“You have this anti-system movement. What we are seeing is a revolution against the system. So fixing the present system is not enough. Now there is of course [an] anti-system, which is called libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives. It’s dismantling the system.”
— Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum
Most men are written before they are born, their personalities and plans typecast and scripted long before they ever have a chance to pretend to craft themselves like gods. Someone else has already thought their thoughts, dreamed their dreams, and foreseen the path they will choose to tread.
Although prefigured, men still have choices to make. Neither claims of necessity nor ripples of destiny can liberate a man from the responsibility of his own freedom. In truth, man’s liberation begins when he admits he is not God and understands that he is ultimately responsible for the twists and turns in his own life. Man’s emancipation – fueled by the light of his reason, conviction, and choice — must always shine through the shadow of his limitations.
Yet, when some men begin to think of themselves without limitation — as something akin to gods capable of crafting themselves and the entire world anew to reign and rule — that is when, ironically, such men will be most ripe to forsake the freedom of others. These “elites” treat their fellow men not as free and equal beings but as tools to be used and resources to be rendered, as bricks to be stacked atop more bricks, as sheep to be fleeced and goats to be sacrificed for the greater good of society and the construction of a new Babel.
The elite always claim to speak for the common good while cloaking their agenda in the language of cooperation and partnership. Yet, behind the curtain, their disdain for individual liberty remains. Liberty threatens their system. Liberty threatens their plans. So liberty must be branded as a danger to the future of civilization and even humanity itself.
Just ask Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum. His recent lament regarding the dangers of libertarianism to his system of stakeholder capitalism with its public/private partnerships fits the script almost perfectly. Some typecast Schwab as a James Bond villain, but I would humbly suggest he is more akin to an antagonist such as Ayn Rand’s Ellsworth Toohey.
Indeed, long before Schwab branded libertarianism the enemy, Rand, the libertarian hero and Russian-born novelist, seems to have already written the script on Schwab and his World Economic Forum.
In an essay entitled “The New Fascism: Rule By Consensus,” Rand prefigures the rise of the 21st-century globalist liberal elite with their calls for a mixed economy of pull, privilege, and partnership wrapped up in the language of compromise, cooperation, and consensus:
“The formula by which the sacrificial animals are to be fooled and tamed is being repeated today with growing insistence and frequency: businessmen, it is said, must regard the government, not as an enemy, but as a ‘partner.’ The notion of a ‘partnership’ between a private group and public officials, between business and government, between production and force, is a linguistic corruption (an ‘anti-concept’) typical of a fascist ideology—an ideology that regards force as the basic element and ultimate arbiter in all human relationships.
“’Partnership” is an indecent euphemism for ‘government control.’ There can be no partnership between armed bureaucrats and defenseless private citizens who have no choice but to obey. What chance would you have against a ‘partner’ whose arbitrary word is law, who may give you a hearing (if your pressure group is big enough), but who will play favorites and bargain your interests away, who will always have the last word and the legal ‘right’ to enforce it on you at the point of a gun, holding your property, your work, your future, your life in his power? Is that the meaning of ‘partnership’?
But there are men who may find such a prospect attractive; they exist among businessmen as among every other group or profession: the men who dread the competition of a free market and would welcome an armed “partner” to extort special advantages over their abler competitors; men who seek to rise, not by merit but by pull, men who are willing and eager to live not by right, but by favor.”
Rand continues, mocking the liberals too socialistically naive to see where their systems lead:
“An essential aspect of the socialistically inclined mentality is the desire to obliterate the difference between the earned and the unearned…To a concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment, primitive socialist mentality—a mentality that clamors for a ‘redistribution of wealth’ without any concern for the origin of wealth—the enemy is all those who are rich, regardless of the source of their riches. Such mentalities, those aging, graying ‘liberals,’ who had been the ‘idealists’ of the 30’s, are clinging desperately to the illusion that we are moving toward some sort of socialist state inimical to the rich and beneficial to the poor—while frantically evading the spectacle of what kind of rich are being destroyed and what kind are flourishing under the system they, the ‘liberals,’ have established. The grim joke is on them: their alleged ‘ideals’ have paved the way, not toward socialism, but toward fascism. The collector of their efforts is not the helplessly, brainlessly virtuous ‘little man’ of their flat-footed imagination and shopworn fiction, but the worst type of predatory rich, the rich-by-force, the rich-by-political-privilege, the type who has no chance under capitalism, but who is always there to cash in on every collectivist ‘noble experiment.’
It is the creators of wealth … who are destroyed under any form of statism—socialist, communist, or fascist; it is the parasites…who are the privileged ‘elite’ and the profiteers of statism, particularly of fascism.”
Klaus Schwab is right to fear libertarianism as a threat to his project. Not only is liberty rising in places like Argentina with the election of Javier Milei, but so too are the ideas of liberty becoming more widespread by the day on public forums like Elon Musk’s Twitter/X platform.
Even worse, libertarians foresaw the likes of Schwab long before he came on the scene. His role was written many moons before his time under the sun. He isn’t the first, nor will he be the last, to play God. Schwab’s enemy – a widespread belief in individual liberty, responsibility, emancipation, and personal salvation – was, is, and always will be an ultimate and eternal limitation on men’s tyrannical attempts to erect a new Babel.
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and is currently the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL M-F 12 p.m. - 3 p.m. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances as well as any feedback, please email newsandviews931@gmail.com.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819news.com.
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