The World Economic Forum (WEF) stands foursquare for stakeholder socialism. The U.S. government (via Trump) should criticize its meeting in Davos, Switzerland that begins today.
Did socialism ever at any time or any place improve the standard of living? Never!
In 1941 the average housewife was fully occupied in household chores. Most Americans did not have a washing machine or an electric dryer. The wife’s responsibilities included hand-washing many clothing items using a washboard and a tub. For this purpose, did socialism bring about soap powders like Oxydol, Duz and Tide? Did socialism invent the electric washers and dryers that replaced most washing by hand? Did it bring about the widespread adoption of washing machines and dryers at affordable prices? Did teams of economists and politicians descend on Davos or anyplace else to design, manufacture, advertise and distribute these inventions?
Was it socialism that freed the housewife from a lot of manual labor and allowed her to get a second job for the family? It wasn’t women’s lib that did this or a government law or an ERA. It was and still is capitalism that broadened the options open to married women and families and allowed this to happen.
In the handwashing days, local laundries sprang up that did sheets and pillowcases, among other items. Did socialism design these businesses, choose their locations, hire people, train employees, pay them a wage at which they were willing to work, and arrange pickup and delivery schedules? Not on your life. Did socialism arrange friendships so that one wife with a car would drive her friend to and from a local laundromat? Not a chance.
In 1938, iceboxes were half the market for home storage of food and refrigerators were the other half. Icemen delivered ice to homes, and their vehicles were often horse-drawn. Refrigerators were only 1 percent of the market in 1925. Did socialism see to this rapid growth? Or did socialism actually hinder this growth?
Socialism should be a dead issue, a dead duck, but it is not. The socialists cannot shake loose of their quest for centralized control of economic decisions. The latest Davos Manifesto buries this quest in a mixture of goals, platitudes, faulty assumptions and distortions. What a mess it is! It is wall-to-wall nonsense! There’s little point in addressing it point by point. Its statements about what companies should be and do comprise a total business ethics, but it is an ethics with no definite free market guidelines. It’s an ethics divorced from the real problems of profitably providing goods and services that people want and can pay for.
The 2020 Davos Manifesto is a blueprint for killing off shareholder capitalism and replacing it with stakeholder socialism, which it misnames “stakeholder capitalism“.
The Davos Manifesto avoids all mention of enforcement or bringing about its measures. For stakeholder socialism to have “teeth”, a real impact, its guidelines will have to be solidified into a large range of measures enforced by government power. This Manifesto calls for a huge suppression of business freedoms. But the freedom of individuals to make their own decisions is the essential and necessary environment for rising living standards.
Ignoring all history, Davos and the WEF stand for the futile hope of improving living standards through the centralized decisions of governmenta and the reduction of individual freedom to make business decisions. The wrong-headed premise is that technocrats, bureaucrats and politicians can and will produce improving living standards. Failures of socialism in this respect like the USSR, Cuba, Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, Great Britain, the New Deal, East Germany, North Korea, and Eastern Europe are ignored.
One thing is certain beyond all doubt. If global warming or climate change or any other catastrophe happens or is going to happen or has a chance of happening, Greta and all the rest of those attending the Davos meeting, including 50 or so leaders of governments, are not, in general, going to be the ones that solve or mitigate the problem; certainly not as long as they ignore socialism’s failures and free market capitalism’s successes. They will not be the ones who even recognize what the real problems of mankind are as opposed to frivolous ideas of what we face.
2:17 pm on January 20, 2020
