Authored by Thomas DiLorenzo via LewRockwell.com,
“The Great Reset” is the latest deceptive euphemism for totalitarian socialism that is being promoted by yet another group of wealthy corporate elitists who think they can centrally plan the entire world economy. They are essentially the ideological heirs of Frederick Engels and his intellectual puppet Karl Marx. “The Great Reset” follows in the rhetorical footsteps of such euphemisms for socialism as “economic democracy,” “social justice,” “liberation theology,” “progressivism,” “market socialism” (an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp” or “military intelligence”), “environmentalism,” “fighting climate change,” “sustainable development,” and “green new deal,” to mention just a few.
The main figure of this movement is wealthy German engineer Klaus Schwab, founder of the “World Economic Forum,” who champions what he calls “transhumanism,” the integration of nanotechnology into the human body so that humans can be controlled remotely by the state. As Ron Paul has noted, “Included in Schwab’s proposal for surveillance [of every citizen] is his idea to use brain scans and nanotechnology to predict, and if necessary, prevent, individuals’ future behavior . This means that anyone whose brain is ‘scanned’ could have his . . . [constitutional] rights violated because a government bureaucrat determines the individual is going to commit a crime.”
Placed in the hands of politicians, this would create a level of totalitarianism the Soviets could only have dreamed of. In other words, Schwab is reminiscent of that famous twentieth-century German who also fantasized about creating a master race and ruling the world.
This is nothing new, Antony Mueller points out, as eugenics, which was all the rage among so many ruling class elitists of the early twentieth century “is now called transhumanism.” Among the most prominent late nineteenth-and twentieth-century eugenicists were H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Darwin’s son Leonard, John Maynard Keynes, Irving Fisher, Winston Churchill, and Bill Gates, Sr. Bill Gates, Jr. is an enthusiastic funding source for “transhumanism” research and, like his father, is fond of eugenics.
During a recent “Ted” talk Gates, Jr. complained that “The world today has 6.8 billion people . .. that’s headed up to about 9 billion.” Have no fear, he said, because if “we” do “a really great job on vaccines [with anti-fertility drugs? Poisons?] health care, reproductive health services [including abortion?], we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.” That in turn will lower carbon dioxide levels on the planet and address “climate change” as well, said Gates.
Keynes was treasurer of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society and director of the Eugenics Society of London. He called eugenics “the most important and significant branch of sociology” [Eugenics Archive]. Irving Fisher, icon of the Chicago School of Economics, literally wrote the book on the subject, entitled Eugenics.
When he was the British Home Secretary (1910-1911) Winston Churchill advocated “the confinement, segregation, and sterilization of a class of persons contemporarily described as the ‘feeble minded’” [International Churchill Society]. His stated goal was “the improvement of the British breed”. Accordingly, he supported “compulsory detention of the mentally inadequate”; the “sterilization of the unfit”; and “proper labor colonies” for “tramps and wastrels.”
World Government, Anyone?
Antony Mueller also wrote of how the first attempt to create some kind of global governing institution to centrally plan the world was the League of Nations (1920), followed by the United Nations in 1945 under the leadership of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill. Although Churchill was fond of citing F.A. Hayek, especially The Road to Serfdom, FDR was essentially a fascist whose domestic policies differed very little from fascist Italy and Germany, and of course Stalin was a mass-murdering communist.
Churchill was voted out of office and replaced by the socialist Labor Party’s Clement Atlee in 1945. The three “allied powers” of World War II were then led by two socialists and the political heir to FDR’s economic fascism, Harry Truman.
The U.N. immediately created UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the World Health Organization (WHO), whose stated goal was to “manipulate human development.” Eugenicist Julian Huxley was the first director of UNESCO who lamented that Marxism’s attempt to create a new type of human (“socialist man”) had already failed because it lacked a “biological component.”
Neo-Malthusianism and the Birth of “Environmentalism”
[S[ocialism . . . is . . . the society that must emerge if humanity is to cope with . . . the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment . . . . [C]apitalism must be monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final social order capitalism.”
– Robert Heilbroner, “After Capitalism,” The New Yorker, Sept. 10, 1990
The above quotation by socialist economist, the late Robert Heilbroner, was written in the context of an article that lamented and mourned the worldwide collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The great debate between capitalism and socialism was over, he said, and Ludwig von Mises was right about socialism all along, said a man who had spent the past half century promoting socialism in his teaching, speaking, and writing. But do not despair, he told his fellow socialists, for there is one more trick up our sleeves, namely, the Trojan Horse of achieving socialism under the guise of “environmentalism.”
The basic strategy was then, as it is now, to constantly frighten the gullible public with predictions of The End of the World from environmental catastrophe unless we abandon capitalism and adopt socialist central planning. This has always been the one constant theme of the environmentalist movement (not to be confused with the conservation movement which is actually interested in the health of the planet and the humans who occupy it) since the 1960s. It ignores the fact that the twentieth-century socialist countries like the Soviet Union and China had by far the worse environmental problems on the planet, orders of magnitude worse than in the capitalist countries.
In 2019 the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) published “Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions” by Myron Ebell and Steven Milloy. The study is a compilation of reprints of newspaper and magazine articles that illustrate the seemingly never-ending false scare stories spread by the “environmentalistS” and their media puppets. The real founder of the modern environmental movement was entomologist Paul Ehrlich, not Rachel Carson, author of the widely-cited novel, Silent Spring. Ehrlich was supported by a group of wealthy socialists known as “The Club of Rome.” His book, The Population Bomb, was incredibly successful, selling millions in just a couple of years, warning that the entire world will soon be destroyed by capitalism unless it is ended NOW and “severe” regulatory measures are taken.
The first article displayed by CEI was from the November 17, 1967 Salt Lake Tribune announcing that Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford said the “time of famines” is upon us and will be “disastrous” by 1975 because of over-population. Such talk was a resurrection of the hoary, thoroughly-discredited Malthusianism of the nineteenth century, cloaked in the words of “modern science.” Birth control may have to be made “involuntary, said Ehrlich, and accompanied by “putting sterilization agents into staple foods and drinking water.” The Catholic church needs to be “pressured” by government to support his, said Ehrlich, who became one of the most celebrated, rich, and famous academics of the twentieth century.
The New York Times quoted Ehrlich on August 10, 1969, as predicting that “unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam n 20 years.”
Ice Age Hysteria of the ‘70s
Global cooling that would create a new ice age was the next scare tactic. An April 18, 1970 Boston Globe article quoted “pollution expert” James P. Lodge, Jr. as saying “air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century.”
Ehrlich chimed in, naturally. An October 6, 1970 Redlands, CA Daily Facts article quoted him as predicting that “the oceans will be . . . dead . . . in less than a decade” because of pollution caused by capitalism. And they will be frozen over. A July 9, 1971 Washington Post article quoted a Dr. S.I. Rasool of NASA and Columbia University who said that pollution will cause an average temperature drop of as much as ten degrees that “could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!”
On December 3, 1972 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent a letter to President Nixon predicting a “global deterioration of climate” never before seen by “civilized mankind” that would lead to a new ice age.
A January 29, 1974 article in The Guardian was headlined, “Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast.” This was followed by a June 24, 1974 Time magazine article warning that “telltale signs are everywhere” that we were already in a new ice age. Global cooling hysteria was still alive and well in 1978. A January 5, 1978 New York Times article was headlined, “International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere.
Pivoting on a Dime: Global Warming Hysteria
By 1988, after more than a decade of warnings of a new ice age unless capitalism is destroyed failed to produce the desired result, many of these same “scientists” and bureaucrats all of a sudden began warning of an earthly apocalypse caused by global warming. The “greenhouse effect” of pollution was discovered/invented, with nationwide warnings like one in the June 24 Miami News declaring that “’88 On Way to be Hottest Ever as World Temperatures Up Sharply.” James Hansen of NASA warned in the Lansing State Journal on December 12, 1988 that Washington, D.C. would “go from its current 35 days a year over 90 degrees to 85 days a year” and “the level of the ocean will rise” by as much as six feet. “Rising seas could obliterate nations,” a “U.N. official” informed the Associated Press on June 30, 1989. In reality, as CEI points out, is that the number of 90+ degree days in Washington, D.C. peaked in 1911 and continues to decline.
By 2000 the mantra of the global warming hysterics included predictions that “snowfalls are now just a thing of the past,” and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” The Independent announced on September 12, 2015, quoting another environmentalist “expert” from the University of East Anglia.
By 2013 “the Arctic will be free of sea ice” predicted James Hansen in 2008, as reported by The Argus Free Press of Owosso, Michigan. In the same year Al Gore informed us that “the North polar ice cap would be gone,” as reported by the Associated Press on June 24, 2008. For such predictions Massachusetts Senator ed Markey designated Hansen as “a climate prophet.”
The renowned atmospheric scientist Prince Charles told The Independent on July 9, 2009 that “the price of capitalism and consumerism is just too high.” The planet will be destroyed by 2017 if capitalism is not essentially destroyed immediately, said the mega-wealthy prince whose preferred method of travel is by gas-guzzling Rolls Royce and private jet.
Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown outdid the prince by informing The Independent on October 20, 2009 that “we have fewer than fifty days to save our planet from catastrophe.” When New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez publicly announced in 2019 with perfect certainty that the world will end in in twelve years, she was referring to a 2018 United Nations “study” of “climate change” that said the same thing. The world will likely end in twelve years, said the U.N. bureaucrats, unless the U.N. is given vast new governing powers over all countries of the world, and vast sums of additional tax revenue.
NONE of these widely-touted and celebrated predictions came true. Birds did not even disappear from the planet as predicted in Silent Spring. capitalism was not replaced by worldwide socialist central planning; so the environmental “scientists” pivoted on a dime once again and adopted the language of climate change. It now does not matter whether the climate’s temperature is increasing or decreasing; either will cause a “catastrophe” that can only be avoided by replacing what’s left of capitalism with some kind of worldwide socialist central planning, they inform us.
A quarter of a century of “climate change” hysteria has still not led to the desired result. The next step in this more-than-a-century-old political crusade for worldwide socialism, therefore, is “The Great Reset.”
The Great Nonsense of The Great Reset
Klaus Schwab holds doctorates in engineering and economics, although he seems ignorant of the most elementary economic concepts when he contends that the entire world economy can somehow be stopped by a god-like hand, push-button style, and “reset” and “built back better,” one of his favorite slogans. He is the founder of the “World Economic Forum,” touted as an organization that promotes “Public-Private Cooperation.” As Ayn Rand once said, however, whenever the private sector “partners” with government, government is always the senior and controlling partner.
Schwab seems totally unaware of how the institutions of capitalism have evolved over the centuries by ingenuity and efforts of millions and were not magically set or reset by any single man or government committee. Money evolved on the free market and did not originate from governmental edits. Even language evolved, and was not invented by any government bureaucracy. There is no recognition at all in any of Schwab’s books that he understands (or cares) anything about the spontaneous order of markets, the importance of private property and free-market prices, the economy-smothering effects of government bureaucracy, or the economic reasons for the inevitable failures of socialism. Like all other socialist ideologues, he does not even bother to address the critics of socialism as he blindly makes his case for world socialism. It can work, he insists, if only he and his corporate elitist comrades could be in charge.
The “logic” of The Great Reset can be stated in a syllogism:
1) Socialism has failed disastrously everywhere it has been implemented;
2) Everyone knows this;
3) Therefore, what the world needs is more socialism on the biggest scale ever.
Schwab is an engineer and believes that world society can be socially “engineered” by corporate elitists like himself. The Soviets would label this kind of thinking “scientific socialism.”
Destructionism
Like all socialist ideologues, Schwab’s starting point is what Ludwig von Mises called “destructionism.” All socialists, Mises said, advocated the destruction of the existing institutions of society, especially capitalism, the family, and religion, all of which form a barrier between the individual and the controlling dictates of the state. Only then can society be “reset” to create a socialist utopia. For “Socialism is . . . the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It doesn’t build; it destroys. For destructionism is the essence of it . . . each step leading towards socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists.”
This is why Schwab, Gates, Biden, and other proponents of “the great reset” so enthusiastically celebrate the lockdowns that occurred during the so-called pandemic of 2020 and declare that it is time to “build back better.” Destroy what exists, they tell us, and then trust them to “build back” the entire planet “better.” In fact, they were caught on video at their annual World Economic Forum meeting in early 2021 cheering a video of empty city streets and closed-down businesses caused by the government-mandated lockdowns that plunged literally millions into poverty worldwide. The lockdowns are “improving cities around the world,” said Schwab. They may even moderate “climate change,” he triumphantly chortled. The unemployed and impoverished residents of those devasted cities would obviously disagree with this rosy scenario.
A “team of researchers” at the University of East Anglia, an institution that is notorious for its “studies” of global warming/cooling/climate change hysteria, has also chimed in to advocate a “global lockdown” every two years to supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions as required by the “Paris Climate Accord.” These lockdowns would not be related to any virus but would simply be designed to intentionally destroy much of the world economy, leaving millions in abject poverty, causing untold illness and death, for the sake of “fighting climate change” and of course, to achieve their real objective of destroying capitalism and adopting a version of worldwide socialist central planning.
Abolition of Private Property
The Word Economic Forum (WEF) socialists reveal themselves as classic Marxists in the sense that many of them call for the abolition of private property which, coincidentally, was the first plank of the ten planks of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. Former Danish Minister of the Environment Ida Auken was given a platform at a WEF event to explain her definition of “a good life” that entailed the abolition of private property:
“Welcome to the year 2030 . . . . I don’t own anything, I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes . . . someone else is using our [house] whenever we do not need it . . . . I have no real privacy . . . everything I do . . . is recorded [by the state]. All in all, it is a good life.”
Auken here is obviously dreaming of “a good life” where governments own all property and rent or lease everything to their subjects. Of course, that means that politicians will decide for you what you need. There would be no such thing as consumer sovereignty any more than there was in the Soviet Union (apart from the black markets). And as Hayek famously said, in such a system the only power worth having would be political power. Bribery, corruption, and rent seeking run amok would be pervasive in any such society.
They want to spy on your every move, using the latest nanotechnology which probably means implanting devices into your body. There will no privacy, and that’s all good with Ida Auken and her WEF colleagues.
Auken speaks fondly of how, if she wasn’t “using” a room of her house, it would be perfectly fine for strangers to occupy it in her absence. Government-approved strangers, of course. This is eerily reminiscent of how the Soviets socialized housing and forced strangers to live in extremely cramped spaces in communal housing. It is easy to imagine an Auken army doing the same in the name of “sustainability.”
After receiving criticism of this outrageous view, Auken attempted to soft pedal and disguise her true beliefs by saying that such a world was not actually her “utopia” but only what she believes is the inevitable. This is another old socialist gimmick – to argue that socialism is inevitable, and it is therefore futile to oppose it. Her argument that she was just explaining an inevitable future is not believable.
In fact, the inevitability gimmick is the main theme of all of Schwab’s books on the subject. They tend to go into excruciating detail about the digitalization of life, nanotechnology, etc., portray it all as “inevitable,” and then make a pitch for why this supposedly means that centralized political control of all societies is necessary .
Exactly the opposite is true, however. As Hayek pointed out in almost all of his life’s work. The more complex society becomes, the greater is the need to rely on voluntarism, private property, and free markets, the only known means of achieving an effective use of knowledge in society. Complexity requires the use of many minds (and bodies) to make effective use of increasingly complex knowledge in order to advance. Not only many minds, but many minds in a regime of economic freedom is necessary — again the polar opposite of “the great reset” ideology.
The Soviet Union had many brilliant people but they were largely forbidden to apply their talents in a way that would improve the lives of their fellow citizens. They were viewed by the state instead as tools to aggrandize the state, not to serve the citizenry. To deny this is to engage in what Hayek called a “fatal conceit.”
The “Stakeholder” Subterfuge
The WEF elitists also employ another subterfuge as a means of essentially abolishing private property. They do this by advocating the replacement of corporate shareholders with “stakeholders,” which includes just about every type of group of individuals in any community which are said to have a “right” to affect corporate decision making on a day-to-day basis. Such groups usually involve various left-wing political pressure groups such as labor unions, environmentalists, the “civil rights”/affirmative action lobbyists, ad infinitum. Libertarians and free-market economists never seem to appear on the lists of “stakeholders” that are espoused by leftist stakeholder theorists.
Public choice economics teaches us, however, that such large groups tend to be disorganized because of their size, diversity, and consequently high decision-making costs and are therefore rarely effective. It would also subject corporate decision making to profit-destroying bureaucracy and indecision, effectively turning corporations into versions of say, the Department of Motor Vehicles or the U.S. Postal Service in terms of efficiency.
The “stakeholder” advocates surely understand this, which is why they propose that people such as themselves serve as unelected spokesmen for all the various “stakeholders.” This will require the heavy hand of government to empower them to order corporations to do as they say, not as their customers and shareholder owners say. It is de facto nationalization, in other words, an effective abolition of private property in corporations.
In addition to offering no clue that he understands elementary economic principles, Schwab also seems completely clueless about the long history of classical liberal ideas such as private property, free markets, limited constitutional government, decentralized government, the rule of law, and much else. Or, he simply doesn’t care because he is a megalomaniacal tyrant. He is no different, in other words, than all the other twentieth century socialists who were either ignorant of these things or openly attacked them as barriers to their totalitarian intentions.
Moreover, Auken’s utopian daydream is reminiscent of the late nineteenth century book, Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. This was another utopian socialist daydream in the form of a novel whereby one Julian West falls asleep in 1887 and awakens 113 years later in the U.S. in the year 2000 when the country had been turned into a socialist utopia. Auken apparently believes it would only take a single decade to achieve her (and Schwab’s) socialist utopia, however.
The Great Reset as Super Fascism
The World Economic Forum claims to exist in order to promote an integration of private enterprise and the state. This is a perfect definition of economic fascism. Economic fascism in Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany allowed ostensibly private enterprises to exist (unlike the Russian socialists), but only if it was subjected to a totalitarian regulatory regime that forced all production to serve “the common good” as defined by the political ruling class, not the ruled. Consumer sovereignty was not at all a concern. Schwab uses this same language of “the common good” to describe his “great reset” agenda.
It is basically a plea to turn the entire world economy into a version of Chinese fascism. In the past several decades the Chinese communist government allowed more and more private enterprises to exist, but they are all still very heavily regulated, regimented, and controlled by the state. Of course, the same can be said of the U.S. economy; it’s all a matter of degree. As Robert Higgs has said, the American economic system is a system of “participatory fascism,” by which he meant a combination of economic fascism and democracy instead of dictatorship.
After claiming that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in the form of the “digitalization” of just about everything is inevitable, and arguing that that means there is a need for the most centralized government the world has ever known, Klaus and his associates drag out the same tired, old socialist platitudes that Leftists have been promoting for generations as the alleged answers to all of society’s problems. They advocate shutting down more and more of the world economy with more lockdowns (destructionism); a huge expansion of the catastrophically-failed welfare state with the unlimited printing of money by central banks in order to hand out “universal basic income” to everyone; the eventual abolition of beef in order to fight “climate change” allegedly caused by cow flatulence; the abolition of virtually all other kinds of meat, replacing it with grass and insects as part of the average diet (presumably not their diet, however); the abolition of the energy industries and their replacement with windmills and solar panels; communal housing, Soviet style; the “leveling” of wage differences by regulating labor markets essentially null and void, which would create communistic chaos; and the effective nationalization of whatever is left of private society with a 400% increase in taxation (for starters).
There is supposed to be no opposition to this recipe for totalitarian utopia because it is all being done in the name of “equity and inclusion” (the mating call of Leftists everywhere), “sustainability,” and “the common good.” To oppose this latest proposal for a totalitarian world order is, therefore, to be an enemy of society. The “common good before individual good,” by the way, was also the explicitly-stated theme of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform. According to the World Economic Forum crowd this is the “new” ideology that is supposed to lead us all through the twenty-first century’s “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
