Unohda Great Reset. Great Escape is here

Source: Reason.com

"The coronavirus pandemic has no parallel in modern history. It is a defining moment."

These are the words of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Director Klaus Schwab in COVID-19: The Great Reset , in the 2020 book he co-authored with Thierry Malleret.

"Many of us wonder when things will return to normal," they write in the book's introduction. "The short answer is: never."

At the most recent WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Schwab set the tone for the conference with a glowing introduction from the keynote speaker : Xi Jinping, President of China and Chairman of the Communist Party of China.

"Major economies should see the world as one community... and should coordinate the objectives, intensity and pace of fiscal and monetary policies," Xi said in a speech to the WEF.

This vision of a united globe and a coordinated economy governed by experts captures Schwab's vision of a post-COVID world. "We need to redefine the social contract," Schwab said The Great Resetin  2020 WEF Charter at the launch event .

These grand declarations, the ominous book title and Schwab's strange personal style have made many people speculate that the "great reset" is part of a conspiracy by the global financial elite and politicians to destroy the planet so that they can more easily set up a one world government or even a COVID designed for this purpose.

I'm not buying it. Long-range, global conspiracies require a level of coordination and common purpose that are likely to be quickly exposed and disintegrate, especially in the networked age. Instead of spinning our wheels in search of a secret agenda, look right outside.

"I think we're moving from short term to long term, from equity capitalism to stakeholder capitalism," Schwab said at his 2020 book event  .

What X, the WEF, and people like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have in common is that they favor so-called stakeholder capitalism, a euphemism for getting corporations to respond in the first place. They want to reorganize corporate boards to include representatives from labor, environmental and social justice groups. Warren proposed a bill that would 40 per cent board seats in large companies would be elected by employees. In China, the state simply owns or controls a majority stake in most of the country's largest companies.

The WEF and many national leaders believe that global coordination and governance are essential to tackle global problems such as climate change, international economic instability and future pandemics. Ironically, it is not only Schwab's conspiracy critics who place too much faith in the central planners who control the globe.

The crucial flaw in Schwab's theory is that it places too much faith in the ability of governments to redesign society in ways that better serve the needs and aspirations of all citizens. He wants to  rethinking capitalism, escaping the "tyranny of GDP growth", so that companies create "goods and services for the common good" instead of "maximising profits".

But the phrase "common good" refers to his fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism, which is nothing new: central planners were already using this idea to maximise their own power at the expense of individual freedom in the 1940s, when Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom magazine , which sold more than two million copies.

"The well-being and happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less and more," Hayek writes, "[and] depends on a great many things that can be provided in infinitely diverse combinations."

Each of the billions of people inhabiting this planet has unique goals and aspirations that are impossible to reduce to a coherent whole, be it GDP or whatever supposedly holistic measure the WEF wants to replace it with, as Hayek and his mentor Ludwig von Mises argued. Profits are a signal to entrepreneurs and investors that they are satisfying the diverse needs of their customers.

"One of the great lessons of the last five centuries in Europe and America is this: acute crises contribute to increasing state power," write Schwab and Thierry The Great Reset. " This has always been the case, and there is no reason why it should be any different with the COVID-19 pandemic."

They are right that war is the health of the state , as the writer Randolph Bourne once said, and the government's response to COVID has been similar to a military conflict in terms of cost and the chaos it has caused. World Wars I, II and the Great Depression ushered in a powerful modern welfare and warfare state that irreversibly transformed America and the world.

But is the permanent expansion of state power predicted by Schwab, which would worsen the world in the long term, really inevitable?

I am more optimistic this time, largely due to the power of technology to offer everyday citizens a way out. Instead of a grand reset, where sclerotic 20th century institutions accumulate more and more power, I think we will enter a... Into the great escape .

This is possible because technological progress is beyond the capacity of the state to control and regulate. The government has no choice but to abandon its efforts to build physical and metaphorical walls. Technology can be designed to facilitate decentralisation, where the flow of money and information cannot be controlled. Ideas are born from the bottom up.

Governments and international bodies are expected to steer every major enterprise towards some broadly agreed 'common good', assuming that the many institutions that have agreed to the COVID-19 reaction are capable of dealing competently with the planet's most difficult problems.

I hope that, having seen the huge failure of governments in the face of a global crisis, many more people will look for a different approach.

Everywhere there is evidence of great compulsion: the US the population is moving out of expensive, restrictive and poorly governed states and cities through increased telecommuting, government-run schools by necessity , cryptocurrencies an increase in the use of and encrypted technology boosted by popularity . , private communication platforms and the growing number of independent voices. dimension in an increasingly decentralised media.

Hayek called central planning "fatal conceit" and said that "the curious task of economics is to show people how little they really know about what they think they can plan".

And Schwab even touches on this idea, writing that "complexity limits our knowledge and understanding of issues; it may be, therefore, that today's increasing complexity exceeds the ability of politicians in particular - and decision-makers in general - to be well informed about decisions."

He calls this quantum policies , but never fully explains how policy makers can realistically overcome this dilemma.

Perhaps confidence our institutions is at an all-time low because the people who run them are trying to do the impossible: plan the future of billions of people.

"Humiliating human pride as it is", Hayek wrote freedom in the Constitution, " we must recognise that the progress and even the survival of civilisation depends on the possibility of accidents happening as much as possible. “ Policy makers should and should focus more on securing the freedom that allows for such decentralised experimentation and accidental progress.

The fear of a great escape - of losing control - is understandable, because there are systemic risks that could destroy human civilisation, including future natural or man-made pandemics, runaway inflation and ecological disaster.

"Small boats may not survive the storm, but a giant ship is strong enough to weather the storm," Xi said in a WEF speech in January.

But if we're all stuck in the same big ship in the same storm, we'll all fall with it when the winds finally pick up.

Centralised power itself carries an existential risk: a bad intervention applied to the whole world economy at once can bring down the whole system. But decentralised power and the modest trial and error of the market and decentralised government bring progress to the scenes and start with a smaller risk of total destruction.

Schwab, Xi and central planners around the world yearn that when the rights of the individual are protected first, others follow.

Source: Reason.com