This week, amidst all of the domestic political hubbub here in the United States, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is happening over at Davos. Now, why exactly is the World Economic Forum important?
In 1971, there was an organization that was established by Klaus Schwab, who is a German engineer, economist, and professor with a James Bond villain accent. He created this organization so that heads of business in heads of state could discuss what he called “stakeholder capitalism.” Stakeholder capitalism was a theory he expressed that essentially suggested if you owned a company, you ought not answer to your shareholders; if you managed a company, you ought not answer to profit margin or shareholders.
Instead, you ought to answer to every stakeholder in the world — meaning governments. Meaning people who didn’t own stock in your company. Meaning everyone.
Now, you might ask yourself: Then to whom are you accountable? Because it turns out that the rando who doesn’t own shares in your company can actually fire you or sell your stock or change anything about the way you run your company.
The answer that Klaus Schwab would give is: You are answerable to no one. You, as the head of a company, should be like a king with his own little kingdom. You, as the head of a company, should be a lord, and the company should act as your fiefdom. And you can pretend that you’re acting in the name of the general will.
But what you truly are is some sort of prophet from on high brought to spread your values. And this was the basis of stakeholder capitalism.
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This theory was promoted via what was called the European Management Symposium. That’s what the WEF was originally called in 1971. By 1975, it had grown so quickly that 860 participants, including the CEOs and chairman of the largest European companies, started showing up. That same year, only four years after creation, the European Management Forum, the EMF, was now partnering with the United Nations.
According to the WEF website itself, “After just five years, the Forum had gained acceptance at the highest levels of business and government. While not advocating policy or strategy, the Forum had become a respected organization that served as a valuable platform for business, government, civil society and other stakeholders to confer and collaborate. Klaus Schwab’s stakeholder theory was beginning to evolve into a broader concept of corporate global citizenship.”
In 1987, the European Management Forum changed its name from the EMF to the WEF.
So what is the WEF today? The same thing, except bigger, much more prominent. 10,000 people show up at the WEF every year, but the people who are on stage, the people who are meeting in the back rooms, are all of the global influential people.
They are the heads of major corporations and the heads of government, and they all come to pat each other on the back and explore what they have in common. What they have in common is a very peculiar set of values you do not share with them, a set of values that suggest they are responsible for solving all of the world’s problems.
They should collude and decide what system prevails everywhere. They should collude and decide what information you are capable of seeing and understanding problems like the climate. They will get together, and they will restructure entire swathes of the global economy in order to fight back against climate change.
This is what they do. Let’s face it, this is a weird group of people because the people at the top levels of power, particularly in the West, are a strange group of people. They are disproportionately secular. They are disproportionately of the political Left. These are people who do not have ties to traditional ways of life in traditional values.
They are also people who seem to have scorn for the culture that actually bore them and, instead, have embraced this peculiar notion of multiculturalism in which all cultures are created equal. And that leads to this really sort of paternalistic and odd look at the WEF, where people are walking in wearing $5,000 suits and $20,000 watches, and then they are paying homage to poor Native Americans or natives of Europe or whoever is showing up.
Yesterday at the WEF, for example, there was a bizarre spectacle of a native woman of some sort with her face painted, appearing before various company owners, heads of state, and top level bureaucrats.
These Bane knockoffs, except in corporate garb, have come up with all sorts of interesting and weird ways to restructure the global system in order to run it and control you.
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There’s language people in the West love to use when they’re talking about controlling you: the language of war. The War on Poverty is about controlling income. It is about controlling redistribution of wealth. The war on climate change is similarly about controlling exactly how you live your life. These people are eager to use war language, because in a war, you get to take control of literally everyone, day and night.
But — there was one wonderful moment during the WEF. Javier Milei, who’s become my spirit animal, the President of Argentina, who is colorful and a wonderful economist rock star, an all around Wolfman, was speaking at the WEF. And he just laid into them, and it was wonderful. He stated:
Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonists of this story. And rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch, unconditional ally. … Long live freedom.
Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty. Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.
This is great stuff. Good for Javier Milei for going to the WEF and slapping people across the head.
It’s precisely what they deserve.