27 Replies to “Setting the Stage for the Takeover by Global Technocrats”

  1. How will they enforce the great reset when they are bankrupted and the peasants revolt from hunger.
    History tells us when the cows quit milking and chickens quit laying and the average man can’t feed his family bad things happen to the elite.
    This is how every revolution in history begins.
    Just like the French Revolution. Arrogant Elites. Hungry people.

    1. Legalizing pot, porn and cheap enough junk food will be all it takes to stave off revolution.

      Those are the three compromises.

  2. Paywalled? Yes and no. Right click then select View Page Source or ctrl/u

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/mark-carneys-values-moans-free-markets-brave-new-world-alternative/

    Humanity faces huge challenges, from climate change to inequality, the pandemic to AI. Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor, says that tackling any of them requires an urgent prerequisite: rethinking “value”.
    In his new 608-page book, Carney laments the economic consensus that “value is subjective”. This pillar of economics says that the value of goods, such as cars, are determined not by their gadgets or the labour producing them but by individuals’ judgments of the car’s importance in meeting our own needs. You may highly value having a convertible roof for summer; I do not. But my decision to buy a simpler car for, say, £20,000, shows that I value that car by at least that much. Value, then, is in the eye of the beholder.
    In each case, voluntary trade makes both buyer and seller better off – each side giving up something they consider of lesser value (me, the money; the seller, the car). So, to create value through exchange, market trades should be left unhindered, except when obvious market failures arise that governments must act upon.
    According to Carney, however, our “marketised society”, governed by this principle, corrupts society’s “values”, because it blurs the distinction between market prices and “social value”. Price is conflated with value, such that everything unpriced is seen as non-valuable. Amazon, the company, has a $1.5 trillion equity valuation. The biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest appears on no ledger until it is converted to farm land.
    We therefore need to move away from “unfettered capitalism”, he says, to an economic model where, rather than pursuing our own subjective interests, society forges “consensus” on its objectives based on our “shared values”. Markets can then be “marshalled to help discover and drive solutions in a form of mission-oriented capitalism”. So we might call “sustainability” our value and make mitigating climate change an objective. Capitalism should be harnessed to deliver that goal.

    Mark Carney's anti-market rhetoric in Value(s) is catnip to a Davos-attending technocratic elite

    In many ways, Carney is attacking a straw man here. Nobody thinks an absence of prices suggests something is not valuable. I value my parents, even though I can’t trade them. People volunteering to sew PPE, or help the NHS during Covid-19, does not reflect the limitations of a market system in harnessing social value, as Carney claims; merely that we are also willing to engage in non-market activities in return for rewards other than money, such as self-esteem.
    Carney’s anti-market rhetoric, though, is catnip to a Davos-attending technocratic elite, who bemoan “unfettered capitalism” (despite the fact that, as regulators, lobbyists and beneficiaries of cronyism, they are doing a pretty good job of fettering the supposed laissez-faire consensus).
    Ultimately, when he suggests that we place too much faith in the wisdom of markets and their prices, what he is really saying is that individuals have too much decision‑making power and that greater power should be transferred to worthies to decide what is best for us. But who makes those decisions, and how, in a world where we disagree profusely is something Carney never really addresses.
    The truth is that markets are good at deliberating these tensions. They allow our differences to be traded off, and minority views served. Non‑market collective decisions, however, are inevitably made via forms of politics in business or government, with all their clashes of values, corruption and tribalism. Carney brushes this off as harmonious “consensus”, but in reality, they are often bitter contests for monopoly power.
    On cue, Carney unveils his list of values that he thinks should drive individuals, business and governments: “solidarity,” “fairness,” “responsibility,” “resilience,” “sustainability,” “dynamism,” and “humility.” Conspicuously absent is “freedom”. But a bigger vacuum is any explanation of how these values would be traded off in his brave new world. Governments deciding to give unemployed workers more taxpayer money might reflect “solidarity”, yet it undermines “dynamism”. Making society-wide decisions is riddled with such thorny trade‑offs. Take the pandemic. Carney correctly observes that, as a society, we undervalued resilience before the pandemic. Our failure to learn from East Asian experiences with Sars and Mers cost thousands of lives and, so far, 12 months of living – impacts that could have been mitigated through tiny prior public health investments.
    Yet our failure in preparation here wasn’t due to markets’ corrupting influence, but politicians spurning public health to prioritise public services, welfare and pensions. Why? Because politicians get rewarded for spending today and providing relief when crises hit; not for unseen investments to protect against emergencies perceived as unlikely. Yet Carney would have politics play an even bigger role in our lives.

    Touching on everything from Bitcoin to climate change, Mark Carney's Value(s) becomes a tirade of frustration

    Many more government failures, in fact, were down to the very “values” Carney wants us to enshrine. If medical regulators had allowed a market in human challenge trials sooner – with individuals offered money for deliberate Covid-19 infection in controlled environments, allowing rapid vaccine efficacy assessments – the pandemic could be over now. How many lives were sacrificed because of a politically enforced “value” that said it was unethical to deliberately infect someone, even if they personally accepted the risk-reward trade-off of infection, and their bravery brought massive social benefits?
    Carney likewise says that policymakers were right not to use formal cost-benefit analyses to weigh up the impact of lockdowns on the economy, health, and civil liberties – a technocratic method which puts a notional value on deaths avoided. Instead, he says, society expressed a “values” preference for minimising deaths through blanket social distancing regulations. From that, he says, it follows that government’s primary objective was to minimise deaths – and only then think about delivering it in the least costly way. Yet in his Reith Lecture, Carney said “due respect” should also be given to “inequality, mental health and other social consequences”. That sounds an awful lot like weighing up trade-offs, but with Carney’s own judgment determining the priority.
    And that’s the recurring problem with this book. Carney outlines his own policy preferences – for rapid decarbonisation, stakeholder capitalism, more diversity, more government investment, and other progressive goals – as if they reflected objective, universally held values. He likewise downplays the trade-offs inevitably required when allocating resources or determining priorities. The green agenda is described as “win-win-win” for all – with no acknowledgement of the massive transition costs to a low-carbon economy. Businesses are told that embracing stakeholder capitalism will make them more profitable, but also that solely pursuing profits will undermine social value. This is the profit variant of “this food is disgusting and the portions are too small”.
    When reading this dense – often muddled – book, which touches on everything from Bitcoin to climate change in extraordinary detail, I couldn’t help wondering whether Carney’s central argument was less a principled objection to our “marketised society”, more a tirade of frustration that our current freely made economic and political choices do not conform to the preferences of Mark Carney.

    1. Sounds more like a temper tantrum than anything cogent and useful.
      Carney better get back on his meds.

  3. “Mark Carney knows how to ruin your life better than you do.” There, fixed it for you.

  4. Everything in that article was off, wrong, or stupid.

    But I am glad the idiot is linking climate change to the virus from China because there should be a huge backlash against our governments response to the virus. Unless censorship and bought media can keep a lid on the people. We will have to wait and see.

  5. Hey, Clipe, thanks for the overly tortuous breakdown of Carney’s (v)alues or whatever unpacking you were striving to explicate.
    The Values remain: truth, good, beauty.
    All the rest is dross, chaff, and sophistry in defence of evil by the pathological likes of Carney and his damned ilk.
    Have a nice day.

    1. “Hey, Clipe, thanks for the overly tortuous breakdown of Carney’s (v)alues or whatever unpacking you were striving to explicate.”

      Huh? It’s a newspaper article.

      “overly tortuous breakdown”
      ” striving to explicate”

      WTF are you nattering on about?

      You found a thesaurus on the bus?

          1. Hey clipe, I read it, and yeah it was long, but well worth the read and eye opening. Thanks.

      1. Methinks Stevie and Bruce aren’t too bright and didn’t realize you found and copied the text of the paywalled article. Don’t worry about it, bud.

  6. Mark Carney is a zealous advocate of corporate financial theocracy based on scientific prowess meeting the equivalence of the intellectual level and psychosis of Al Gore. He also wants Butt’s and the Spawn’s job all in one and eventually climate – finance priest of the world. Carney is an evil and insane megalomaniac.

    1. Just another Globalist Commie POS who never created FA and lived like a tapeworm in the system using what others produced.
      Psychopathic Parasitic Worm

    2. JC, “Carney is an evil and insane megalomaniac.”

      Jeez, ain’t that the truth! That said, he is in a position to actually cause things to happen, so you might want to add “dangerous” to that sentence.

  7. For every imaginary problem there’s an unworkable solution.

    Being a woke socialist requires you to have a full mental catalogue of all of them, and insist that others try to follow.

  8. Some saw the 2008 market crash coming-The Big Short
    Did Roman Empire get too big?
    Did Mayan/Aztecs fail because “wheels fell off the bus”?
    Some evil Org killed the home sized fuel cell/ electric car circa 1980’s/ 100mpg carburetor.
    If Carney (love that surname) is a true visionary he’d be advising Brookfield about all the empty commercial real estate depreciating in “value”, since the unforeseen “work remote” became a “thing”.

  9. Sinister. He isn’t even PM yet and I’m already sick of him! Like I’ve thought for over a year – prepare for the GCCL: the Great Climate Change Lockdown.

  10. The Second Coming
    BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again; but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  11. Déjà vu

    This is the same type of talk coming from the liberal establishment just before they talked Iggy into a run at the liberal leadership.

    Just saying.

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