WASHINGTON, DC, Nov 7 — They call themselves the World Economic Forum and they gather in the swanky environs of Davos, Switzerland four times a year. Who are they? They are millionaires, billionaires and assorted wannabe elitists. They eat, drink and merrily discuss the fate of the world.
A new book, Against the Great Reset, by cultural-political consultant Michael Walsh describes them as a “cabal of bankers, techies, corporate executives, politicians, senior bureaucrats, academics, and pundits who … seek to change, reduce, restrict, and homogenize the Western way of life—but only for ordinary people. Their own way of life, along with the wealth and power that define it, they seek to entrench, augment, deepen, and extend.”
Fear not. America is still a capitalist nation. While a fair number of Democrats seem to have abandoned support for capitalism, a poll conducted earlier this year shows that overall 55% of respondents said they favored capitalism over socialism and so-called democratic socialism including 56% of Independents, 67% of Republicans and even 42% of Democrats. “The survey [found] that Democrats are the only party to hold favorable views of democratic socialism and socialism, both before and after being presented with ideology descriptions,” according to a report by a progressive think tank, Data For Progress. It found that “a majority of voters associate capitalism with success and the American dream.”
The organization known as FEE [Free-market Economics, Entrepreneurship] says there is good reason that most Americans have low esteem for socialism. Because “socialist policies, when enacted, have catastrophic effects on the lives of the people living under them. To enforce such policies, governments must take control of people’s property—whether by fully nationalizing businesses, mandating what and how much a company must produce, or seizing and distributing their products—thereby violating people’s right to the product of their own effort. The victims include entrepreneurs who have built or purchased businesses, landlords who maintain and manage properties, and everyone who earns a wage, from construction workers to artists.”
The Fee article goes on to cite two countries that describe themselves as socialist societies, Venezuela and North Korea. Venezuela officially became a socialist country in 1999. Here’s a country that once was the fourth wealthiest country in the world. Today, it is high on the list of the most impoverished nations. In fact, according to The Policy Circle, today “almost 90% of the population [is] living in poverty … As of early 2022, more than 7 million Venezuelans in Venezuela are in critical need, and almost 6 million have fled to 17 countries across the region … a nationalization spree in the 2000s pushed out all private enterprise, starved industries of technical expertise and investment and sent government-controlled institutions into a downward spiral. Exchange rate controls and price controls broke the basic link between supply and demand, creating surreal economic distortions.”
As for North Korea, the country emerged from World War II as a communist state, according to FEE. “But [it] formally switched to a form of ‘self-reliant’ socialism following the Korean War. The leadership of the Worker’s Party of Korea has brought widespread misery in the form of horrific rights violations, including torture, severe censorship, forced labor, and arbitrary detention. Their policies have also led to nearly half the country suffering from inconsistent access to food and water—in stark contrast to their far more capitalist neighbor, South Korea, which has flourished in recent decades.”
Irving Berlin wrote the song, God Bless America, and He did. Our free-market capitalism drives our economic growth, it lets “we, the people,” choose the products and services that take priority and dictate their costs.