Posts Tagged → world economic forum
The beautiful power of a free market guitar
A lot of the recent discussion and reporting about the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is how hard the participants there are trying to centralize decision making, to aggregate power into as few hands as possible, and to control the choices that individual people have available to them all around the world. This effort to concentrate power and decision making in the hands of elites runs opposite and directly against the democratic forms of government that many people around the globe have fought and died to achieve.
Places like India, France, Britain, Israel, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, the Philippines, and of course my home country of America, have all offered their citizens a maximum amount of personal freedom and opportunity. People living there can make all kinds of choices about what they want to read, to say, to wear, to eat, what kind of job they want to try, what kinds of products they want to try and create and sell. And that last part, the creating and selling part, is really at the heart of democracy. Because free markets offer choices not just in economic spheres, but which naturally blend into our own personal lives.
When a person, you the reader here, for instance, feels personally fulfilled by fully following your natural talent and curiosity, and by fulfilling your creative spirit, often also followed by greatly improving your physical living conditions, then you become a maximally happy person. This pursuit of happiness is one of the main reasons that America exists, and it is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. A nation filled with happy people is a miracle, because it is so rare in human history. So we see that free markets create the most happy, most fulfilled individuals, who are creative, educated, and opinionated.
And we also see with the WEF that the wealthiest people on Planet Earth are now scheming and trying to take that happiness away. The WEF people do not want “little people” individuals to make their own decisions. Instead, they want centralized decision making for all of us, by a very small number of ultra wealthy people. They do not support democracy or free choice or you having an opinion that threatens their power.
I want to share a neat related video with you. To me it is powerful because it touches on this subject of an individual who follows his dream to make the best guitars possible within the free markets that the world allows. He succeeds within the international guitar market, but because of a natural resource constraint – the almost complete loss of ebony trees, necessary for making guitar necks and frets – he takes a big risk, makes some big sacrifices, and ends up playing an even bigger and more positive role in the world.
Bob Taylor, of Taylor Guitars, uses careful market-driven management of rare ebony trees and their surrounding forests to create the conditions necessary for conserving the vast African rainforest jungle those trees grow in. When the local people no longer need to poach ebony trees to sell on the black market, they become protectors of the ebony trees. Economics and free markets keep ebony trees alive, and growing for the future, as well as the richly diverse jungle habitat in which ebony trees grow. This is powerful stuff only achievable by free markets.
The same dynamic is also at play with trophy hunting in Africa, where wealthy hunters pay much more to kill wild game than that same animal is worth as bush meat to the local populations. Because the locals get the meat from the trophy animal (99% of the trophy animal is immediately donated to locals, the hunter and the safari camp getting the other 1%) anyhow, and they also get the hunting and tourism-related jobs from the international visitors who want to see and hunt wildlife, the incentive shifts away from poaching and market hunting to the locals then protecting and conserving the wild game they once saw only as a meal. Again, powerful natural resource conservation as a direct result of free markets.
Long live free markets, personal choice, personal accountability, and personal reward for hard work and risk taking. May the World Economic Forum fail in its effort to end our choices and to make us “own nothing.”
Here is the Taylor Guitar video. I hope it speaks to you like it speaks to me.
(and here is the ten years later video, which is about ebony tree planting and husbandry)
The Real Crisis at Davos is WEF’s Tidal Wave of Bullsh*t
Some people are addicted to adrenaline, to crisis, and to being always on the move, hopping from one phone call to the next to nonstop meetings, followed by the inevitable “Gosh I am so crazed and busy, I am soooo stressed.” As if they did not do it to themselves, victims of their own bipolar, egomaniacal, or cutthroat competitiveness.
These people may be Michelin Man full of peanuts, but at least they are trying to be productive, in their own way. They may bother everyone around them, try to hijack most projects and processes around them, and be the kind of person you try hard to avoid in the parking garage at the end of the day, but they are probably a net-positive force. Maybe by a slim margin, but they are still on the positive side of the equation.
Then there are people for whom shouting “Crisis!” from the rooftops is a purposeful scam. So they can be in control, of the rest of us. These people use the latest manufactured fake so-called “crisis” to make end-runs around collective decision making processes and procedures that would normally bog down over or outright reject such a claim of “crisis” due to a lack of evidence.
In the past sixty years there have been a bunch of fake crises, most of them some shade of environmental or another. Paul Ehrlich (see below) was predicting the end of the world (really, like the entire world would come to a cataclysmic halt) back in the 1960s and 1970s. And when the world did not end in the 1970s, he predicted its demise in the 1980s, 1990s and even in the 2020s! He is still at it, saying pretty much the same thing.
Obviously, the world has not ended and Paul Ehrlich has been wrong the entire time. His crisis is fake.
Paul Ehrlich may be wrong, but nevertheless he is persistent. To his credit, he is not persistently crazy, but rather consistently smart. Like another “the end of the world is nigh!” false messiah, Al Gore, Ehrlich has learned that a foolish soup of the intellectually gullible and the politically mal-aligned reward him whenever he steps up to a podium to declare that capitalism, Americans, gas stoves, cars, whatever the false issue du jour is, are all going to result in the end of the world.
Today the Neo Nazi League World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland has assembled a who’s-who of villains, career politicians, fakirs, weirdos, sycophants, coelacanths, investors, psychics, and actual real Nazis who want to own your body and your soul. The literal Nazi skinhead of the WTF WEF, Klaus Schwab, has declared 2023 to be a year of “polycrisis.”
According to WTF head Klaus Barbie Schwab, there are now so many crises attacking us all at once that the entire Western democratic system of self-rule and self-decision making and self-problem solving must be ended, so that he and his little cadre of Neo Nazi technocrats can fix everything. Yes, Herr Fuhrer Schwab is sounding the alarm on a whole array of (utterly fake) crises that demand America come to a screeching halt. No more gas cars, no more gas stoves, no more meat…”You will own nothing and you will be happy” he says, meaning it more now than ever before.
Herr Schwab’s fake climate and gas stove and environmental alarmism is obviously fake, but his cadre’s lust for power and control is not fake. It is real. Within the WEF WTF’s tsunami of bullshit crisis is a very serious threat to humanity, and this is a real threat and potential crisis that we have seen over and over before: Mass murderers Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, the Democrat Party in 1860-1865 and again now, Julius Caesar, the Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar, and a thousand other violent tyrants who have claimed the right to govern us absolutely because of some “crisis” or other.
The WTF WEF people may be a bunch of evil thugs who we must resist at all costs, but they do get credit for unabashedly living a pimped out high end lifestyle in broad daylight. Like high and mighty feudal princes of old, they don’t listen to a word of their own demands that they place on the rest of us. They have hundreds of jet airplanes taking individual members to Davos, some of the flights being only twelve miles, with enormous outsized plumes of carbon emissions to each member’s sole ownership and credit. And they have the highest price prostitutes possible (I am not talking about the CNN, NPR, BBC staff, but actual hookers), the best alcohol and the most exotic real meat and shellfish food possible.
There may be a tsunami crisis of BS at the WTF WEF World Economic Forum, but wow, those people nonetheless know how to live high on the hog! Without an apology to anyone…
They must think We, The People are a bunch of idiots.
August 13, 1970 edition of the Orlando Sentinel citing grand environmental fakir Paul Ehrlich. In the intervening fifty three years, none of Ehrlich’s dire predictions have happened. But Herr Klaus Schwab, Al Gore and yes, even Herr Ehrlich are still peddling the same b*llshit
