Davos Patricians Want Your Property, Your Country, and Your Freedom

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivers a speech during a session of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on Jan. 20, 2016. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

In June 2020, some four months into the calamity created by the CCP-engineered COVID-19 pandemic, a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum attended by a fashionable cohort of Davos luminaries revealed a cunning plan to remake the world order.

After the 2020 meeting, World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab and “Monthly Barometer” author Thierry Malleret published a book titled “COVID-19: The Great Reset.” In the book, they define the “reset” as a way to address the “weaknesses of capitalism,” which they say were exposed by the pandemic.

Progressive Power Grabs

Throughout history, catastrophic events—like war, famine, poverty, natural disasters, or plagues—have produced feelings of fear, anxiety, and helplessness among affected people. Such conditions open the door for untested ideas that promise to restore well-being, prosperity, and confidence in the future.

Contemporary Marxists regard tragic events as opportunities to expand their power. Within the context of temporary chaos and suffering, global progressives always promise to deconstruct the existing order and “build back better.”

During the 2020 WEF confab, no less a global nabob than Charles, prince of Wales and heir to the British throne, declared, “We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis—its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change.”

Dramatic Policy Shifts

Writing last April in The Epoch Times, Heartland Institute fellow Justin Haskins pointed to a recent inclination for international corporations and financial institutions to embrace left-wing causes and, in the process, alienate tens of millions of ordinary people.

“In recent years,” Haskins wrote, “dramatic shifts in monetary policy, coupled with greater coordination between bankers, investors, government officials, and corporations, have ushered in an entirely new era of cronyism and the centralization of economic and social decision-making, one that poses significant dangers to individual liberty.” It should also be noted that routinely excessive rates of currency printing have devalued people’s savings and led to rampant inflation.

Corporate leadership has moved to the left because it’s no longer comfortable being neutral. Trillions of dollars are flowing from government agencies to favored financial institutions, banks, NGOs, and selected corporations. With permanent state actors in full control, common citizens have become almost powerless to challenge socialist orthodoxy through a free press and the conventional democratic process.

Perilous Proposals From the WEF

From the Age of Enlightenment onward, Western intellectuals have adopted various manifestations of “rationalism” to dismiss all forms of religious or nationalist convention. They claim that their reasoning alone can build a superior morality and a brave new world.

Our 21st-century Davos savants are no exception. Today, they’re back on a “long march” to eliminate private property, reduce national sovereignty, and limit individual freedom.

According to the WEF’s Global Future Councils, private property could be abolished during the next decade. The proposed changes would go further than the classic Marxist plan to put the “means of production” in the hands of the single-party state. The WEF is suggesting that even private assets will become a thing of the past.

Davos globalists are also musing about the emergence of a unipolar order. With Western traditions in decline, the international left looks forward to uniting Beijing with cooperative progressive regimes throughout the world.

Over the years, global elites have sought to intervene in what they regard to be “borderless” issues. They see matters like climate change, economic disparity, child poverty, the plight of refugees, racism, economic disparity, terrorism, and social unrest as international problems that call for extra-national solutions.

The “one world government” paradigm has returned to the mainstream of scholarly thought about international affairs. Universities in North America and Europe routinely advertise for positions in “global governance,” a term that few would have recognized a decade ago.

According to Klaus Schwab, “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”

Apologists for the “Great Reset” say that anxiety about “one world government” is just part of another conspiracy theory drummed up by right-wing reactionaries. But “One Belt, One Road” is hardly an ambiguous vision.

The Trouble With Globalist Solutions

In a prescient economic analysis titled “The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism,” Friedrich Hayek pointed out that civilization prospered only when sufficient importance was placed on the institution of private property. Since the era of John Locke, independent ownership of assets has led to expansion, trade, and eventually the enormously productive free-market system.

Under the influence of rationalist ideologues like Rousseau, Saint-Simon, and Marx, the merits of property ownership have been minimized by progressive academics with clever schemes to reshape the structure of human cooperation.

Hayek lauded the value of our traditional order over Marxist “constructivism.” Since longstanding economic practices led to our existing productive order, he said that resets to the system are doomed to fail. All of the disastrous 20th-century experiments with socialism and communism have proven Hayek right.

On the question of nationalism, the Davos cast of mind is equally destructive.

In the early years of my life, ordinary citizens in countries such as the UK, Canada, and the United States were permitted to express esteem for the achievements of their respective nations. A sense of national pride was shared by native-born citizens as well as immigrants who chose to join us in pursuit of individual freedom and fresh opportunity.

Today, books celebrating the achievements of nation-builders are seldom recommended to students of history. Global integration is seen by our elites as the indispensable condition for sound policy formation and moral decency.

The Davos intelligentsia’s vision amounts to a dangerous flirtation with a new form of imperial governance. Their “reset” wouldn’t produce an updated version of the second British Empire. This time, it would amount to an irreversible shift to “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and a CCP dominated totalitarian world order.

Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony defends the universal value of nationhood. He argues that a world made up of independent nations leaves room for diverse forms of self-government, religious practice, and cultural experimentation that benefit all of mankind.

Nationhood provides a context for the exercise of free will and self-determination. Protections provided by national constitutions ultimately safeguard the freedom of ordinary people.

Unraveling Davos Illusions

Thankfully, the notion that self-interested globalists understand our best interests better than we do ourselves is beginning to unravel.

Common men and women know intuitively that the right to hold property and maintain a sovereign nation is essential for human freedom. The international left campaigned vigorously against the 2016 Brexit and MAGA movements. And yet both succeeded at the polls.

In 2015, just prior to the emergence of these dynamic populist movements in America and the UK, Canadians once again voted to move the country in a more “progressive” direction. “Back to the future,” so to speak.

With the usual urging from Canada’s regime media, swing voters traded a competent middle-class leader for an untested Laurentian aristocrat and a cultural agenda that came straight out of the Davos playbook.

Justin Trudeau won a landslide election. His opposition was reminiscent of “the silence of the lambs.” Canada’s new leader had everything the Davos generation admired—great looks and a prep-school pedigree. He had high praise for the Chinese communist system and contempt for Donald Trump’s America. He was as comfortable with climate change prophets like Leonardo DiCaprio as his father had been with Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.

Early in June 2020, he boldly took a knee in the Canadian capital with the Marxist-inspired Black Lives Matter organization, which continued to riot, loot, and burn American cities over that entire summer. When asked about Trump and the use of tear gas against rioting protesters, Trudeau suggested that Canadians were watching what was unfolding in America with “horror and consternation.”

That was then, and this is now. What a difference two years can make in peoples’ perception of their political leadership. From coast to coast, ordinary citizens have sought various ways to protest selective business shutdowns, disproportionate suffering, unnecessary vaccine mandates, and government overreach. Canada’s regime media just pretended the protesting didn’t exist.

When the Canadian truckers Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa for a mid-February “park-in” around Parliament, no one in the Canadian Davos set ever considered speaking with them. After all, these were people who had probably never even seen the Swiss Alps.

Instead, the Ottawa protesters were vilified by the regime media, harassed by Ottawa Police, and finally crushed by a para-military-style emergency measures operation which, this time, Canadians truly did watch with “horror and consternation.” Despite the outcome in Ottawa, there are legions of Canadians who now take more pride than ever in their national Maple Leaf insignia.

Trudeau’s instinct to silence dissidents rather than engage them should be a wake-up call for free men and women throughout the world. Canada’s brutal “emergency measures” were a troubling reminder of how quickly a Davos patrician can go from nanny state manager to CCP-style tyrant.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.