Libertarian Institute, January 22, 2024

Davos Demolition Derby for World Freedom

by James Bovard

The World Economic Forum had their annual conference last week in Davos, Switzerland. Once again, the Davos crowd ran a demolition derby for the destruction of liberty around the globe.

The WEF seized the COVID pandemic to champion a “Great Reset” to radically increase the power of politicians over every aspect of modern life. In June 2020, the WEF announced that “the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate…We need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

The COVID policies and vaccines that the WEF championed were complete disasters. Thus, one of the WEF’s big themes this year: “restore trust.” More than sixty heads of state from around the world flew in to blather about why they deserve more trust and deference from the people they plunder and oppress.

The WEF seeks to “restore trust,” not by honestly admitting that it pedaled horrible advice to governments and the media, but instead “crush dissent,” more or less. The WEF is proclaiming that the greatest peril humanity now faces is “misinformation and disinformation.”

And how can we recognize “misinformation”?

Easy: it denies that WEF cronies should rule the world.

OK, that’s a paraphrase. WEF’s latest Global Risks Report warns, “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.” In other words, governments must suppress “falsified” information to save truth.

The WEF presumes governments are founts of truth—regardless of endless rascality from practically every political party on earth. Apparently, anyone who manages to capture political power with a gun or a ballot automatically becomes trustworthy.

The WEF notion that governments deserve deference is practically a theological edict. But that is a primary source of the WEF’s peril to humanity. And this folly is compounded by the presumption that vastly increasing punitive power is necessary to redeem humanity.

One of the wackiest shows at Davos was performed by British environmental activist Jojo Mehta, the chief of “Stop Ecocide Now.” She hectored Davos attendees to recognize that people making money from farming or fishing could be as guilty as people committing “mass murder and genocide.” But if the elites succeed in stopping farmers from farming and fishermen from fishing, future Swiss shindigs may run short of caviar.

The WEF previously promised young people that by the year 2030 “you will own nothing and be happy.” (Davos attendees are exempt from that lofty edict.) Recent political reforms in many nations have furthered the first promise, ravaging private property rights and subverting individual independence.

But the world’s kingpins will need to tighten all the mental thumbscrews for propertyless serfs to “be happy.” Public euphoria could be in especially short supply considering other policies championed at the WEF.

“Individual carbon footprint trackers” are a popular panacea at Davos, and the WEF has proposed the “setting of acceptable limits for personal emissions.” How many burps will it take to get sent to a re-education camp?  These type of footprint trackers will be useless without imposing universal “digital identification,” another WEF pet project. How can government “serve” people unless it can find and accost them at any moment, day or night?

Vaccine passports are also a cause célèbres for this crowd. Count on the Master Wizards to exert far more effort to compel injections than to assure vaccines actually provide the protection they promise. While congressional committees in the United States probe the COVID policy failures and cover-ups, the Davos crew continues by effectively whooping up a worldwide Bio-Security State.

The WEF is also gung-ho on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). The U.S. dollar has lost 97% of its value since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, but politicians deserve more arbitrary power over the currency, right? Never forget that “cash is printed freedom.” But CBDCs have powerful appeal to would-be financial tyrants. Saule Omarova, Joe Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, proposed in 2021 to give government total control over every person’s finances; “There will be no more private bank accounts, and all of the deposit accounts will be held directly at the Fed.”

“Climate change” is probably the WEF’s best short-term hope to put a halo over tyranny. This is a topic which requires boundless censorship in order to keep peasants in their place. Cartoonists have long ridiculed all the private jets that fly in for the WEF conference. Such details need to be suppressed on “world security grounds,” or some such crap. The same is true for the appalling failure of green energy schemes such as windfalls to provide energy at reasonable prices.

To boost confidence in the all-electric future, government censors will need to be extra vigilant during harsh winter weather so that people are not warned that their Tesla becomes a useless block of metal during cold snaps.

But the point of the “climate change” hysteria is not to protect either the environment or humanity. It is to provide a pretext for perpetual, boundless subjugation by the elite. If Davos folks were meeting in the woods and subsisting on nuts and berries, they would have more credibility to lecture everyone else on their diets.

WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab practically echoed Marx’s Communist Manifesto, warning of a new specter haunting the world. Schwab derided “an anti-System which is called Libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives.” But it is not libertarian’s fault that Schwab’s standard for “some kind of influence of government” is eerily similar to medieval serfdom. Schwab also warned of the rising danger of individuals become “ego centric.” And we all know that the worst form of selfishness is refusal to submit to your superiors.

The most effective rebuttal of the WEF sirens of subjugation came from the newly-elected president of Argentina.Javier Milei came to Davos and exhorted the friends of freedom around the globe: “Do not be intimidated either by the political class or the parasites who live off of the State. The State is the problem itself.” Milei’s scoff at people “motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste” was perhaps the ultimate face slap for the self-proclaimed saviors.

Many of the follies championed at Davos arise from the boneheaded delusion that political power is irredeemably benevolent. We should not trust elitists who portray “truth” as the same type of despicable luxury as eating meat or owning your own automobile. And we should not trust those who seek to convert officialdom into a priesthood with the right to blindfold people, to muzzle them, and to slash their living standard.

Luckily, people still have freedom to scoff on social media (thanks in large part to Elon Musk). Maybe the next Davos confab will convince critics to cease referring to the “World Enslavement Forum.” It would help if the WEF ceased fearing “runaway skepticism” with the same dread that old southern plantation owners viewed runaway slaves.