‘Nonsense on Stilts’ — Davos Dream

At the G20 meeting in Indonesia, as President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping wasted their time talking about global warming, a subject the People’s Republic does not take seriously, instead of the origins of COVID or the status of Taiwan, to my utter astonishment, the face and voice of the “Great Reset” appeared.This is the jargon for the readjustment in the world towards so-called stakeholder capitalism that is the ambition of the conveners of the World Economic Forum. The forum began in 1971 as a conference where a few political leaders and celebrities from different industries and activities gathered and the occasion was paid for by admission fees happily tendered by a selection of prosperous people from different countries who wished to rub shoulders with the prominent featured guests.It was a winning commercial formula, and it grew and grew. It never moved to a more commodious and stylish place than the dreary and remote Swiss town of Davos. It is now a virtual world’s fair of global political, industrial, and even cultural leaders, surrounded by wealthy and eager camp-followers attracted to “networking.”Davos was the creation, and remains the fiefdom, of a pleasant but not rollickingly gregarious German-Swiss, Klaus Schwab. He has always claimed that his objective is entirely to further international and interdisciplinary understanding, with no ulterior motive and not the slightest interest in self-enrichment, just selfless and tireless efforts to promote human understanding and the inexorable progress towards a better world.As one who attended for 20 years — and, following the controversial death of Bob Maxwell, was co-leader (with the late Lord Rothermere) of the World Economic Forum media group — I found the sessions interesting and informative, and sometimes even entertaining. (On one occasion, I was speaking with the doyen of conferenciers, State Secretary Kissinger; when someone approached, Mr. Kissinger said, “Here comes that goddamn Indian.” I remarked that he was quoting General Custer; the networker turned out to be the prime minister of India.)Mr. Schwab thought the leaders of the international organizations he featured at Davos — the European Union, the World Bank, the United Nations, World Court, World Trade Organization, and all their affiliated agencies — should play an increasingly important role to implement his vision of universal supranationalism.As the Cold War ended, and the international left presciently clambered aboard the accelerating bandwagon of environmentalism to attack capitalism from a different direction in the name of saving the planet, Mr. Schwab became a fully paid up advocate of the most comprehensive version of the virtues of global governance.This evolution rushed back to me these last days as I watched Mr. Schwab at the G20 meeting, as part of the Business-20 portion of the summit, with his heavy Teutonic accent that sounds like the Marx brothers imitating Kaiser Wilhelm, advising the world’s 20 most prominent political leaders that the Davos reset of a universal, heavily regulated, post-national, post-religious world of synchronized egalitarian toiling was inevitable and infinitely desirable.For a moment I wondered, in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, “Do my ears deceive me?” They did not.As the editor of a just-published collection of essays titled Against the Great Reset (Bombardier Books), Michael Walsh, points out, “The World Economic Forum advocates a complete reimagining of the Western world’s social, economic and moral structures.” This book contains 18 mostly very stimulating essays from such noted authorities as Victor Davis Hanson, Douglas Murray, Roger Kimball, Michael Anton, and Mr. Walsh himself (including a modest contribution from me).Mr. Schwab has expressed pride that Prime Minister Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland, and Mark Carney (who converted the Bank of England into a rabid partisan of Britain’s continued membership in the European Union and a crusading promoter of militant environmentalism) are all Davos alumni. The Canadian opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, has publicly warned against the WEF’s globalist agenda: “Freedom means making our own decisions here at home.”For Mr. Schwab, stakeholder capitalism means the overarching requirements of society as interpreted and enforced by an emergent international class of theoretical regulators that would enforce the interests of everyone in society in the activities of the entire private sector. He calls this the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” which, he says, is “fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.”The 2020 book, “The Great Reset” was inspired by the COVID crisis to present a full frontal exposé of the Davos ambition 50 years after its gestation: “It will steer the market towards fairer outcomes, environmental, social and governance metrics.… To ensure that investments advanced shared goals such as equality and sustainability.… And harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.”As Mr. Hanson points out in his essay, “The viper tongue of totalitarianism is most often bathed in palliatives before it strikes.” The whole concept of the Great Reset is, as I wrote, based on the fervent endorsement of “democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public-sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world,” under the direction of the Davos claque of world bureaucrats and redistributors. “All concepts of public policy are to be divorced from any sense of nationality, history, spirituality or spontaneity and redirected to defined goals of imposed uniformity.”Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Aldous Huxley were novelists. Mr. Schwab and his chums seriously intend to push what Mr. Hanson calls “a kitchen sink mishmash of the UN’s long-stale Sustainable Development Plan, the Green New Deal, Black Lives Matter sloganeering, Critical Race Theory, the most authoritarian versions of stakeholder capitalism, ESG, social governance, open borders rhetoric and boutique redistributionism, dumbed down from Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the 21st Century.’” In a phrase of Jeremy Bentham’s that appears in the Walsh book, it is all “nonsense on stilts,” but insidious and dangerous nonsense. In 2020, the G7 “agreed in principle to the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan to harmonize global tax rules.” Corporations would be “redefined by how much they paid in taxes to governments who could distribute the profits more responsibly.… Virtuous expert classes” will buy off the lower classes with “endless government spending, cheap debt and grievance politics,” while blaming everything on the bourgeoisie. Marxism returns as authoritarianism masquerading as gentle worldly idealism. Citizens of the world, back to the barricades!________From the National Post

‘Nonsense on Stilts’ — Davos Dream

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