On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre looks at the amazing — and sinister — success of the World Economic Forum:
The World Economic Forum.
Every January, roughly 2,800 executives, finance ministers, and central bankers fly private jets into Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how you should use less fossil fuel, practice sustainability, and pursue “equitable growth”.
Klaus Schwab founded the Forum in 1971, and for 55 years it has perfected a singular trick: dressing up cartelization as collaboration. When BlackRock’s Larry Fink sits across from Christine Lagarde and three heads of state, the outcome is never deregulation. It is always managed markets, stakeholder capitalism, and what the Forum itself calls “public-private partnership”, which is the polite term for incumbent firms writing the rules their competitors must follow.
The 2030 Agenda the Forum relentlessly pushes centralizes energy allocation, monetary policy, and food production under supranational bodies that nobody elected and nobody can remove. Prices no longer signal actual scarcity; they rather reflect political priorities. Farmers in the Netherlands lost land to nitrogen regulations lobbied into existence by parties with no skin in Dutch agriculture. You absorbed that cost through food prices, quietly, with no vote cast.
The Forum redistributes access to governments, and access to governments is worth more than genuine productivity when regulations make genuine productivity nearly illegal. Regulatory capture operating at a global scale.
Hayek identified the fatal conceit in 1988: the belief that a committee of sufficiently credentialed people can allocate resources better than dispersed price signals. Davos proves him right annually, producing white papers while the people funding those flights, through taxes and inflation, get poorer.
