The World Economic Forum is currently holding its annual meeting in Davos.
Argentine president Javier Milei was invited to speak, and did he ever rise to the occasion.
Milei delivered his remarks in Spanish, so an interpreter did simultaneous translation. That means the text I'm quoting from is choppy and imperfect, but it's good enough to give you an idea of what was said.
I can share only excerpts, in order to keep this issue at a manageable length, but these excerpts will certainly give you a sense of the speech:
Good afternoon. Thank you very much. Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is endangered because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.
Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. We're here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause....
Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were forced to change their agenda. They left behind the class struggle based on the economic system, and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts, which are just as harmful to life as a community and to economic growth.
The first of these new battles was the ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman.... All that this radical feminism agenda has led to is greater state intervention to hinder the economic process, giving jobs to bureaucrats who have not contributed anything to society. Examples: ministries of women or international organizations devoted to promoting this agenda.
Another conflict introduced by socialists is that of humans against nature, claiming that we human beings damage the planet, which should be protected at all costs, going as far as advocating for population control mechanisms or the bloody abortion agenda.
Unfortunately, these harmful ideas have taken a strong hold in our society. Neo-Marxists have managed to co-opt the common sense of the Western world, and this they have achieved by appropriating the media, culture, universities....
The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you may be or how much you may have in terms of natural resources, or how skilled your population may be or educated, or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank, if measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, free competition, free price systems, if you hinder trade, if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty....
Today, states don't need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals, with tools such 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....
A good deal of the generally accepted political [positions] in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openly communists, fascists, Nazis, socialists, social Democrats, National Socialists, Democrat Christians, or Christian Democrats.
They are neo-Keynesians, progressive, populist, nationalist or globalists at bottom. 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.
We have come here today to invite the rest of the countries in the Western world to get back on the path of prosperity, economic freedom, limited government...and unlimited respect for private property....
The impoverishment produced by collectivism is no fantasy, nor is it an inescapable fate. But it's a reality that we Argentines know very well. We have lived through this. We have been through this because, as I said earlier, ever since we decided to abandon the model of freedom that had made us rich, we have been caught up in a downward spiral, as part of which we are poorer and poorer day by day....
In concluding, I would like to leave a message for all businesspeople here and for those who are not here in person but are following from around the world. Do not be intimidated, either by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges.
You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You're the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we've ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it's because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being.
Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonists of this story and rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch, unconditional ally.
So yes, it's fine to speak at the World Economic Forum, as long as you smash them as wicked parasites whose program leads to impoverishment, as Milei just did.
Tom Woods