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Samizdata quote of the day – Swiss ski resort and health spa edition “Precisely how and where `free-market fundamentalism’ has run amuck remains a mystery. After all, we live in a world in which most governments in developed nations routinely control 40 per cent or more of their nation’s GDP.”
– Samuel Gregg, Spectator (maybe behind paywall). Gregg is the author of The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets In An Uncertain World (2022) and is Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy at the American Institute for Economic Research.
Full disclosure: As a young newswire journalist in the 1990s, I went to the WEF in Davos three times (in one of them, I met Nelson Mandela, as one does). The whole event, held in a Swiss mountain resort once made famous by Thomas Mann while he underwent treatment for turberculosis, rather resembles the lair of Ernst Blofeld in Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In fact, Schwab is very, er, Spectre-like, although I did not see a white cat.
There is, of course, the pro-free market Mont Pelerin Society, so even the good guys cannot resist the allure of the mountains.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Why is it the experts and academics and scholars and officials that know what’s best for all of us and have all the answers never have an introspective moment and ask themselves “if we know so much and we keep pushing our policies forward, why don’t humanity’s problems ever get better?”
That article makes some very important points, particularly about the way that Schwab has explicitly rejected “Free-market fundamentalism” as he called it.
Samuel Greggs goes on to talk about what’s wrong with Schwab’s vision of corporatism.
These Davos types are surely aware of the many ways in which human life is genuinely getting better. Wouldn’t it be easier for them to just take credit for increased life spans, medical advances and more, rather than spend their time on grubby, cognitive-dissonance-creating introspection?
Indeed the state controlling 40% of the economy, with its spending and so on, would be low by modern standards – the state in most countries has been growing for 150 years. And even the “free” part of the economy is dominated by funny money created (from nothing) by the government and pet banks – and dished out to the connected. And every aspect of life is dominated by endless regulations.
Someone who believes there is “free market fundamentalism” will believe anything.
But it is not just modern times – for example almost every history book describes the vast rise in taxation in Ireland from the 1830s onwards, to reach utterly crushing levels in the late 1840s, as a “laissez faire” policy.
Still, to return to the modern world, even the last 60 years has seen a truly spectacular rise in the size of government in many Western nations (including the United Kingdom) and a vast increase in regulation.
It is impossible that George Soros, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and (of course) Klaus Schwab, do not know this, do not know that government has vastly increased in size and scope – so when they talk of “free market extremism” or “free market fundamentalism” they are just lying – telling fibs, it is as brutally simple as that.
As for the aims – they make no secret of their aims (their objectives).
World wide “public-private partnership” rule by a Corporate State “Stakeholder Capitalism”, with an end to real competition and customer choice – people will have what is good for them (as decided by the Corporate State) not what, in their supposed foolishness, they actually want.
Gene – life expectancy is falling in the United States, and life has been made so unbearable over the last few decades that many people are turning to opioids (knowing very well that they may kill them).
This does not upset the international elite – on the contrary, this is what they want.
The international establishment are not very nice people – for example, remember they smeared Early Treatment for Covid 19 (most people who died of it, could have been saved with Early Treatment) and pushed injections which they knew very well can be lethal.
Imagine the sort of people who could do such things. And you can look at them – as they will be meeting in Davos in a few days. There is nothing special about how they look, they have no horns or tails – in reality evil is banal.
J.P. If Dr Schwab actually had a white cat, I might even warm to him. A would-be world dictator should be interesting in this way – although, yes, he does NOT want to be a world dictator, he wants a Corporate State where he would be just one of the humble organisers, yes-I-know Agenda 2030 and all that.
But he could have a white pussy cat – and even a hollowed out volcanic lair, that would be nice.
StevenR said:
I’m pretty sure you know the answer to this already, but for the slow folk in the back, I’ll point out that whenever you hear the anointed talking about “What’s best for all of us…”, they’re really talking about what’s best for them.
It’s all about institutional capture and rent-seeking. Even if they aren’t outside “forces of evil” trying to capture things, the sad fact is that they’re going to arise from within after a certain amount of time goes by. It’s a natural consequence of time’s passage on any human organizational endeavor. Might even be a truism across other species similar to ours, but who really knows? I suspect that any species that rises to intelligence is going to have these problems, because there’s no way you’d have enough individual and institutional altruism arise naturally.
There is a life-cycle to any organization or institution, much as if they were separate organisms with lives of their own. That life cycle is something you have to keep in mind, when you’re within the belly of the beast. Every constituent part of really big organizational structures also has a life-cycle, and you can see that taking place over even a short period. The syndrome normally begins with things in a state of dysfunctional chaos in one part of the organization, followed by the leadership saying “This has got to be fixed…”. So, they pick out some hard-chargers, give them autonomy and the ability to recruit or select their own people, and they go in and fix things. Whereupon that aspect of the organization ceases to be an issue, and moves on to the next part of the cycle: Benign neglect, followed by actual negligent neglect. After that, the situation becomes shambolic, and it won’t get fixed until and unless someone pays attention to it again, and then exerts the effort and emphasis to fix it.
This is an outgrowth of the old observation we had in the military: The only things that get done are the ones that the commander is paying attention to and actually looking at. No attention? No fixes, no emphasis, and a gradual decline.
You can see that syndrome in Southwest Airlines. The guy who made that company what it was was a true God of Operations. The guys who succeeded him were bean-counting finance guys, and it shows. They ran the necessary systems in operations into the ground, never fixing them or improving them, ‘cos they didn’t see the need. Boom. Now, with all the scheduling problems, it’s an issue. So, it will get fixed up until it isn’t one, then the cycle will repeat under the future guidance of men who don’t thing operational things are of any value or import.
Thus it always was, and thus it always will be. You can go out looking for smart people talking about this, but good ‘effing luck: This sort of thing just isn’t studied, ‘cos there ain’t nobody thinking it’s important. Until it’s too damn late.
You see a failure in governance or organization, it’s usually rooted in things like this.
Paul, writing about declining life expectancy in the US, writes: This does not upset the international elite – on the contrary, this is what they want.
I have written comments in this sort of vein in the past (“the elites want us to be poor” etc) but I am not sure. Do we have the ability to peer inside the soul of an “elite” (which in turn begs the question of who these folk are). I very much doubt that Klaus Schwab or any other of this ilk rejoices and bangs the table in glee when they read that the average life expectancy of Joe Sixpack has gone down. What I think is the case is that they are so convinced of the rightness of their views that things such as falling lifespans, increased addictions to painkillers, suicide rates, etc, don’t impinge on their thinking.
One issue that such a mindset can’t or won’t confront is that men are far more likely to kill themselves than women, and that men are, in large numbers, giving up on marriage given the way that courts interpret divorce laws and custody around children. (See this book by Dr Helen Smith, wife of Glenn Reynolds.) There is in much of the West a serious alcohol and drug addiction issue among men, and increasingly, women. (Disclosure: in my late 20s and much of my 30s I regularly drank to excess and thankfully, managed to pull back from this. I know of several people who did not, and are dead or in serious trouble.)
Interesting thoughts Kirk.
When my nephew was celebrating his 21st birthday, folk were discussing what advice you’d give to someone that age. Off the top of my head, I said “pay attention”. When you dobt pay attention, that is when mistakes and mis-understanding occurs.
I got Schwab’s book for Christmas. A joke by my son. I have read it. Which I suspect is rather more than Schwab participated in the writing of it. The book is awful. Not merely in the ideas and failing arguments but in the prose itself. Many of its assertions are just plain wrong.
Try this: “The first industrial revolution spanned from about 1760 to around 1840. Triggered by the construction of railroads and the invention of the steam engine, it ushered in mechanical production.”
Check those dates against those inventions. What railroads in 1760? Why no explicit mention of fossil fuel power being the trigger? Because we might have to admit that it all came from coal? The difference being that we no longer had to rely on wind and water to power our mills and pumps.
That is where he skims through history and cherry-picks the things that support his four revolutions narrative. Personally I can’t see the second, third or fourth revolution, to me it look like evolution all leading from the first. If it WAS the first. Against critical arguments the narrative might have a hard time standing up, but those arguments are not forthcoming, just assertions which make the unwoke reader scream out ‘That’s just not how it is!’
It is impossible to critique in detail if only because it is so badly written. It reads like the notes from a Powerpoint presentation made by an aspiring manger out to please his bosses. Full of buzzwords and non-sequiturs. And that is the clue. It is the higher-level version of just that. The Ne Plus Ultra of the managerial class. That is who wrote it and that is who believes it. The top level of management of the Golga-Frincham B Ark. In a sensible world we would have nothing to fear from these people because they can’t make or organise anything. What we have to fear is the position we have allowed them to take up and their sheer inability to understand that they are NOT the masters of the universe but a bunch of over-promoted tossers.
JP – good point, and if this was 1963 or 1964 I would agree.
But after 60 years of Progressive policies in American cities (and-so-on) I do not believe it is a mistake – I think it is deliberate. They can see the terrible results of what they have done – and they are carrying on. Indeed they are “doubling down”.
Yes, a thousand times yes, Mr Biden does not understand the harm Progressive policies have done (his mind is undermined) – but people like Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab are not senile – they can see exactly what Progressive policies have done – and they want more of it.
Why?
Kirk is part right and part wrong – it is about “what is good for them” but it is not about money or other wealth – someone like Bill Gates or the many other billionaire corporatists is not going to have more luxury under a totalitarian system than they have now, it is about POWER.
They want POWER – not another luxury home or what not, they want power.
Now they tell themselves, and perhaps they are correct, that to have their “Great Reset” (and it is hardly a “conspiracy” as Dr Schwab used this as the title of his latest book – it is not a secret), they must destroy the existing society.
Reducing the population to terrible poverty will get the population to accept this system. Homes and a basic income provided by government (or, rather, by government and pet corporations – in public-private partnership) – in return every aspect of life controlled.
“We do not enjoy doing this people – but we HAVE to do it, otherwise they would not accept the new system”.
Why have the new, totalitarian, system?
Well in the 1970s it was Global Cooling, not it is Global Warming – the justification changes, but the objective (the Corporate State – tyranny) is always the same.
Tyranny not because the various people meeting at Davos (and many other places) will have more luxury – they have plenty of luxury already, but tyranny because it will give them the power to make people jump when they say jump.
Remember Mr Bloomberg when he was Mayor of New York?
He became a comic figure (but he also won three elections in a row – by saturating the local media) because of his desire to pass laws controlling a lot of human life – what people ate and so on.
Bloomberg’s New York City is nothing compared to what they have planned for us.
But to get people to accept that – they must first crush us, “for our own good”, so that we accept control over every aspect of our lives.
Only desperate people, in fear of homelessness and hunger, will hand over total control of their lives. – So people must be made desperate – in fear of homelessness and hunger. “For their own good” – so they accept the new system.
Of course, this is a few people – most of the government politicians and officials and corporate executives just “go with the flow” without thinking about it.
Did Prime Minister John Major or President George Herbert Walker Bush think deeply before rubber stamping “legally nonbinding” Agenda 21? No – of course not. I doubt they even looked at it. Any more than the Mr Johnson read in detail the deal with the European Union which, it turns out, does a lot more than undermine the independence of Northern Ireland from the European Union – it also undermines (in key areas) the independence of this island from the European Union – which Ben Habib was explaining to us a couple of days ago. Mr Johnson did not read it, he had no real knowledge of it, so (I suppose) he is not morally responsible.
As for human evil – or ruthlessness.
Remember Covid.
The denial it came from the Wuhan lab.
The claim that it would not be a threat to the United States – a claim made by Tony Fauci (who knew it would be – and knew what it was as he, and Peter Daszak, had funded the research that created it).
The smearing of Early Treatment – most of the people who died could have been saved, but Early Treatment was smeared (in a sustained campaign to increase casualties from Covid – think about that, that is not good behaviour).
The pushing of lockdowns – medically useless, but very good for destroying independent small business enterprises and handing over the economy of California (and elsewhere) to massive corporations.
And then the pushing of injections – which is still happening (in spite of all the evidence of the harm the injections can do).
Yes there may be justifications “the greater good”, “one can not make an omelette without breaking eggs” and so on.
But it is still terrible conduct.
In local government a very crude version of all this has a name – the “Curley Effect”.
Mayor Curley of Boston in the early 1900s drove out various business enterprises and undermined others – this did weaken him politically. On the contrary, it made him much stronger politically – as people became more dependent on the local government, and (hence) on Mayor Curley. It did not occur to most people that their misery was caused by Mayor Curley – on the contrary he was the saviour.
And what is happening now is vastly less crude than what Mayor Curley did. It is alliance of Big Business and Big Government – for the objective of total control.
After all Big Corporate Business depends on the Credit Money from the Central Banking system – and that monetary system (the Cantillon Effect – three centuries old idea) means that most people “have to be” a lot poorer than they would otherwise be.
Once that step has been taken, why not take the next step? Make people much poorer.
After all desperately poor people, grateful for handouts, are much less likely to ask problematic questions.
“It is for their own good”.
Saint Simon and other “great intellectuals” centuries ago explained how Collectivism need not mean that bankers and other Big Business types would be killed – on the contrary they could guide the new Collectivist system.
In the name of “science”.
‘Free-market fundamentalism’ has run amuck by providing too much prosperity to the undeserving peasants. It has destroyed their quaint, aesthetically-pleasing poverty. It has made them uppity, disrespectful and disobedient toward the Superior Class who are their natural masters. It has turned a dangerous fringe minority of those peasants into kulaks, hate-filled extremists who hold totally unacceptable views. It has seduced too many of the other peasants into supporting the kulak heretics and blasphemers against Government Almighty.
And it has destroyed the value of material goods as a proper status-reward, as a reward limited to the Superior Class as their just due for being Superior. Instead, ‘free-market fundamentalism’ has turned the reward of material goods into worthless participation trophies.
(/sarc for the Poe’s Law impaired)
Deep Lurker.
We do not have free market fundamentalism. We have rising poverty and other social decay, certainly in the United States and United Kingdom. because of endless government spending and taxation (which has been on the rise, even as a proportion of the economy, for a very long time indeed), endless regulations (which cut off opportunities for small business enterprises and for ordinary people to get into a trade or profession, and make goods and services much more expensive than otherwise would be) and a Credit Money financial system which, the Cantillon Effect, concentrates economic control in a few “connected” hands (such as BlackRock) at the expense of everyone else.
One of the things that I noticed during lockdown is what were considered medical priorities and what were not.
Cancer screening and treatment was not considered a priority – essentially it was “go away and die”.
But abortion was considered a priority – got-to-kill-those-babies.
J.P. you, de facto, asked for am example of evil – without having to look inside the souls of the people involved.
Well there you are. I could have been misinformed about the priorities (that is always possible), but if (if) it is true that baby killing was treated as a “medical priority” during lockdown, and screening for cancer was not treated as a medical priority – then there is an example of human evil.
By the way Deep Lurker – I could be mistaken, but I think you are the person who denied that Article One, Section Ten of the Constitution of the United States lays down that States may only have gold and silver as a legal tender.
If (if) you held that Deep Lurker, you are mistaken – because it does. This was nothing to do with pushing Federal fiat money – as there was not supposed to be Federal fiat money. “Not worth a Continental” was the fiat money of the old Continental Congress, a basic point of having Constitutional Convention was to have a new government that would not go down that road.
Although it is true, as Roger Sherman pointed out, that the Constitution should have formally banned Federal fiat money – not just de facto banned it by saying that the Congress could “coin” money (i.e. not print it), “shyster” lawyers and judges exist (as the Greenback cases show) who will seek any loophole or weakness in wording.
By the way – California and Oregon continued to use gold and silver currency, for both private debts and taxes, during the Civil War.
There is no economic reason why a major war should mean fiat money – the reason is POLITICAL, trying to con the public – pretend that the war is not costing as much as it is really costing.
As for fiat money (and Credit Bubble banking – i.e. lending that is not from Real Savings, the actual sacrifice of consumption) in peacetime – well that is just barking mad, there is no excuse for it.
There are other ways of dealing with the public relations problem of high taxation during wartime.
For example, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius had a public sale of his wife’s jewels and the gold and silver plates (and so on) from the Imperial Palace.
The reason for this was not financial, it did not raise much money, it was a public relations exercise.
“Look – this is a time of terrible barbarian invasions, we all have to make sacrifices, and the Imperial family are playing their part”.
Paul Marks: No, I did not deny that Article One, Section Ten of the Constitution of the United States lays down that States may only have gold and silver as a legal tender. I said that it does prohibit the States from making making anything other than gold and silver legal tender, just as prohibits the States from doing a number of other things, including coining money.
What I denied is that Article One, Section Ten binds the federal government in any way, and that your argument of the form “Section Ten prohibits the States from doing this thing, therefore it also prohibits the federal government from doing it as well” is complete nonsense. You might as well argue “Section 3 requires Senators to be at least 30 years old, therefore it prohibits the federal government from making anything other than gold or silver legal tender.” The mention of gold and silver makes the Section Ten argument look superficially plausible, but the logic is just as bogus.
If you want to make an argument that the federal government can only make gold and silver into legal tender, you can do so. But again, basing that argument on Article One, Section Ten does not work.
We will have to agree to disagree Deep Lurker.
As if no State can accept anything other than gold or silver as a tender in payment of debts, then the Federal fiat money would fall outside the District of Columbia (which may be no more than “ten square miles” in size) and military bases. California and Oregon carried on with gold even during the Civil War, and Constitutionally, every State should have.
By the way the Confederacy was WORSE than the Union on monetary matters (it inflated more), just as the Confederacy was worse on taxation (its income tax as more Progressive), and worse on regulations (“swarms of officials”) and government ownership.
But if you want something that limits the Federal Government – certainly.
The Tenth Amendment.
No where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that the Congress (or any part of the Federal Government) can issue fiat money or control a bank or system of banking.
So the Tenth Amendment means that it can NOT.
Of course, and I fully accept that you are in-practice correct, whilst the courts remain intellectually corrupt the Tenth Amendment will continue NOT be enforced.
There we do agree – in theory the Tenth Amendment stops the Federal Government doing most of things it does (“the common defence and general welfare” being the PURPOSE of the specific powers then granted to the Congress – there being no catch-all “general welfare spending power” as the courts falsely pretend that there is), but in practice (due to the judges) it does not.
Deep Lurker – I have not personally talked with any of the American Founding Fathers (even I am not that old – well not quite that old), but I have talked with one of the people who wrote the South African Constitution.
It will come as no shock at all to you, to be told that most of what the South African government now does, the Constitution of the place was meant to PREVENT.
The “judge problem” again.
That is why when looking at American States, or other countries, it is always important to find out how the judges are chosen.
For example, Mexico has a right to keep and bear arms in its Constitution of 1917.
The Mexican judges destroyed it by “interpretation” – thus meaning that ordinary Mexicans are helpless in the face of the vicious cartels and are murdered in very large numbers.
Democrats in the United States (such as the corrupt person who was just “elected” Governor of Arizona – and the corrupt person who was “elected” President of the United States in 2020) want to appoint that sort of judge.
Indeed they already are appointing this sort of judge.
Democrats and RINOs – it does not matter if someone has a “D” or an “R” after their name – what matters is if they are honest, and there are fewer and fewer honest judges.
The sons of Judge Samuel do not walk in his ways, they are corrupt – so the people will call out for a King (by some other name) who will “fight their battles for them”, only to fall into the trap described in the First Book of Samuel – Chapter Eight.
That monstrosity is the prime example of why you don’t delve into amending or rewriting constitutions lightly.
Constitutional language that has existed for some time has been interpreted and narrowed and examined closely by many courts, and so present courts are (in theory) somewhat constrained in how they can make new interpretations. Stare decisis (again, in theory) keeps the courts in their own lane.
But add new language, or, worse, write a new constitution longer than the Bible, and you open all of that new wording to the judges to bend to their own present purposes.
The new SA Constitution was an abomination made up of every law, rule, regulation, and desire of the new SA government – a progressive’s dream – but even those writers didn’t foresee how much further the courts would take it all.
bobby b – you put the matter well.
As for very “paranoid” Constitutions that are very careful to limit what government can do – one example used to try and attack them is the Constitution of Alabama (1901) which is incredibly long and “paranoid”.
However, it is partly very long because of amendments to it – and amendments to make the original document less “paranoid” have not turned out well.
For example, under the original document local government in Alabama could not borrow money or play various financial games – so an amendment was passed to allow the county around the largest city in Alabama (Birmingham) more freedom of action.
This freedom for local government to engage in financial games ended as any local politician in any country (full disclosure – I am a local politician in the U.K.) would have been able to predict.
Bankruptcy – billions of Dollars of debt for Jefferson country (Birmingham Alabama). Politicians, officials and Wall Street vermin (giving self interested “advice”) – all to blame.
You do not allow government, at any level, the power to borrow money and play financial games – any more than you give a baby razor blades to play with.
“Paranoia” is the correct attitude when dealing with any aspect of government, at any level.
Ditto Wall Street and other financial centre types.
Color me in as “not a fan” of any form of government or bureaucratic organization.
You want something that works? Don’t fall for the fallacy that you need some kind of permanent bureaucracy to solve your problems. All such entities are prone to “capture” by precisely the sort of people you don’t want running things, and they’ll then proceed to not only not do the job of that organization, but to use it to actively harm others in the name of personal aggrandizement.
See “CDC” and “FBI” for examples.
You see a problem in society? Don’t say “There oughta be a law…” and then legislate for such a thing. All you’re doing is throwing gasoline onto the bonfire that is government; stop, think about root causes, and then work to address those through other means. You don’t “solve problems” with government; all you do is create opportunities for sociopaths to take over.
Actually, I think I’d still set up these organizations, but I’d leave them powerless in real terms, and then use them to identify the people who want to take part in such things and then cull them from the population. Wannabe control-freak? Fine; here’s your “gummint job”, and a free sterilization so your obviously flawed genes don’t get passed on. No need to kill them; just turn ’em into actual drones that won’t reproduce, and then be entertained by the endless volume of “gummint” that ensues. You could probably heat your house with the useless paper they generate…