money in prosecution and incarceration.
• Criminalisation of users, surrendering them to criminal organisations.
• Black markets selling adulterated product — the primary cause of overdose deaths.
• Prices multiples above what a legal market would sustain, socially condemning users.
• A culture of irresponsibility on both sides of the user/non-user divide — prohibition abolishes personal accountability.

Medical doctors are not the sole architects of prohibition. But they are among its most consequential advocates, deploying moral authority in defence of a system that protects their prescription monopoly and substitution treatment revenues.

The war on drugs does not protect health. It protects professional monopolies, criminal organisations, and the corrupted state.

From Handwerpen, we call for:

• The full legalisation of drug production, commercialisation, and consumption.
• The termination of prescription privilege for pharmaceutical products accessible without clinical risk.
• The dismantling of the INAMI licensing and reimbursement system and its replacement with competitive private health insurance.
• Full freedom to establish medical practices and educational institutions without state authorisation.
• The termination of cartel pricing enforced through the INAMI convention system.
• The privatisation of the mutualités, to operate as voluntary health insurance funds financed by their members' contributions and in competition with other health insurance operators.
• The promotion of arbitration as the preferred mechanism for medical negligence disputes.

Pharmacists — Legalised Guilds

Belgian pharmacists operate under medieval logic dressed in regulatory language. The state manufactures scarcity on their behalf while the population pays exorbitant prices for goods of paramount importance. The consumer is captive. Pay or suffer. This is privilege in its most naked form — not even disguised as public interest.

The mechanism is elegant in its brutality. Entry is not merely regulated — it is cartographically controlled:

• A statutory ceiling limits the number of pharmacies per inhabitant (approximately one per 2,000).
• Minimum distance requirements between pharmacies eliminate spatial competition.
• Geographic distribution is subject to central planning by administrative decree.

A qualified pharmacist with capital, willing to offer lower prices, is legally prevented from doing so. Not by the market. By the state, acting on behalf of the guild.

The distortion does not stop at entry. The licence itself has been transformed into a tradable asset:

• It is attached to a specific location.
• It is effectively transferable despite formal language to the contrary.
• It carries a market value frequently reaching hundreds of thousands of euros.

The licence has become an inheritance privilege — a private toll booth, legally sanctioned and dynastically transmitted. Corporate ownership is prohibited, foreclosing supermarkets, clinics, and insurers from introducing economies of scale, price competition, or distribution innovation. The consumer pays the difference, on every prescription, for life.

This is not healthcare. It is licensed scarcity.

From Handwerpen, we call for:

• Full freedom to establish pharmacies and to distribute pharmaceutical products through any commercial channel, including supermarkets, online retailers, and clinics.
• The abolition of the statutory ceiling on pharmacy numbers and the minimum distance requirements between establishments.
• The end of the corporate ownership prohibition, opening the sector to competitive operators and economies of scale.
• The end of ID-card-linked prescription systems, which constitute a dangerous mechanism of state surveillance and individual control.

Bankers — Executors of Monetary Expropriation

Banking is not a free market. It never has been in Belgium — nor anywhere the state has installed a central bank, imposed fiat currency, and granted selected institutions the privilege of operating within its monetary perimeter. What presents itself as a regulated industry is in fact a cartel operating under state licence, performing fiscal functions on behalf of the sovereign in exchange for guaranteed margins, socialised losses, and protection from genuine competition.

The mechanism is not conspiracy. It is architecture.

Fiat currency is the foundation. When the state monopolises money — abolishing competing currencies, mandating legal tender, and delegating money creation to a central bank — it removes the discipline that free banking would impose. In a competitive monetary system, banks issuing depreciating currency lose depositors to sounder rivals. Under fiat, no such exit exists. The citizen is captive to the currency as surely as the pharmacy customer is captive to the licensed dispenser.

• Banks benefit from lender-of-last-resort financing — losses are socialised, profits are private.
• Guaranteed deposit insurance removes depositor discipline, eliminating the market mechanism that would punish reckless balance sheets.
• Regulatory compliance costs create barriers to entry that protect incumbents from challengers.
• Banking secrecy has been systematically dismantled — not to protect citizens but to serve fiscal enforcement; banks now function as unpaid tax collectors for the state.
• Capital requirements and reporting obligations are designed by the same institutions that benefit from them — regulatory capture at its most institutionalised.

Bankers are not regulated against their will. They are partners in expropriation — junior partners, occasionally sacrificed, but partners nonetheless.

The citizen pays twice. First through inflation — the silent, continuous theft of purchasing power that fiat money enables and central banks administer. Second through taxation collected at source, withheld automatically, reported without consent, enforced without recourse.

Currency debasement is not a modern aberration. It is the oldest instrument of state predation — from Roman emperors shaving silver coins to the European Central Bank expanding its balance sheet by €5 trillion between 2015 and 2022. The technology changes. The theft does not.

From Handwerpen, we call for:

• The abolition of fiat currency and the establishment of a free banking system with competing currencies and full reserve or contractual reserve banking.
• The end of inflationary monetary policy that debases currency, impoverishes the population, and prevents saving and long-term economic self-reliance.
• The elimination of the central bank and the dissolution of the privileged licensing framework that enables state fiscal deficits and the accumulation of exorbitant public debt.

Tax Advisors & Accountants — Profiteers of Fiscal Madness

The tax advisory profession occupies a unique position in the architecture of Belgian extortion: it sits on both sides of the wall simultaneously, billing the state to build it and billing the citizen to scale it. No other profession has institutionalised conflict of interest with such brazenness, or dressed it so successfully in the language of technical necessity.

The mechanism is self-reinforcing by design. Economists, accountants, and legal specialists are commissioned by government to design tax reforms — the capital gains tax being only the most recent aberration. They provide the conceptual scaffolding, the revenue projections, the technical legitimacy. They return to their firms and bill their private clients for navigating the system they helped construct. The revolving door does not merely exist — it is load-bearing.

Tax complexity is not a bug. It is the business model.

• Endless reforms, exceptions, and corrections ensure permanent obsolescence of prior advice.
• Contradictory rules and administrative circulars create interpretive dependency.
• Advisors involved in drafting legislation are subsequently engaged to apply it.
• Conflict of interest is not incidental — it is institutionalised and unremarked.

Not all participate equally. Some tax advisors excel at finding legal arbitrage within the labyrinth. This is legitimate and, within the current system, necessary. But it does not absolve the profession collectively. Those who design the conceptual frameworks justifying mass fiscal extraction — who provide the intellectual cover for what is straightforwardly an extortion machine — are accomplices regardless of which side of the wall they bill from on any given day.

The accountancy dimension compounds the damage. Belgian and European accountancy bodies have successfully imposed jurisdiction-specific GAAPs — standards marginally different across member states, serving no harmonisation purpose, adding no analytical value, but effectively segmenting professional markets from external competition. Shareholders pay. Economies stagnate. The guild endures.

The last profession to reform is always the one that drafts the reform.

From Handwerpen, we call for:

• The elimination of the progressive tax system and its replacement by a single flat-rate income tax, applied uniformly without exception.
• The abolition of all taxes on capital and savings, including those on pension plans, real property, capital gains, financial transaction taxes, and inheritance.
• The radical reduction of public expenditure and the progressive repayment of public debt through the privatisation of state assets and a structural reduction in state functions.
• The limitation of state disbursements to core functions — defence, policing, and justice — subject to a constitutionally binding expenditure ceiling.
• The constitutional prohibition on running budgetary deficits except in times of formally declared war, subject to strict parliamentary procedure and a defined repayment schedule.
• The elimination of sectoral VAT exemptions for all liberal professions, applying the standard regime uniformly would close the gap.
• The replacement of state-imposed reporting standards (BE GAAP) by voluntary subscription to internationally recognised frameworks (IFRS, US GAAP), open to competitive selection by firms and investors.

The Suicidal Bourgeoisie

The bourgeoisie did not fall. It sold out.

It governs alongside socialism to preserve its niches. Its children become functionaries, activists, and moral entrepreneurs — at best the inheritors of privilege, at worst its ideological enforcers. The class that once carried liberty forward now produces its jailers.

They no longer defend liberty. Their defection delegitimises liberalism and fuels the authoritarian expansion that fills the vacuum.

The individual, meanwhile, faces double extortion: from the masses above, who vote for redistribution, and from the ill-constituted elites below — not elites of merit but of extraction. The two feed each other. The political class harvests both.

That is why seeking liberty requires denouncing the hypocrisy of the so-called liberal professions. Not out of class resentment — resentment is the socialist's instrument. But out of fidelity to the principle they have abandoned: that free individuals, free markets, and free minds produce the only society worth defending.

Brabo's task is not finished. The hand must be thrown again.

Handwerpen.be — For full references and legal sources see the References Annex.