In closing, I would like to leave a message to all the business people here and to those who are not here in person but are watching us from around the world. Don't be intimidated by the political caste or the parasites who live off the state. Don't surrender to the political class who only want to stay in power and maintain their privileges. You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we have ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambitions are immoral. If you are making money, it is because you are offering a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to the general welfare. Don't give in to state support. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem. You are the real protagonists of this story, and rest assured that from now on Argentina is your loyal and unconditional ally.
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Unofficial translation of Argentine President Javier Milei's Davos speech from English with simultaneous interpretation from Spanish.
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Good afternoon. Thank you very much. I am here today to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West are infected with a vision of a world that leads inexorably to socialism and thus to poverty.
Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others and others motivated by a desire to belong to a privileged caste, the major leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom in favor of various versions of what we call collectivism. We are here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that plague the world's citizens. Rather, they are the root cause.
Given the abject failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists have been forced to change their agenda. They have left behind the class struggle based on the economic system and replaced it with other supposed social conflicts that are equally harmful to community life and economic growth.
The first of these new battles was a ridiculous and unnatural struggle between a man and a woman... All that this radical feminist agenda has led to is more state intervention to hinder the economic process and give jobs to bureaucrats who have contributed nothing. Examples: women's ministries or international organisations dedicated to promoting this agenda.
Another conflict introduced by socialists is that of people against nature, when they claim that we humans are damaging the planet, which should be protected at all costs, even to the point of promoting population control mechanisms or the bloody abortion agenda.
Unfortunately, these harmful ideas have taken a strong hold in our society. The neo-Marxists have succeeded in infecting the common sense of the Western world, and they have achieved this by appropriating the media, the culture, the universities.
The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you are or how much you may have in terms of natural resources, or how skilled your population may be, or how educated, or how many gold bars you may have in the central bank, if measures are taken that prevent the free functioning of markets, free competition, free price systems, if you prevent trade, if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty.
Today, states do not need to directly control the means of production in order to control every aspect of the lives of individuals by using instruments such as money printing, debt, subsidies, interest rate controls, price controls and regulation to correct so-called market failures. They can control the lives and destinies of millions of individuals.
Much of the generally accepted political attitudes in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they openly claim to be communists, fascists, Nazis, socialists, social democrats, national socialists, or democratic Christians.
They are neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or, in essence, globalists. There are no fundamental differences. They all say that the state should control all aspects of individuals' lives. They all defend a model that is contrary to the one that has led humanity to the most remarkable progress in its history.
We are here today to invite the rest of the Western world to return to the path of prosperity, economic freedom, limited government...and unfettered respect for private property.
The impoverishment caused by collectivism is no fantasy, nor is it an inevitable fate. But it is a reality that we Argentines know very well. We have experienced it. We have been through it because, as I said earlier, since we decided to abandon the model of freedom that made us rich, we have been in a downward spiral in which we are getting poorer and poorer every day.
In conclusion, I would like to leave a message to all the entrepreneurs here and to those who are not here in person but are watching us from all over the world. Do not be intimidated by the political caste or the parasites who live off the state. Don't surrender to the political class who only want to stay in power and maintain their privileges.
You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we have ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambitions are immoral. If you are making money, it is because you are offering a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to the general welfare.
Don't give in to state support. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem. You are the real protagonists of this story, and rest assured that from now on Argentina is your loyal and unconditional ally.
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