Picture of the Nations Capitol. David Maiolo, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Klaus Schwab is the head of the World Economic Forum; he founded the organization in 1971. Each year, the WEF hosts a massive conference in Davos, Switzerland, with thousands of world leaders, diplomats and experts on various topics gathering to trade ideas about how best to cooperatively run the world. Lest this characterization be seen as overstating the case, Schwab himself said as much this year in opening the conference: “The future is not just happening. The future is built by us, by a powerful community as you here in this room. We have the means to improve the state of the world. But two conditions are necessary. The first one is that we act all as stakeholders of larger communities, that we serve not only self-interest but we serve the community. That’s what we call stakeholder responsibility. And second, that we collaborate.”

This is the call to action for elitists the world over. They appoint themselves the representatives of global interests — without elections, without accountability — and then create mechanisms of national and international order to control citizens over whom they claim to preside. Schwab himself has decoded his favorite term, “stakeholder capitalism.” He wrote in Time magazine in October 2020, “Free markets, trade and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off if there was the will to do so.” To do so, however, would require taking hints from Greta Thunberg, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter; it would require “building … a virtuous economic system” in which companies abandon their core mission of serving customers and shareholders and instead embrace answering questions like “What is the gender pay gap in company X? How many people of diverse backgrounds were hired and promoted? What progress has the company made toward reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions?”

All of this extraordinary arrogance is predicated on a perverse view of how successful change works within decentralized systems. As Schwab himself acknowledges, free markets have generated more prosperity than any system in human history. But that’s because free markets are not  a top-down imposition, a system created by conspiratorial muckety-mucks in a back room somewhere. Free markets were the outgrowth of centuries of evolutionary societal progress: gradual recognition that private ownership was the greatest incentive toward work and innovation; incremental understanding that individual rights are the only alternative to endless conflict; step-by-step acceptance that decentralized sources of knowledge are both broader and deeper than centralized ones. The most powerful and durable institutions we have are traditional because, as F.A. Hayek wrote, they are “a product of cumulative growth without ever having been designed by any one mind.”

For Schwab and his ilk, however, it’s precisely such an evolutionary approach that must be ended. Instead, he and his rationalist buddies — brilliant businessmen and ambitious politicians, striving bureaucrats and myopic experts — will cure the world of its ills, so long as we grant them power. Or, more likely, so long as they seize power in the name of “stakeholders” to whom they are never answerable.

One of the great ironies of the past several years is the gap between the elitists’ perception of themselves. To the elitists, their solutions failed because citizens of the world lacked the will to listen to them; to the citizens, the elitists failed because their prescriptions were ill-founded. Yet so long as the elitists retain their power, they will continue to push forward their utopian dreams at the expense of those they purport to serve.

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John H Kainrath
1 year ago

no no its not rite leave the countries alone

vickie
1 year ago

In simpler terms, one of the greatest problems with these self-anointed “elites” is that it is beneath all of them to go grocery shopping, or to fill their car with gas, indeed, to even drive their own car. They don’t cook their own food, they don’t muck about with the “useless eaters” so they have no comprehension of what it is to be a human being in the world. Their fantasies deny reality to the point that they believe they are divine and can create the world to fit their ideology. They are like five year old kids who’ve driven race cars on a video game and then believe they can now climb into a real car and drive successfully on the road with the rest of us.

If I had a magic wand, I would drop every last one of them into a poverty stricken area with no money, no phone and no one they know. Then I would task them with figuring it out and seeing if they can come out alive.

To say they don’t get it is an understatement. It makes me happy to simply sit and watch kids playing happily in a park or to go to a baseball game and look around at the camaraderie and enthusiasm. I realize none of these so-called “elites” have had that simple pleasure. They don’t know what a family thanksgiving dinner is like.They trust no one. They don’t have the emotional intelligence or capacity to watch a flash mob and just love that everyone is in sync and enjoying the music together. I have finally realized these very damaged and deranged individuals are missing a huge part of the human experience, and that emptiness makes them desperate to fill the void with money and power. Neither of which will do a damn thing for them. They each will die a very lonely and unfulfilled death. The majority of earth’s population may well add, “the sooner, the better for us all.”

ourzoo10
1 year ago
Reply to  vickie

Very well put, ThankYou.

TOOTS
1 year ago

i WANT THE NAMES OF THE POLITICIANS AND AMERICANS THAT GO TO UNDERMINE AMERICA TO THIS CONFERENCE. nOTICE THEY ARE NOT COVERING MUCH UP NOW WHEN THEY STATE THAT THEIR GOAL IS TO KILL ONE HALF OF THE WORLD POPULATION.

DOMINIC PASQUAROSA
1 year ago

This is the power of the left, democrats, to protect and defend each other in all circumstances. They truly are the separatists and dividers, segregationists in the name of control and power. Good or bad is all the same to them. 

ourzoo10
1 year ago

They are pointing their finger at us, while 3 of their fingers is pointing back at them!