The World Economic Forum conference venue in Davos is
secured with barriers and barbed wire on a slope. What are they so afraid of?
"Revenge of the Outsiders"
Milei rips WEF, Schwab on the back foot and the natives grow restless...
by Bill Bonner
"Do not be intimidated either by the political class or the
parasites who live off of the state. The state is the problem itself."
~ Javier Milei
Baltimore, Maryland - "On Monday, Allianz CEO Oliver Bäte warned the World Economic Forum, gathered in Davos, Switzerland, that the natives were getting restless. If elites weren’t careful, he said, there could be a revolt of the masses. WEF founder, Klaus Schwab sees the mob forming…and identifies its ringleaders: “An anti-system which is called libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives.”
And what’s this? The outsiders are winning key elections. Donald Trump won the Iowa Republican primary contest – by a strong margin. Geert Wilders won in the Netherlands. And in perhaps the most exciting and impressive turnaround yet, Javier Milei took over the jefe role in Argentina. Here’s The Guardian: "From Helsinki to Rome and Berlin to Brussels, far-right parties are climbing steadily up the polls, shaping the policies of the mainstream right to reflect their nativist and populist platforms, and occupying select ministerial roles in coalition governments. It remains to be seen whether any of these ‘populists,’ ‘authoritarians’ or ‘right wing nut cases’…depending on your point of view …can actually steer the ship of state away from the rocks."
Dazzling and Spellbinding: Some, such as Donald Trump, seem to have no stars to guide them. For four years, he was in the control room at the White House, floating like a drunken boat, getting nowhere. His mixture of bluff, bluster and BS…resulted only in more of the same – debt, decree and dysfunction.
But Milei is another matter. He is like what Ronald Reagan might have been if he had had time to read Hayek and Bastiat, study classical economics, philosophy and history…and if the CIA hadn’t misled him, leaving him to believe that the Soviet Union was a great military threat, when in fact, it was a dying empire.
Like it or not, Milei has a coherent theory about the way the world works…and, from our point of view, a much more attractive one. And on Wednesday, he explained it to the assembled hacks, jackasses and deep staters at Davos. Like Daniel walking into the lions’ den, he had a message that was so unexpected …so inhabitual in all public discussion… so at odds with the whole Davos philosophy…it was dazzling and spellbinding: "We’re here to tell you that collectivist solutions are never the answer to the real problems that have afflicted the world. Free market capitalism is not only the only system to relieve poverty it is also the only moral system. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem. Long live freedom, dammit!"
Milei to WEF: F-Off! Milei was challenging the fundamental creed of the Davos group. They are the elite of the elite…captains of industry (there are 800 leading CEOs in attendance), along with heads of state from all over the world. They are movers… shakers…the intellectuals and power brokers who’ve created many of the problems we now face. But whatever the challenge, real or imagined, they are ready to meet it head-on, with more ‘solutions’ that increase their own prestige and power. And there was Milei, yesterday, standing in front of them…and telling them all, essentially, to F-off.
Davos Man aims to control your money, your time, your home, your car…your entire life. And your thoughts. One of his chief worries for 2024 is that the common man might have thoughts he can’t control. A WEF report: “Some governments and platforms... may fail to act to effectively curb falsified information and harmful content, making the definition of ‘truth’ increasingly contentious across societies.”
The WEF has the full and final TRUTH, of course…and urges censorship for the good of the planet…along with the quest for equality…or to help the homeless (unless they are made homeless by a Davos-attending nation!) or make people use the proper pronouns…and now they want us all to live in small, energy efficient apartments, take only one trip a year, eat no meat, and drive an EV. We will “own nothing, but we will be happy.” They want us to vote democratic and read The New York Times. And, oh yes, at every meeting, we should acknowledge an Indian tribe that may or may not have once inhabited the land on which we stand.
Collectivism vs. Voluntarism: Milei spoke directly…and with the authority of someone who has ‘been there, done that’ against ‘collectivism.’ And here, we clarify. ‘Collectivist’ solutions don’t work. But the reason they don’t work is not that they involve collective action. We all work ‘collectively’ – together in one form of another. A company is a collective undertaking. So is a family. And a church. A tribe. A town. All of them involve groups of people working more or less together, following certain rules…with more or less the common goals…guided by free markets that tell us what things are really worth. And even the simplest product, such as a common pencil, takes as many as a million different people – from the one who plants the tree to the one who puts on the paint – with hundreds of different skills, machines, languages, and beliefs.
Man is a social animal. He cannot exist unless two of his species get together. And then, he cannot prosper unless he works with others…to hunt…to reap…to build…to exchange the fruits of one for the services of another. Capitalism is a collectivist undertaking. It requires near-constant exchanges and interchanges between people who are never fully independent of one another.
The difference between capitalism and the kind of collectivism that Milei is talking about is that the former is voluntary; the latter is not. The collectivist elite – many of whose big shots you find at Davos – produce no pencils…and, often, nothing else. We have no choice; we are forced to follow their rules and policies, whether we want to or not. Those policies – always favoring the insiders at the expense of everyone else – ruined Argentina over an 80-year period…and killed some 100 million people, worldwide, in the 20th century.
Capitalism has its elites too. But they are only elite so long as they provide goods and services to everyone else. When they fail, they are quickly sidelined. By contrast, collectivist elites, once they get power, are almost impossible to get rid of. Win-win becomes win-lose. And ‘The People’ get poorer.
We waited for the end of Milei’s speech. How would the elite react? Would they recognize that Milei was telling them that they were wasting their time and despoiling the world? Would they turn off his mic? Would they walk out? In the event, they sat in silence…and then gave him a polite applause, the kind reserved for honest preachers. The crowd must have known he was right; but they didn’t want to hear it."
o
No comments:
Post a Comment