For more than 50 years, globalists have descended upon Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Annual Meeting to push “stakeholder capitalism,” a synonym for global socialism.
Meanwhile, the first-ever World Prosperity Forum (WPF) is taking place in nearby Zurich with a decidedly different message: “freedom, markets, and human flourishing.”
“While the World Economic Forum promotes a centralized, top-down vision for the global economy, the World Prosperity Forum advances a prosperity-focused, freedom-focused vision rooted in free markets, individual liberty, and rising living standards,” the website states.
In other words, decades after the demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the world’s largest and longest experiment with socialism, the WEF still promotes a failed ideology that fosters poverty, not prosperity.
Even worse, for many years, the WEF has wielded unabated power and influence as it seeks to enact its socialist vision.
Such is why the rise of a counterargument, which promotes global freedom, national sovereignty, and free-market capitalism, is so vital.
While some may consider that a cynical viewpoint, I think the history of the WEF’s agenda and actions since its founding in 1971 demonstrate its deranged fixation on global socialism.
According to the WEF website, in 1971, German economics Professor Klaus Schwab “had a bright idea…unconventional at the time, but it has since taken hold…that a company should serve all its stakeholders, not just its shareholders: employees, suppliers, and the community it is part of. The vision for this socially responsible ‘stakeholder capitalism’ became the guiding principle of the World Economic Forum.”
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In 1973, the WEF officially adopted the climate change narrative to “reconcile economic development and environmental constraints.” This is a fancy term for centralized planning on a global scale.
Over the past five decades, the WEF has concocted numerous harmless-sounding initiatives to implement stakeholder capitalism, primarily through the threat of “climate change.”
This worked for a while, when most people believed that climate change was an existential crisis. But thanks to Bill Gates, that is no longer the case anymore.
During the pandemic, the WEF pushed all its chips to the middle of the table when it went all in on the Great Reset. Fortunately, the Great Reset was a dud, mocked and ridiculed for its grandiose declarations and tyrannical edicts.
Despite utter humiliation and scorn, the Davos mindset has not changed: stakeholder capitalism still must be achieved, no matter the cost.
This year, the WEF Annual Meeting features themes like how to “deploy innovation at scale and responsibly,” and how to “build prosperity within planetary boundaries.”
Unsurprisingly, the WEF still claims that “Infrastructure, food systems, and natural ecosystems are all affected by climate change, reinforcing the need to further develop nature-based solutions as part of an integrated approach.”
Sometimes I wonder if these people live in such an insulated bubble that they actually believe this stuff. Nevertheless, the facts and data demonstrate that this claim is obviously bogus.
It is important to underscore this point because the WEF has convinced itself that climate change is wreaking havoc on crop yields, power grids, and coastal cities. Again, this is not true.
Based on this wrong assumption, the WEF is stressing this week that “the need to deliver on the energy transition is greater than ever, and the challenge is no longer ambition but execution.”
At this point, the elites at the WEF absolutely know that the green transition is incapable of powering the AI revolution they covet.
They surely know that windmills and solar panels cannot provide abundant, affordable, and reliable electricity to the datacenters necessary for what the WEF calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
At its best, this is cognitive dissonance. On one hand, the elites have convinced themselves that climate change is still an existential threat, which means no more fossil fuels, while on the other hand, they are gung-ho on “frontier technologies” like quantum computing, which require fossil fuels to function.
At its worst, this is the classic socialist creed: Do as I say, not as I do. Apparently, despite their hyperbolic assertions that carbon dioxide emissions are the bane of humanity, these same people spew more carbon dioxide emissions than the average human by far. They fly in private jets, live in mansions, and ride in luxurious SUVs.
The good news is that people across the world are rejecting stakeholder capitalism. The Great Reset crashed, DEI died, and ESG is fading.
The fundamental difference between the globalists at the WEF and the liberty-minded upstarts at the WPF is that people always have and always will despise socialism, whereas people always have and always will desire freedom. Freedom is moral and righteous. Socialism is evil and anti-human nature.
Will the geniuses at Davos grasp this elementary point, or will Davos derangement disorder continue to plague them?
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.
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