Davos is a corporatist racket

[WestVirginiaRebel]

CapX:

This will be the last time anti-globalisers protest at the World Economic Forum in Davos. From 2016, the ministers, chief executives, columnists and assorted quangocrats who gather at the Swiss resort won’t see so much as a stray dreadlock: eco-protesters say the meeting is no longer worth picketing.

 

You can see why they might feel conflicted. Davos is a place where powerful people pick up consultancies and directorships and international posts. Left-wingers rightly resent this. What they see, in Marxist terms, is a gang of rentiers coming together to devise new means to live off the sweat of the workers. Against a background of dazzling, empty slopes – there are no skiers, because every chalet has been hired by an NGO or a multi-national – the few hatch schemes against the many.

 

Yet, when it comes to free markets, Davos Man is often on the same side as the Lefties. He derives most of his income, directly or indirectly, from state patronage. If he is in the private sector – and he is more likely to be a lobbyist, politician or bureaucrat than a businessman – he’ll be an instinctive monopolist, keen to persuade ministers and officials to raise barriers against his potential rivals. (I say “he”, though his female equivalent can also be found stalking the conference rooms in her sharp trouser suit.)

 

Some Lefties, in short, may finally be grasping the difference between being anti-business and being anti-market. Others refuse to see any distinction, insisting, with a kind of mulish narcissism, that if A and B both separately disagree with them, then A and B are, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable.

 

For the record, most Right-wingers heartily dislike the Davos racket. The only reason we don’t demonstrate in the slush alongside the Occupy crowd is that most of us have jobs. We know in our bones that Davos Man despises us and our values. As Samuel Huntingdon once put it, the delegates “view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the élite’s global operations.”

 

All right, you say, but surely it’s useful for powerful people to exchange ideas and learn from each other’s mistakes. Well, yes; but this lot rarely seem to learn. Whatever the problem, their preferred solution is always to establish a global bureaucracy staffed by people like themselves. Obviously, they don’t put it like that. “The stability of the global economy” is a much prettier phrase than “a juicy public sector post for me”.

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The annual wealthy liberal guilt get-together.