 I thought it would be helpful to talk a little bit about the World Economic Forum and what it stands for, what its goals are, and kind of talk about Mele's presence at that conference in Davos. Mele's introduction was given by none other than our favorite super-filonesque German professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the WF. Let's hear a little bit of Schwab's introduction. It's for me a great, great honor to welcome Javier Mele. As you know, he's a freely elected president of Argentina. I think you sometimes people would say with more radical muscles that you introduce a new spirit to Argentina, making Argentina much more related to free enterprise, to entrepreneurial activities, also to bring Argentina back to the rule of law. So we have a very extraordinary person among us today, and of course we are all eager to listen to you, and again a very cordial welcome to the World Economic Forum. Alright, so generally pretty cordial. Mele is radical, but he's bringing markets and the rule of law to Argentina, so maybe not all that bad. The WF is not contrary to some of the theories out there, some sort of communist organization. They're not reflexively hostile to markets. They just, in my view, look at them as tools to achieve certain social ends because they're corporatists. And I have to imagine, you know, having watched the speech that he was not expecting what happened next, because we'll see soon that Mele goes directly for the jugular of what the WF is actually all about. Or maybe he doesn't just, he just doesn't care. He's 85 years old, maybe, you know, just want to yolo, spice things up, see what happens. Any thoughts, Liz, or Marcos, about just kind of the WF, Klaus Schwab, Davos? I mean, they're sort of cringe technocratic central planners. So I have to believe that with the amount of control they exert over the rest of us, certainly they exerted lots of control over pre-vetting the speeches, which makes me think that Mele went off script a little bit. I don't know, you know, whether or not that's true. There's not really any indication as to what happened, but that's sort of the only explanation I can come up with that explains how Mele got so delightfully fiery in his speech in a way that is sort of an indictment of some of the things Klaus Schwab stands for. What about you, Marcos? Does the WF, like, what does it mean to you, if anything, as someone who's living through the economic turmoil in Argentina? It doesn't really mean much to me personally, but here in Argentina, there was a lot of expectation about Mele's speech, particularly because of the idea that he could mirror the speech that former President Macri gave in 2016 when he took office, when he, yeah, he had just taken office like one month prior, just like Mele. And back then, this was like the reintroduction of Argentina into the world stage, right, into the world of free enterprise. And so there was some expectation as to whether Mele would mirror that speech or whether he would go off script, as Liz said. Though, I mean, we'll talk about the speech later, but the speech itself is not that different from the speech that we as Argentines have been hearing consistently from Mele in the past years. It's remarkably similar to lectures that he has given out loud to whoever would listen in different cities in the country. I was actually part of one of them in my hometown, Marven Plata, in the summer of, I think it was 2023 last year. He was just touring the country, you know, and lecturing about economics and freedom. And some of the contents of those lectures were remarkably similar to the speech that we saw at Davos. So to what degree did this actually mirror Macri's speech? Well, I would say that it did in that they both favored free enterprise and freedom in, you know, on paper. But Mele went after the WEF scores, values, or not core values, but many of the interests that they have taken in past years in a way that Macri did not. I mean, Macri was all for, you know, fighting climate change and the progressive agenda in terms of civil liberties. Whereas Mele was clearly opposed to all of that. He was clearly against all of that. And he was much more radical in arguing in favor of capitalism. Because Macri's speech resembled, you know, this idea of Klaus Schwab and others, that capitalism is at the service of something else. You know, that we value capitalism because of the, because it is a means to a different end. Whereas Mele argued, in my view, at least, that capitalism is good in itself, because it allows us to do whatever we want with them, which is not, I think, what the World Economic Forum stands for. So in that regard, it did not mirror Macri's speech. There were similarities and dissimilarities, but I think this was a much more radical speech, which is what I would expect from a libertarian and then anarcho-capitalist president. Yeah, and that's why I think it is important going into this to understand the values of the WEF and to not get distracted by some of the strange theories about the WEF. And I'll not so humbly recommend one of my previous videos on this called, Forget the Great Reset, Embrace the Great Escape, that kind of lays out what the WEF is actually all about, which is not necessarily a nefarious agenda to turn us all into transhuman AIs or something like that, but more so a kind of managed version of capitalism that has become known as stakeholder capitalism, where you put aside the previous Milton Friedman conception of capitalism as just delivering value to the shareholders of a company to expanding the mandate of a company to deliver to so-called stakeholders, which could be environmentalist groups or labor groups or any other kind of interest group that you could come up with. Here at Domestically, Elizabeth Warren has been one of the outspoken proponents of this. She's proposed, you know, I think 40% worker ownership or worker representation on corporate boards in California. There's been attempts to kind of rebalance what a corporate board looks like. And so that's why I ultimately describe them as corporatist. And I think in kind of the furthest, the most extreme instantiation or example of like where this heads would be China, where they actually put government, you know, party officials on the corporate boards. So the stakeholder is actually the government itself. And that gets into, you know, outright fascism. So can lead to really bad places. China has like the opposite of separation of state and business. It's also disturbingly intermingled in a way that I think a lot of Western audiences just totally misunderstand. Yeah. And in the at the 2022 Davos Conference, Xi Jinping was the kind of keynote speaker who kicked off the conference and Klaus gave them a fairly glowing introduction there as well, which I found kind of disturbing. But before we move into Malay's speech, let's play one more clip just to get now that I think we've laid out a little bit of what the WF is about and what Davos is about. Klaus Schwab actually is on the record with his opinion about libertarians and where libertarianism fits into the new world order. So let's roll that clip from the 2017 World Government Summit in Dubai. We are at historical crossroads. We face the backlash of millions of people, particularly in the West, who feels that globalization is not working. Fixing the present system is not enough. Now there is, of course, an anti-system, which is called libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives. It's dismantling the system. And we see certain elements of this now in the new U.S. administration. If we want to go forward, we need a completely new thinking. We have to integrate into our future policymaking is the notion of multi-stakeholder concept. The big challenges which we have cannot be solved by governments alone, but they cannot be solved by business or civil society alone. We need new ways of cooperation, of very flexible cooperation. I wish you a very good World Government Summit. Thank you. Okay, so again, new flexible ways of cooperation between public and private. That's kind of what I was alluding to earlier. And then, you know, his assertion that libertarians are anti-system, which, you know, we are, yeah, we are anti-your system, the one you're selling to a bunch of monarchs in the UAE. That leads you to open your conferences with odes to the wisdom of Xi Jinping. I could not imagine a better endorsement, honestly. But, you know, we again want to be really clear about what the WF is and isn't. And, you know, even Klaus Schwab has acknowledged, you know, these changes in that these technological changes that have driven political changes and made it much harder to have top-down control. So, he does at times talk about the need for subsidiarity, the need to have, you know, more localized versions of control. And he's not really at this point advocating for some sort of one-world government, but more so that local and national governments kind of come in under the WF umbrella and kind of we have this common view of governance and these sort of common tools and consensus to kind of manage the future. But I just want to open the floor to both of you for any additional reactions to Klaus's view of libertarianism. I have a lot of disdain for Klaus Schwab's description of libertarianism. I think, first of all, libertarians exist on this massive, glorious spectrum. There's obviously Rothbardian and Cap types who very much hate the state and do want to smash the system in a very major way. There are also, I think on the other side of the spectrum, a bunch of libertarians who look at the current system, which involves an awful lot of crony capitalism and subsidies doled out to various companies that are sort of in these bidding wars for contracts with the government. And they look at that and they say, why is it that any time government sort of taints everything that it touches, you know, any time we look at a project either done in collaboration with a government or by a government agency itself, we see it completed, you know, two years later than they had anticipated and massively over budget. In any other sector, that would be totally unacceptable. And so a lot of libertarians look at the state of affairs at present and say, well, government, like, look at the results. Government is not in many cases delivering to nearly the degree that they say they will. And to us, that indicates that we need to privatize more things and allow markets to, you know, conduct more affairs than the government. The thing is libertarians, I think, are so frequently portrayed as these like naive people who think that absolutely everything will be perfectly solved once we get the government out of the way. And I think libertarians actually frequently realize that there will be short term pain points in the same way that I think Malay is sort of setting Argentina up for realizing that that is what will happen in order to get inflation under control. In the short term, there will be massive unemployment. There will continue to be people living, you know, 40% of the country below the poverty line, right? Like that is not going away tomorrow. But he will move things in the right direction and will pursue a means of getting inflation under control. And I think libertarians, that's the thing that people really miss. So I think Klaus Schwab is totally misrepresenting what libertarians stand for. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week. So subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other pod catcher. See you next week.