The rising income gap and growing rifts in Western societies that led to the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote are the main global risks, according to a report by the World Economic Forum ahead of its annual forum in Davos next week.
Climate change and technological disruption were also listed as important risks in a survey of 750 law makers, business leaders and academics carried out by the WEF….
No, the rising income gap isn’t why President-Elect Donald Trump was elected, nor was it why Great Britain voted to go out from the European Union. Quite the contrary: it was because those on the bottom and in the middle were being held down by the policies of the Know Betters and by the latter’s desperation for votes—votes bought and paid for by handouts that trap folks in the Know Betters’ welfare cages. That that contributed to a rising income gap is only a side effect. The bottom and middle class folks simply wanted their opportunity to get rich, too.
Climate change isn’t a risk at all; it’s a certainty. The Earth is illuminated and warmed by the sun, the sun has been heating up for its entire four billion year existence, and it’ll continue to heat up for the next several billion years. Global warming—which is what climatistas mean when they changed the name to and talk about “climate change”—is a pseudo-science whose sole industrial function is to transfer government funds to the “industry.”
Technological disruption is a good; it’s how progress and prosperity happen in a free market—and without a free market there is neither progress and prosperity nor any technological change at all. It’s a risk, too, but it’s one that’s well understood by everyone who’s had a high school economics class.
And there’s this nonsense from Cecilia Reyes, Chief Risk Officer at Zurich Insurance Group, speaking at the gathering:
The momentous political changes in 2016 raised worries about the health of liberal democracy that has underpinned global prosperity[.]
No, the health of liberal democracy took a dramatic turn for the better, exemplified by the repudiation of the policies of eight years of the Obama administration and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s control over the Congress as a whole and then of the Senate. That repudiation was broader than just a rejection of those policies, though: the real turn for the better was the repudiation of the increasingly authoritarian behavior of the Progressive-Democratic Party and of the Left in general.
No, the WEF is just getting a bit too far out of touch with the world.
