While speaking to world and industry leaders at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) conference in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Argentinian president Javier Gerardo Milei condemned leaders in the Western world for abandoning the “model of freedom.”
The staunchly libertarian president called on global leaders, in no uncertain terms, to embrace capitalism and abandon globalist and “collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world.”
“I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger,” Milei said. “It is endangered because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inextricably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.”
Milei, who took office amid crippling inflation and a lingering $44 billion debt with the International Monetary Fund, has been strongly opposed to socialist policies that he says will create economic turmoil.
The Argentinian president later said that the leaders of the Western world have “abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.” He later added, “We are 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.”
Milei notably traveled to the summit on a commercial airliner, starkly contrasting the global leaders who have been criticized at past conferences for their decision to fly privately, all while fear-mongering about the dangers of climate change. Milei reportedly took “selfies with passengers on board and [criticized] what he called the event’s ‘socialist agenda'” according to Reuters.
While on the flight, he told reporters that he was traveling to Davos to “seed ideas of freedom in a forum that is contaminated by the 2030 socialist agenda, which will only bring misery to the world.”
“The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that — no matter how rich you may be, or how much you may have in terms of natural resources… or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank — if measures are adopted that hinder the free function of markets, free competition, free price systems, if you hinder trade, if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty.”
-Argentinian President Javier Gerardo Milei at the World Economic Forum summit
This piece first appeared at TPUSA.
