Certainly one of my favourite songs after I was a young person within the late Nineteen Sixties was “Harper Valley PTA.” In it, Jeannie C. Riley sings a few girl whom the Harper Valley PTA criticizes for the best way she clothes. The lady doesn’t sit again. As a substitute, she exhibits up on the PTA assembly that afternoon and asks some embarrassing questions designed to point out the hypocrisy of most of the members of the PTA.
I considered this track when watching Argentine president Javier Milei’s masterful speech final month to the World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF meets each January in Davos to debate world affairs. Primarily based on experiences I’ve learn over time, it’s truthful to say that whereas WEF contributors appear to favor some good insurance policies akin to freer commerce, in addition they need to prepare individuals’s lives. This exhibits up particularly on the problem of fossil fuels. In 2020, for instance, regulation professor William Burke-White expressed his hope that “teenage local weather activist Greta Thunberg” is an opinion setter and celebrated the truth that a number of “CEOs and authorities ministers joined youth from around the globe in Greta’s local weather march down the principle avenue of Davos.” I’m wondering if just a few CEOs confirmed up as a result of they hadn’t parked their corporations’ personal jets in time. (In the event you suppose I’m not taking international warming critically sufficient, notice that even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change agrees with me. As former Caltech physicist Steven E. Koonin identified in his 2021 e book, Unsettled, the IPCC predicted that if the worldwide temperature will increase by as much as 3 levels Celsius in 2100, world gross home product shall be 3 % decrease than it could have been. As I wrote in 2022, “So as a substitute of world output in 2100 being 387.5 % increased than it’s now, it could be ‘solely’ 368.8 % increased.”)
The WEF was due for a “Harper Valley PTA” second, and Javier Milei delivered it masterfully.
That is the opening of my newest Defining Concepts article for the Hoover Establishment, “The Day Milei Socked it to the Davos Crowd,” Defining Concepts, February 1, 2024.
Learn the entire thing.