22 Analysis
The Great Reset: a fresh start or
yet another assault on freedom?
The World Economic Forum’s latest big idea is being trumpeted as a new beginning for the global economy.
Yet in truth there is nothing new about it – and nothing appealing either. Stuart Watkins explains
A sinister global plot is afoot. It seeks to exploit the
coronavirus crisis to remake the world economy, put
it under the control of an unaccountable technocratic
elite, and impose a new world order under which we
shall all be monitored and measured, controlled and
commanded, oppressed. That, at least, is a view held
in some of the wilder corners of the internet – and by
at least one British journalist. Whenever you hear a
political leader refer to the need to “build back better”
when this crisis is over, or to use it as an opportunity
for a “reset”, then you should know that this is a “code
phrase for one of the most terrifying and dangerous,
globally co-ordinated assaults on liberty and prosperity
in the history of mankind”, as James Delingpole puts it
on Breitbart.
Delingpole must be worried, as his view was that
the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential
election was the only chance we had of halting this
catastrophe. Now that Biden has taken office, we must
instead look forward to a new world where “your
children have no prospects and your life will barely
be worth living”. The Great Reset, as the conspiracy
is known, “is not a drill… [it is] an imminent, deadly
threat of which everyone who cares about freedom,
prosperity and national sovereignty should be aware”.
It it is also, however, an unusual kind of conspiracy
in that it has been cleverly hidden in plain sight. As
Stacey Rudin of the American Institute for Economic
Research points out, the lead villain of the piece, Klaus
Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has
published a book outlining his plans. Time magazine
ran a special feature and cover story on the theme.
The WEF itself – the organisation that hosts the
annual Davos shindig – has explored the ideas in
numerous web pages, videos and online conferences
that are freely available to the public. The ideas aren’t
even new. They are, as Rudin says, a “rebranded,
tightened-up version of the UN’s decades-old
Sustainable Development agenda”. Before Covid-19
was discovered, the UN and the WEF had agreed to
work together to advance the sustainable development
agenda now known as the Great Reset.
A Green New Deal
What kind of ideas are we talking about? The Great
Reset is in essence a rebranded Green New Deal
(defeated by the US Congress in 2019) and a rebadged
advocacy of “stakeholder capitalism” (the increasingly
trendy idea that a firm’s managers should be responsible
not just to shareholders, but also to vaguely defined
“stakeholders”). Schwab has long been hostile to
Milton Friedman-style economics, which holds that
“The big a company’s only job is to make profits, and believes
the Covid-19 pandemic will mark the final death-
idea is to knell of such “neoliberalism”, says Rudin. Schwab
‘steer the defines “neoliberalism” as “a corpus of ideas and
policies… favouring competition over solidarity,
market creative destruction over government intervention
towards and economic growth over social welfare”. The
words chosen there give some hint of the kind of thing
fairer Schwab would prefer, which will seem a pleasant
outcomes’” aspiration or a socialist mess, depending on which
MoneyWeek 26 February 2021
tribe you hail from. Schwab has been pushing such
ideas for a long time, but the pandemic has, in his view,
provided a window of opportunity for turning the
dream into a reality. Schwab has, in fact, long expected
a global pandemic and, knowing that such episodes can
accelerate societal shifts, has been planning for one.
His organisation conducted a “high-level pandemic
exercise” in October 2019, four months before the
advent of Covid-19.
That people have now for nearly a year been
working from home, communicating by Zoom rather
than flying around the world, taking cues on what
constitutes acceptable behaviour from the state, doing
only what is deemed essential work, and happily signing
up to be tracked and traced to monitor compliance with
state edicts, are all very happy developments from this
point of view. They lay the foundations necessary for
“building back better”.
To achieve better outcomes, as Schwab explains
on the WEF website, “the world must act jointly and
swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and
economics, from education to social contracts and
working conditions. Every country, from the United
States to China, must participate and every industry,
from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed”.
The way to that end is for the state to “steer the
market towards fairer outcomes”, using such tools as
wealth taxes and new rules over intellectual property,
trade and competition; to ensure that investments
advance “shared goals”, such as equality and
sustainability; and finally to “harness the innovations
of the fourth industrial revolution to support the public
good”, which means essentially applying new digital
technologies to engineer society in a direction deemed
to be healthy.
What’s not to like?
It may be hard for those of a left-liberal disposition
to see what there is to object to in any of this, so it’s
worth listening again to the warnings of prophets
of old. Change the odd word here and there and
an apposite analysis of the dangers inherent in this
seemingly very modern utopia will be found in a book
first published in the wake of the second world war.
It is not, as Friedrich Hayek argued in The Road to
Serfdom, that experts in one field or another cannot
identify some social ill, propose a plausible cure, and
then put it into effect, using state power to make the
medicine go down if necessary.
The problem is rather that there is never any end
to the problems to be solved, needs to be met, desires
satisfied; yet the resources available to put to those
ends, including those of our own minds and attention
and energies, are strictly limited. What one person
might reasonably value as the supreme goal will
conflict with a million others who value things rather
differently. So how do you decide on priorities? It is
not so much that it is hard for state bureaucrats to solve
this problem – rather, it’s impossible. Policymakers
would need access to an all-inclusive scale of values.
And as Hayek puts it, “Not only do we not possess such
an all-inclusive scale of values: it would be impossible
moneyweek.com
©Getty Images
The World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab is cleverly hiding a global conspiracy in plain sight
for any mind to comprehend the infinite variety of
different needs of different people which compete for
the available resources and to attach a definite weight
to each”.
Scales of value can “exist only in individual minds”,
which are different from and inconsistent with those
in other individual minds. In a society where such
complexities are navigated by individuals acting on
their own account within a system of free markets,
a solution to this infinitely complex problem arises
spontaneously in a social order that is not planned,
but the outcome of the activity of free individuals
associating freely for their own purposes. If the state,
or some other collectivist entity, tries to blindly impose
its own values, its own solutions, in the name of some
superior scale of values, the result can only be an
erosion of liberty and greater poverty and misery for all.
History would seem to amply support these claims.
When all is going relatively well, such arguments
might sound excessively philosophical and remote
from everyday, practical concerns. The response of
states around the world to the pandemic, however,
brought home once again their vital importance and
relevance. Against the system of values that puts a prime
value on controlling a virus and protecting certain
vulnerable groups from one illness, and which turns to
expert modellers and epidemiologists for prescriptions
on the best way forward, there are billions of people
worldwide with other values, other ideas, other goals.
Hayek and Ludwig von Mises’ arguments against
central planning specifically concerned the need for
prices of marketable goods, and hence of private
ownership, but as Patrick Barron of the Mises Institute
points out, the arguments apply more broadly. “The
government’s response to Covid-19 assumes that it
knows everyone’s personal risk hierarchy and can tailor
an appropriate public response. This is as impossible
as knowing values in a socialist commonwealth.” The
social planners now coalescing around the ideas of the
Great Reset are different from those Hayek was taking
aim at. The ideology is not socialist or fascist, but
technocratic; the means not brute force, but behavioural
“nudges”. But the pertinent arguments still apply.
moneyweek.com
Analysis 23
Who decides what will be the goals aimed at? Schwab’s
work is full of speculation about what “we” can
“Herding
achieve. Who are “we”? cats springs
Worse than a conspiracy
to mind, but
Still, as Hayek argued, it is a mistake to see those imagine a
who seek power with rather different ideas about
how society could be managed and planned for the
herder with
common good as a malevolent conspiracy of evildoers. state power at
It is natural that well-intentioned, highly intelligent
experts and intellectuals, whose job is to apply reason to
his disposal”
solve problems, wish to bring the power of the natural
sciences to bear on the real issues that concern them.
The trouble is that such methods, which deal with
the laws governing the interactions between inert
matter, are inappropriate for solving social problems,
since what we are dealing with is not inert matter at
all, but living minds with a will, morals, conscience,
desires, values and ideas of their own. The difficulties
involved in herding cats might spring to mind – but
imagine a herder with state power at his disposal, and
spare a thought for the misery of the cats.
The dangers inherent in the ideas of the Great
Reset, then, are more troubling than that presented
by any conspiracy since what is called for is not
an effort to expose and stop the conspirators, but
rather a challenge to ideas that are in effect the official
religion of our times – Hayek called it “scientism”.
And it’s very hard to do that without being dismissed
as a heretic.
Rather than a conspiracy, what we have is an
“elite consensus on ‘the way ahead’”, as Ben Sixsmith
puts it in The Spectator. “One critic has called
Davos an ‘ideological synchronisation environment
for individuals, corporations, and governments
to keep on the same page’. That is different from
conspiracy – but not that different. When bad ideas
are adopted globally by some of the most powerful
people in the world, the effect can be the same. The
Great Reset might be all the more terrifying for not
being a sinister plot.”
For more on this topic, see moneyweek.com/great-reset
26 February 2021 MoneyWeek