Hour of the Opponents in Davos

Wednesday was the day of the opponents at the annual World Economic Forum gathering in Davos. Donald Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei tore apart the WEF agenda. One declared globalism as officially failed, the other wielded an intellectual-ethical scalpel through the decayed body of the establishment.

Norwegian Børge Brende has been the chairman of the World Economic Forum since last year. He took over after a heated internal personnel debate from the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, who for decades dominated the agenda of this shadowy institution for political will-shaping.

Schwab did so with undeniable success. The WEF has become an ideological melting pot of European politics, from which socialist concepts long proven costly in blood and failure continue to resurface -- now repackaged as morally renewed, dressed in green.

Whether it’s the EU’s climate-socialist agenda, peculiar ideas like the 15-minute city to restrict individual mobility, or digital control currencies designed to make hidden capital controls palatable -- the WEF has always been a source of centralist fantasies of political power.

Take the vision of the digital identity of the new global citizen, who no longer exists as an individual but as a managed dataset -- this too originates in Davos think tanks. Every person would possess a centralized, supranational digital existence where financial behavior, health status, and political reliability are consolidated into a controllable unit. The culmination of the “transparent citizen,” the final chapter of individual dignity and freedom.

Mobility, nutrition, housing -- all are turned into moral tests. The CO2 footprint replaces personal judgment; deviation is social misconduct. Davos has grown in the haze of its control fetish into the symbol of a leadership claim by a detached pseudo-elite.

Informal political organizations like the WEF live on media presence. Continuous coverage is their lifeblood, which makes

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Alas, most Americans are not aware of the economic miracle that is taking place in Argentina. His walk away from Socialism to pro-business Capitalism have made the Argentinian people the envy of all South American countries. His use of Capitalism to improve his peoples’ economic well-being is even surpassing Chile’s post-Alende’s turn-around. Friedman must be smiling from above...

Trump dismantled the Davosites’ fantasies of omnipotence one by one. Planning versus growth, moralism versus prosperity, control versus dynamism -- every certainty was exposed like a warped political myth.

Trump was brilliant in this dissection.

The "green new scam" that Trump so effectively dismantled is but the latest scam that seeks to justify taking power from the individual and placing it in a collective run by technocrats.

And it is the technocrats that give us a clue about the next possible scam conjuring up reasons for collectivism over individual rights. The article describes reducing humans to digits to be managed by technocrats but that tendency could well be put on steroids as and when AI and robots become ubiquitous.

If, as Elon musk says we are entering an age of surplus because of the productive power of robots, the question arises, who profits? If AI and robots have so great technical and economic reach, they have the potential power to thoroughly upend our existing economy that as over centuries been grounded in individual right to property and individual rights generally. How do we distribute this wealth and, while distributing, retain property rights, individual rights and human rights-all in a capitalist system?

If we have to manage a whole new economy, we must beware lest we replay the green new scam.

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