Every January, the richest people in the world get together to meet at Davos, Switzerland, at the world economic forum.
Also present are the best and the brightest in the Keynesian community, whose plane fares and hotel rooms are taken care of. These are the hired hands.
Every year, everyone hopes he is going to hear some great speech that will transform his business or his career. Everybody thinks at the end of the sessions that he must have missed the big speech, once again, the same way he missed it last year.
Austrian school economists are not invited to the festivities. That’s because they don’t think that Keynesian central planning and Keynesian central banking have much of a future. They keep saying so, and this message is not congenial to the World Economic Forum.
This year, the preliminary press releases about some of the major speeches indicate that the New World Order really is bordering on the New World Disorder. The acolytes of central planning are losing control, and they are now admitting it.
NETWORKS: PERSONAL VS. DIGITAL
The international old boy network is figuring out that they are being replaced by digital networks. They are like the specialist traders in the commodity futures pits, who for over a century screamed and used hand signals to communicate their buy and sell decisions. These people have been replaced by computer networks. The same thing is now happening to the New World Order.
You may think I am exaggerating. So, let me quote from an article from a representative of the New World Order, the Director of the European branch of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Keynesian model is based on the idea that committees of specialists are in a position to make better decisions than market forces are. Market competition just cannot get the job done, the Keynesians insist. Their problem is this: market competition now is based on computer networks, and the grand designs of the central planners and welfare state advocates are steadily losing ground. This has created great consternation in high places.
For example, labor markets are being revolutionized by computerization and robots which are funded by the very people who are showing up at Davos, and who are getting rich off of this development.
True revolutionary change is a rapid, fluid, and inherently indeterminate process. But there has been no indication so far that transformative economic change will lead to the types of policies — for example, a minimum basic income, greater investment in public goods, heightened multilateral cooperation, and closer regional integration — that would promote political stability.
In other words, computerization is creating international economic cooperation. Digital networks are spreading across geographical borders. But, horror of horrors, there is no international agency with sanctions comparable to those possessed by national governments. So, as trade, digital money, information, and almost everything else that makes the world go round is becoming multinational, the central planners are losing control. Central planning has always been limited to national sovereignties, and national sovereignties are losing control over the flow of funds, the flow of goods, and the flow of information.
Simultaneously, in reaction to this, a new domestic nationalism is upset about international trade. It is upset about open borders. So, instead of turning over power, as in the past, to representatives of the voters have decided to reclaim power from the old boy multinational network. The NWO sees this coming.
On the contrary, rather than embrace the new global connectivity, there is a yearning to build fences and walls, resist trade deals, and restore national independence.
(For the rest of my article, click the link.)
