What Is The Great Reset?

When you think of Reset, what comes to mind? For my part I recall poignantly the scene in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2009, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her first foray on the world stage, handed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a plastic toy, on which was supposedly written, the Russian word for Reset.

You see, the Obama administration was directly repudiating Bush foreign policy, because it could do so and because no one was going to complain.

But then, in a fascinating moment, Lavrov looked at Hillary and declared that her minions in the United States State Department had mistranslated the word Reset. The Russian word did not mean Reset, it meant Overload.

Heaven knows what Freud would have made of that, but Lavrov’s gesture was clearly a humiliation for Hillary. Consider that Lavrov, had he wanted to be diplomatic, would have said nothing. When he did say something, something that was designed to wipe the smirk off of Hillary’s face and to put her in her place, he was making a statement. And he was saying that Hillary was a poser, a woman who did not deserve to be sharing the stage with him.

Within a few years, Russia would annex Crimea, would move into Syria, would cause America to cancel the missile defense systems that the Bush administration had sold to Poland and the Czech Republic, would, at Putin's bidding, refuse to sell defensive tank missiles to Ukraine, and buy off Hunter Biden.

Naturally, the Democratic Party and the mainstream media would conclude that Donald Trump was Putin's bitch.

Most Americans had not figured it out that Lavrov was taking the measure of Hillary, because they, like the sainted Dr. Fauci, were genuflecting at the court of the Mother Goddess.

Anyone who knew anything would have known that Hillary was an incompetent fraud, a woman who had ridden her husband’s coattails to power, a woman whose most important achievement was to enable her husband’s sexual predations, and who would happily defend him against a charge of rape. 

And, yes, I recall perfectly that Barack Obama once said that Hillary was the most qualified candidate to run for the presidency of the United States. But seriously, don’t you know irony when you see it? Perhaps Obama was too subtle for most Americans, but he was also ridiculing the pretension of the queen of pretension.

Apparently, many of the world’s great business and thought leaders missed the point completely. When they gather together for their yearly Davos confab-- taking place next year in Singapore-- said world leaders are calling for something they call a Great Reset.

The Great Reset is even bigger than the Hillary Reset. So, you know that it’s really big. And you also know that the echo of the Hillary flub shows that they are living in an alternate reality, one where their and Dr. Fauci’s wishes had come true, and Hillary had won the 2016 election.

In truth, the Great Reset is a return to internationalism, to globalism, to anti-nationalism. Davos Man is a citizen of the world. He has no real national alliances. He is living in a world city where he is not just working to make industry produce goods and services. He is dedicated to the Herculean task of bringing diversity and justice and equality to bear for any and all.

He has adopted nothing less than what is called stakeholder capitalism. It won the most recent presidential election, so why not double down?

Francis Menton describes The Big Reset on his Manhattan Contrarian blog (via Maggie’s Farm):

The basic idea is to enlist every government and all big corporations to work to eliminate the freedom-based economic order (often mis-named “capitalism”) that prevails today throughout the successful portion of the world. But, you ask, why? Hasn’t that order brought prosperity and abundance to millions? Yes, but per the WEF, we are all required to feel great guilt and shame at our economic success, because we have not also simultaneously achieved perfect fairness, justice and equality among all people, let alone that the world is beset by “crises” including the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. “Crises” like these can only be addressed by massive and pervasive government control.

Or, as Alexander William Salter explains in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

This is no accident. Stakeholder capitalism is used as a way to obfuscate what counts as success in business. By focusing less on profits and more on vague social values, “enlightened” executives will find it easier to avoid accountability even as they squander business resources. While trying to make business about “social justice” is always concerning, the contemporary conjunction of stakeholder theory and woke capitalism makes for an especially dangerous and accountability-thwarting combination.

In truth, Salter continues, stakeholder capitalism will naturally diminish profit and damage corporations, to say nothing of the economy. It will become a convenient excuse for failure:

When other goals compete with the mandate to maximize returns, the feedback loop created by profits gets weaker. Lower revenues and higher costs no longer give owners and corporate officers the information they need to make hard choices. The result is increased internal conflict: Owners will jockey among themselves for the power to determine the corporation’s priorities. Corporate officers will be harder to discipline, because poor performance can always be justified by pointing to broader social goals. And the more these broader goals take precedence, the more businesses will use up scarce resources to deliver diminishing benefits to customers.

After all, if you hire for diversity you are not going to be doing as well as if you had hired for merit. And yet, big ideas gleam overhead and the world’s thought leaders are bedazzled by them.

When it comes to business success, and the ability to compete in world markets, stakeholder capitalism is suicide.

Naturally, these great world leaders imagine that Asian nations, led by China, are naturally going to sign on to this program. And while China has been more than happy to pay lip service, for example, to overheated environmentalist brains, it is certainly not going to shut down electrical capacity, coal-burning or nuclear, because Greta Thunberg is throwing a tantrum.

Only the geniuses running California will be causing their citizens to suffer blackouts. The Eastern world will be laughing at the West's self-immolation as they take over the world.

The Great Reset is a loser’s lament, a losing strategy, a way of saying that even though, what with our high ideals, we are about to lose out in the clash of civilizations, we are still standing tall and proud on the moral high ground.

These great minds have never understood that being on the moral high ground accomplishes one and only one thing: it makes you a target.