Big corporations and global leaders adhere to and assume growing interventionism and the advance of socialism because, for politicians, it’s an excellent way of perpetuating their power and control over citizens, while multinationals tolerate it because they have enough financial muscle and size to absorb the pernicious effects of the massive rise in public debt and monetary imbalances, public spending, taxes, barriers to trade, and progress.
They all know that the burden of interventionism falls entirely on small businesses and families, destroying the middle class in the process. The wealthy can escape the negative impact of monetary debasement and confiscatory taxes. People with salaries and small entrepreneurs can’t.
Who suffers the constant erosion of real disposable income from those gigantic and wrongly called government “stimulus plans” that never stimulate anything but bureaucracy, leaving a massive trail of debt and impoverishment caused by increased inflation and ever-increasing taxes? The middle classes and small businesses.
Why do global leaders accept a rising trend in destructive policies that they know will fail? There’s a perverse incentive.
Business leaders who should value the success of productive investment and free markets are afraid that the interventionist canceling crowd will attack them. They, therefore, prefer to look elsewhere or even finance the advance of anti-freedom ideas in the hope that the mob will let them work and invest in peace.
Others believe they may keep their market share and avoid the threat of competition if they stay close to political powers. It doesn’t work. They don’t leave them alone, and leaders lose more than they gain when they fall for cronyism.
Whitewashing Marxist collectivism doesn’t stop it. It’s no surprise to see how this neocommunism disguised as social justice attacks with even greater cruelty those companies and leaders who embrace its false messages. Just like wokeism often cancels and destroys its most staunch defenders, Neomarxism does the same with corporations and business owners, because its objective is full control.
Argentine President Javier Milei explained this in detail at Davos, crushing the consensus narrative.
“It should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it’s been tried out. It’s been a failure economically, socially, and culturally, and it has also murdered over 100 million human beings,” he said.
However, the most important point of his speech for me was the reminder of what socialism is.
“I know, to many, it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism, but it’s only ridiculous if you limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which says that it’s an economic system where the state owns the means of production. This definition, in my view, should be updated considering current circumstances.
“Today, states don’t need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.
“This is how we come to the point where, by using different names or guises, a good deal of the generally accepted ideologies in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openly communist, fascist, socialist, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists, or globalists. Ultimately, there are no major differences. They all say that the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals. They all defend a model contrary to the one that led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history.”
This is critical, because the average citizen has been led to believe that massive money printing, piles of new regulations and laws, rising public debt, and constant interest rate interventions are capitalist or neoliberal policies, when they’re tools of statism to accelerate the rising size of government in the economy.
Socialism doesn’t seek progress; it seeks control. Large companies that fall into the trap of buying socialism suffer the same attack and further deteriorate their ability to create value and wealth.
Mr. Milei destroyed all the current myths in one speech at Davos, and millions watched in awe because it was obvious that he was telling the truth—and that, coming from Argentina, he knows what he’s talking about. When one speaks with Argentine citizens, they often remind us all that they “come from the future.”
The example of Argentina is obvious. Between 2007 and December 2023, the world looked the other way in the face of a massive increase in poverty and inflation. They even had the audacity to justify that the inflation was due to exogenous factors, not massive money printing, and that the poverty was miscalculated, exculpating socialist governments from any responsibility.
The left’s shocking silence in the face of the humanitarian and ecological disasters created by the socialism of the 21st-century governments in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Argentina, and other countries shows that they couldn’t care less about the welfare of citizens or the protection of the environment but used seemingly harmless causes to take power and destroy the economy.
Why? Because the goal of any socialist leader is to create poor hostage clients who depend on a state in which those leaders become obscenely rich as the country goes down. Don’t be mistaken; statism doesn’t seek the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, but the accumulation of the wealth of the nation in the hands of a few politicians.
No, businesses don’t depend on the state. There’s no welfare state without powerful and productive enterprises, and there are no public services if private wealth isn’t created. There’s no public sector without a thriving private sector. Progress doesn’t depend on a crony, extractive, and confiscatory state but on a strong civil society of free individuals with independent institutions that act as a counterweight to political power.
Legal certainty and investor attractiveness, or respect for international law, don’t happen due to the generosity of political leaders but thanks to free markets and independent institutions that limit political power. The world doesn’t progress due to big governments, but despite the obstacles they put in place,
Mr. Milei crushed it by telling the truth. Those who remained silent for years about Argentina’s economic ruin now fear him.
Socialism is an impoverishing system that has failed and shouldn’t be defended out of fear of retaliation.
Mr. Milei reminded companies that they’re the heroes of poverty reduction and progress and that the left only uses environmental and gender excuses to impose totalitarianism.
Mr. Milei reminded everyone at Davos that Argentina’s ruin isn’t a coincidence or fate, but the result of years of implementing the same interventionist policies that many at Davos have defended or tolerated.
