Charles the Climate Prince

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At a time when the monarch, James I, “the wisest fool in Christendom,” believed in the divine right of kings, it was perhaps tactless of the English jurist John Selden (1584–1654) to write:

A king is a thing men have made for their own sakes, for quietness’ sake. Just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat . . .

Commentary such as this meant that Selden spent a short time in the Tower of London. Nevertheless, he lived long enough to see James’s son, Charles, being found surplus to requirements.

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The Great Reset: If Only It Were Just a Conspiracy

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Writing for The Spectator US, Ben Sixsmith gets to grips with “the Great Reset” now being proposed by the World Economic Forum (“Davos”).

And yes, despite a name that sounds as if it were conjured up in some of conspiracism’s danker fever swamps, the Great Reset really exists:

“The World Economic Forum, which organizes the annual conference Davos, has launched an initiative called, yes, ‘the Great Reset’. It has its own website.”

Indeed it does.

But, after noting the involvement of “partners” such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, IKEA, Lockheed Martin, Ericsson and Deloitte, Sixsmith doubts whether the Great Reset can be seen, as some like to suggest (even allowing for a bit of hype) as “socialist Left Marxist” or a “global communist takeover plan.”

Fair enough, not least because the Great Reset is, in essence, corporatist, not communist. The participation of companies of the type that Sixsmith mentions is, in reality, the participation of certain members of their senior management, using shareholder funds for purposes that have nothing to do with the bottom line and everything to do with the wielding of power within a system akin to a concert, with the state — if not necessarily the government — acting as the conductor.

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A Useful Pandemic: Davos Launches New ‘Reset,’ this Time on the Back of COVID

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COVID-19 is a bad disease that has been used to breathe new life into bad ideas. And so it comes as no surprise that the World Economic Forum (“Davos”) is deploying the pandemic as an argument for what it labels, with characteristic modesty, “The Great Reset” initiative:

There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.

Even if we pass over the presumption of the reset’s name, this is a small classic of the prose of soft authoritarianism. There is an “urgent need” that must be met. There is to be cooperation and management, the world is to be “improved,” and all of this is to be put in place by “global stakeholders,” — a conveniently vague phrase, with more than a suggestion of democracy bypassed about it.

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The Dangers of ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, Andy Puzder took aim at Joe Biden’s embrace of “stakeholder capitalism,” the doctrine now being touted as a replacement for the quaint notion that a company should be run for the benefit of those — the shareholders — who own it. Stakeholder capitalism is a modish name for what is just another expression of corporatism, an old ideology with a sometimes sinister past that, because of the power it gives to the unelected and the unaccountable, will never fall far out of style. That, in this case, it involves playing around with other people’s money only adds to its sleazy appeal.

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