The Elitists Who Want to Rule the World

Klaus Schwab, who founded the World Economic Forum in 1971, is its head. The WEF organizes a large conference each year in Davos, Switzerland. It brings together thousands of international leaders, diplomats, and experts from various fields to share ideas about the best way to run the world. Schwab, who opened the conference this year, said that the future was not only happening. Our powerful, global community is building our future. We can improve the condition of the world. Two conditions must be met. First, we must act as all stakeholders in larger communities. This means that we not only serve our own self-interest but also serve the community. We call this stakeholder accountability. Second, we cooperate.”

The call for action is made by elitists all over the globe. They create international and national order mechanisms to ensure that citizens are controlled by them. Schwab has even decoded the term “stakeholder capitalism”, his favourite. His writings were in Time Magazine, October 2020. “Free markets, competition, and trade can create such wealth that they could theoretically make everybody better off if it was possible to do so.” This would mean following Greta Thunberg’s #MeToo and Black Lives Matter examples. “Building… a virtuous Economic System” would be required. Companies would have to abandon their core mission, which is serving shareholders, in order to answer questions like, “What is company X’s gender pay gap?” Are there people with diverse backgrounds who were employed and promoted in the company? How has the company been able to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions?

The perverse understanding of how decentralized systems work is the basis for all this arrogance. Schwab admits that free markets are more prosperous than any other system in history. However, free markets don’t come from a hierarchy. They are not an imposition. The result of decades of evolution societal progress was free markets: incremental recognition that private ownership is the best incentive to work and innovation, gradual acceptance that individual rights provide the only option to perpetual conflict and step-by-step acceptance of the fact that decentralized knowledge sources are more extensive and deeper than those centralized. Because of F.A. Hayek stated that they were “a result of cumulative growth without having ever been designed by any single mind.”

Schwab and his cohorts believe that such an evolutionary approach is the wrong one, so it must end. He and his rationalist friends — bright businessmen, ambitious politicians, striving bureaucrats, and myopic specialists — will end the world’s problems if we give them power. More likely, so long that they take power under the name of stakeholders to which they are not answerable.

It is ironic that the way the elitists perceive themselves has been one of the most important paradoxes in recent years. The elitists believe that their solutions were ineffective because the people of the world are not willing to hear them. But the truth is, citizens see the failures as the result of ill-conceived prescriptions. But the elitists will not relinquish their power and continue pushing forward utopian ideas at the expense or those they claim to be serving.