Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos has been applauded by the same sort of people who once hailed Angela Merkel as the anti-Trump, the leader of the free world.
That’s not a good sign.
For an idea of who Carney is, it may be worth looking at Value(s): Building a Better World for All, the 2021 book in which Carney set out his thoughts on how this aim could be achieved. As I noted back then, it was not a work that impressed Peter Foster, who reviewed it for Canada’s National Post and saw it as a manifesto for a particularly unlovely form of technocracy, justified, naturally, by climate change:
Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises.
In his review for the Daily Telegraph, Ryan Bourne was no more enthusiastic. He recorded how Carney attacked “unfettered capitalism,” a phenomenon, much like “market fundamentalism,” notable for its absence. The problem for Carney was that the fetters were not tight enough.
Carney wants, Bourne explains, to move 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.”
That, I should add, sounds a little Xi Jinping to me. How odd!
Bourne:
Ultimately, when [Carney] 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.
I suspect that Carney had someone in mind.
Bourne:
[Markets] 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”.
How odd!