(OPINION) Today we have entities such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) pushing for a radical “Great Reset” of Western society that promises to handcuff free markets with economic regulation while concentrating power into the hands of a small international coalition of central economic planners — most notably their own?
How could promising a future where people will “own nothing and be happy” possibly be conducive to a free and productive society — or even a happy one? How can a future in which all energy is controlled by international governing bodies and multinational corporations possibly provide individuals with the institutional building blocks for endless innovation? How can farmers sustain larger and more prosperous populations when Western governments continue to stifle agricultural production through regulation and eminent domain?
The questions answer themselves. The WEF’s agenda promotes radically anti-liberal programs such as the use of artificial intelligence to censor dissent, regulate free speech, and even erase ideas from the Internet. Its repressive efforts to control all hydrocarbon energy and cattle and crop farm production will smother human innovation by first depriving Westerners of their ability to create, invent, and grow food.
Its policies betray millennia of Western civilizational advancement by replacing respect for individual choice and free will with top-down management of human activity through the blunt instruments of force and coercion. Its motivations are indisputably anti-human at their core because each individual human life is treated as nothing more than a cog or input that can be manipulated as part of a centrally-controlled social machine. When Westerners are reduced to ones and zeroes that are sorted and shifted by the WEF’s social programming codes for a “better future,” builders obey but no longer create.
Whereas personal liberty has unleashed the human mind and generated tremendous Western prosperity, the World Economic Forum’s push for a centrally controlled economic system will crush rights, stifle creativity, and mass-produce poverty and servitude. Its proponents, in fact, seem mostly committed to using a combination of pandemic, famine, and fear to centralize dominance for themselves.
In order to persuade Westerners to give up more and make do with less, the WEF and its globalist allies promise Westerners a future Utopia. As with every similar lie ever told to justify the extraordinary acquisition of power, though, they will fail to deliver.
No society, after all, was ever promised more than in Stalin’s 1936 Constitution of the USSR — or subsequently treated more abysmally. Despite its claims to the contrary, the WEF’s mission directives intentionally reverse Western trends toward greater human freedom, social mobility, and more broadly obtainable wealth — or what, in another era, would have been rightly regarded as true, liberal progress.
Although the WEF and its sister organizations claim to be “saving the planet,” their efforts seem primarily an ignoble design to control the planet. “Clean” energy, after all, is controlled energy; and the more that energy is controlled by centralized governments, the more completely once-free markets become centrally controlled.
If every potential entrepreneur must first receive permission to use electricity before producing anything new, then no entrepreneur can thrive without the central authorities’ blessing. If all manufacturing is viewed as a “threat to the planet,” then no independent upstart can innovate or build wealth without first seeking and obtaining government approval. If consumers are forbidden from buying anything unless it is first pre-approved, then free markets are transformed into controlled markets.
Taking this trend to its logical yet communist conclusion, private property becomes antithetical to the state’s goals. We already see the ominous subversion of private ownership today with so-called ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) standards used to strong-arm industry goals and manipulate free markets. Because control over information makes control over markets more manageable, the more economic uncertainty that results from market manipulation, the more censorship we’ll continue to see.
Recently, even a senior economist who correctly stated that the American economy had entered into a recession found his research “fact-checked” and “corrected” by the U.S. government’s friends at Facebook. Where free markets are under attack, free speech is inevitably under attack, too. The individual blessings of liberalism are not easily dissected from the body politic without inevitably rendering liberalism’s death, as a whole.
The issue today may be “climate change” or COVID-19 or “sustainable food supplies,” but the stated issue never seems anything more than a public relations campaign for fooling the masses. It always appears to be merely a disposable excuse designed to seduce Westerners into handing a small cabal of “elites” power and control over everyone else. Convincing mankind to believe that free markets will inevitably lead to some kind of apocalypse increasingly looks like the only policy goal that matters. READ MORE
