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Davos 2021: No Property, No Market

Davos, Foro, propiedad, agenda, WFE

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Last week, from January 24 to 29, the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) took place in Davos, Switzerland, in a mixed format, partially online, given the ongoing pandemic.

As usual, different personalities from certain states and political-economic and financial elites met. These included Xi Jinping, Ursula von der Leyen, Tedros Adhanom, Pedro Sánchez, Angela Merkel, and Emmanuel Macron.

Clearly, Davos’ main theme had to be the coronavirus coded as SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19, but there was also a certain emphasis on the so-called Great Reset (according to their propagandistic justifications, it is necessary for “a better world”) and on the so-called “sustainable development goals” of the UN “Agenda 2030.”

All this is linked to certain ideological slogans proposed from Davos and other elite meetings, such as the mythologized “climate change” which, as we know, is not a problem subject to a free objective study by science but a prelude to scientistic pretexts with a marked political ideology as an underlying factor.

In any case, it is not the purpose of this article to analyze the agenda in depth and detail, but to focus on one of the objectives of this kind of project, taking the opportunity, by the way, to clear up misunderstandings about the economy in the face of these “contests”.

Private property, subtle but head-on attacked

No one has proclaimed on Davos, nor through the online videoconferencing system they have used, a slogan in the purest Chavista style, whether it was Hugo Chávez’s “¡Exprópiese!” or Pablo Iglesias’ “Expropriating is democracy” (the grandson of Manuel Iglesias, not the founder of the PSOE). It is true.

However, if one takes the time to consult certain articles and audiovisual resources that the WEF itself has disseminated through social media, one can read certain indications of the above, easy to understand if we are in a state of alertness and caution.

In a short video from Davos on predictions for the year 2030, it is said that, by then, “we will own nothing”, while, in an article whose authorship can be attributed to London University professor Guy Standing, specialized in development research, the following is stated:

“[…] the land, the air, the water, the landscape, the natural resources, the social amenities that society inherits, the data we produce and our cultural institutions belong to everyone and, naturally, to no one. They are neither state nor private property.”

The above can be described as utopian, as “nothing belongs to anyone” (just as others argued that “public money” did not belong to anyone). Similarly, others may wonder about the later claims of “public-private partnership,” but we will clarify this in the next section.

Without property, there’s no freedom nor market

A somewhat slower and more meditated analysis of the above will allow us to see that they are investigating new strategies to announce and carry out a greater invasion of the “social sovereignty” (within which there is, of course, the individual, with a negative freedom in its Austrian-Thomistic conception), of society (a stumbling block for statism).

In fact, let us bear in mind that we are talking about the same purpose that is already presented to us with the health-pandemic and environmental excuse. Faced with a casuistry, it is possible to take advantage of it to reinforce the intervention of the state in the economy, strangling society politically and, therefore, economically.

New taxes, new items of expenditure, increased debt, contributions to a chimerical idea of freedom of movement, threats to freedom of savings, invasions of privacy, complications for the flow of capital, imposition of new “official truths” by means of social engineering.

For this, collaborators are needed (beyond suppressing all the counterweights that could be assumed if we assimilate and support the principle of subsidiarity in its Christian conception), and not only that which allows them to exercise the absolute and exclusive monopoly of violence.

Leaving aside the existence of media with direct subsidies or state ownership, it is worth remembering that large corporations are more concerned with political interests and benefits than with attending to the needs of society within the natural and spontaneous mechanism of the market.

This is what has happened, for example, with the American Big Tech, in absolute collusion with the so-called Deep State and benefiting from some direct subsidy or tax exemption. They have not given up any promotion of the “woke” agenda; neither have they given up any totalitarian censor trials.

So, if you read the term “public-private”, don’t get excited (unfortunately). What will be promoted is the so-called “crony capitalism,” which does not fit either with the positive conception of capitalism in Centesimus Annus (St. John Paul II) or with the definition that any follower of the Austrian School could give.

What is going to be developed is a kind of export of the Chinese economic model, which is still socialism in that the state is quite involved and the main companies are linked to the political power (in this case, the CCP). In fact, monopoly and oligopoly are not consolidated by spontaneity.

That said, respect for market freedom is absolutely non-existent. For this to develop, the individual’s natural right to property (through which he may have room for maneuver and privacy) must be recognized, taking for granted that many owners can and must emerge, something that no one wants here.

Ángel Manuel García Carmona

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