OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
X, the company formerly known as Twitter, was set ablaze when its CEO, Elon Musk, posted a not-safe-for-work (NSFW) image to his account.
The picture contained a naked man sitting upright in bed with a laptop computer covering up the backside of a naked woman sitting on the man’s lap area facing the other way. The caption said, “so hot rn” (right now).
But what he was really referring to was the image on the laptop that showed the much-talked-about speech given at the World Economic Forum meeting on Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland, by Argentine President Javier Milei.
So hot rn pic.twitter.com/K4YjoWmS8i
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 18, 2024
In his speech, the Argentinian president said that the Western world was “in danger” and that it needed to embrace capitalism.
“Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger,” he said in the address that has been praised by conservatives.
“And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty,” he said.
“Unfortunately, in recent decades, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. Some have been motivated by well-meaning individuals who are willing to help others, and others have been motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste,” the Argentine president said.
“We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause. Do believe me: no one is in a better place than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points,” he said in his fiery speech.
“Thirty-five years after we adopted the model of freedom, back in 1860, we became a leading world power. And when we embraced collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished, and we dropped to spot number 140 globally,” he added.
“But before having the discussion, it would first be important for us to take a look at the data that demonstrate why free enterprise capitalism is not just the only possible system to end world poverty, but also that it’s the only morally desirable system to achieve this,” Milei noted further.
He went on to talk about world history and poverty before coming back to the current day.
“We should remember that by the year 1800, about 95 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. And that figure dropped to five percent by the year 2020, prior to the pandemic. The conclusion is obvious,” he said.
“Far from being the cause of our problems, free trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we have to end hunger, poverty, and extreme poverty across our planet. The empirical evidence is unquestionable,” Milei said, scolding the left.
“Therefore, since there is no doubt that free enterprise capitalism is superior in productive terms, the left-wing doxa has attacked capitalism, alleging matters of morality, saying — that’s what the detractors claim — that it’s unjust. They say that capitalism is evil because it’s individualistic and that collectivism is good because it’s altruistic. Of course, with the money of others,” the president said.
“So they therefore advocate for social justice. But this concept, which in the developed world became fashionable in recent times, in my country has been a constant in political discourse for over 80 years. The problem is that social justice is not just, and it doesn’t contribute to general well-being,” said Milei.
“Quite on the contrary, it’s an intrinsically unfair idea because it’s violent. It’s unjust because the state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively. Or can any one of us say that we voluntarily pay taxes? This means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden, the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom,” he noted.
