A court in Australia has told the government’s own eSafety Commission that Elon Musk is correct: One country cannot impose censorship on the world. The company X, formerly known as Twitter, must obey national law but not global law.

Mr. Musk seems to have won a very similar fight in Brazil, where a judge demanded not just a national but global takedown. X refused and won. For now.

This really does raise a serious issue: How big of a threat are these global government institutions?

Dreamy, dopey, and often scary intellectuals have dreamed of global government for centuries. If you are rich enough and smart enough, the idea seems to be the perennial temptation. The list of advocates includes people who otherwise have made notable contributions: Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Walter Cronkite, Buckminster Fuller, and many others.

Often the dream comes alive following huge upheavals such as war and depression. Or a pandemic period such as the one we’ve just gone through. The use of “disinformation” as a cross-border test case of global government power is designed to deploy a new strategy of governance in general, one that disregards national control in favor of global control.

That has always been the dream. In history, for example, following the Great War, we saw the creation of the League of Nations, which was a forerunner to the United Nations, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. Both were seen by the intellectual class as necessary building blocks for what they really wanted, which was a binding world state.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s what they said and what they wanted.

In 1919, H.G. Wells, inspired by the League, became so excited about the idea that he wrote a sweeping reinterpretation of world history that extended from the ninth century B.C. until that present moment. It was called “The Outline of History.”

The goal of the book was to turn on its head the popular Whig theory from the previous century, which saw history as the story of ever more freedom for individuals and away from powerful states. Wells told a story of tribes turning to nations and then to regions, with ever less power to the people and ever more to dictators and planners. His purpose was to chronicle and defend exactly this.

It was a huge bestseller at a time when the appetite for books was voracious because they were becoming affordable and there was a burning passion in the population for universal education. The thesis of his book, however valuable in some historical respects, was genuinely bizarre. He imagined a future world state ruled by a tiny elite of the smartest people who would plan all economies, information flows, migration patterns, and governance systems while crushing national ambitions, free enterprise, traditions, and constitutions.

It was crazy stuff and didn’t really happen. But the efforts never stopped among a certain class of intellectuals. Following World War II, we saw similar efforts, the U.N. being only one. In the agreement hammered out at Bretton Woods in 1944, we had forged the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which were seen as the basis of a global planning apparatus, together with a new world monetary system.

None of this worked out either. The IMF and World Bank ended up being well-funded sinecures for elite academics but not really the financial basis of a world state. The U.N. turned into a disappointment for many. The efforts at global management of trade finally came to fruition with the World Trade Organization, but that machinery has proven mostly toothless and unable to stop the sweeping turning back on free trade that has taken place over the past five years. Today, no nation really fears that entity.

The drive to unite Europe was advertised as a liberal move to inspire cooperation on trade and travel and to make economic cooperation possible. But that was just the pitch. The reality of the European Union was the creation of a mean bureaucracy in Brussels that would override the sovereignty of nations and force deference to a new central state in Europe that actually had no historical precedent. It was an experiment in region-wide government planning.

Britain was always a reluctant member, but when its worst fears were realized, the people voted to leave the whole thing. The result was Brexit, a political movement that panicked elites all over the world. They saw the plans of decades going up in smoke. Boris Johnson became prime minister with the task of making Brexit happen, but his rule was confounded at every step. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic came along to upend his entire tenure.

One way to understand the COVID-19 pandemic response is as a further experiment in world government, a way for the elites to broadcast to the entire planet that they can achieve global cooperation when they want to.

In most every nation, the response was the same in terms of timing and protocol. Social distancing was everywhere, and masks, too. The breakup of gatherings including worship, along with idiotic schemes such as one-way grocery aisles, were imposed everywhere. The slogans (“We are all in this together”) and signage (wash hands, keep distance, mask up) were also the same.

It was creepy in the extreme, especially when you consider the way it all happened at once, even though we knew for sure that there are huge hemispheric differences in the way respiratory pathogens spread. Something can be a problem in New York but not in Sydney. Why did this happen all at once? The message seemed to be: This is just what we do in a global pandemic.

What they did not tell anyone is that none of this constituted “common sense public health measures” but rather amounted to an experiment without any precedent in the history of humanity. Nowhere had all this cockamamie stuff ever been implemented. Only crazy people had recommended them in the past, but the crazies somehow carried the day. There was a message behind the entire effort: We are the government, and we rule the world, populists’ resentment be damned.

In the aftermath, the World Health Organization (WHO) has picked up the mantle to goad the nations of the world to give up their sovereignty and agree to implement the same protocols anytime that the WHO demands it. They have this treaty or agreement that they have been shopping around the planet for signers. At first, it seemed to be in the bag. But with the calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic response in the rearview mirror, it turned out to not be so easy.

The group REPPARE started looking carefully at this agreement and the amendments and saw that the entire thing rested on faulty premises, twisted thinking, and fiscal profligacy. Governments around the world are now flat-out rejecting the offer to give up their control over nations. It appears now that the World Health Organization’s agreement is in trouble. We are even starting to see movements in the direction of leaving the WHO completely, just as President Donald Trump attempted to do back in 2017.

No question that a nascent world government is in operation today. It is hugely influential over media, technology, and the operation of the internet. It is managing global money flows and asset prices. It aims to reduce national sovereignty to mere brand names of the same thing and make it impossible for the will of the voters to prevail in any policy outcomes. It consists of large and well-funded elites that swim between the public and private sectors and operate through foundations and nongovernmental organizations. It is utterly detached from democratic processes.

“Nothing more disastrous could happen in the field of international economic relations than the realization of such plans,” Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1944. “It would divide the nations into two groups—the exploiting and the exploited; those restricting output and charging monopoly prices, and those forced to pay monopoly prices. It would engender insoluble conflicts of interests and inevitably result in new wars.”

In other words, like all government actions, the results of a world government would end in the opposite of the promise: not peace but war, not prosperity but poverty, not health but sickness, not a better environment but a worse one. It would be a prison for the world and utterly unworkable. People of the world need to be on the lookout for what is happening and reject it whenever the opportunity presents itself to do so.

For this reason, we should cheer anytime global government impositions such as censorship experience a setback. Government in one country causes enough trouble. A unitary government ruling all countries would doom what’s left of civilization.

I’ve long said that Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are the path through which the depopulation and control agenda is manifesting. Perhaps the easiest example to use is the relationship between various governments, including America’s, with the private World Health Organization during Covid. International private bureaucracies like the WHO that are bestowed power over the people by governments is the model through which Public-Private Partnerships can be made to rule over us.

One of the reasons I often say we cannot vote our way out of the current perfect storm of existential threats is because the UniParty Swamp completely embraces PPPs. Moreover, even the handful of “good” representatives in the federal government dare not attack the concept of PPPs for fear of being politically eliminated by them. This can only be fought on three levels: spiritual, personal, and local.

When facing foes who sit in ivory towers with no accountability to the people, we must turn to God as the ultimate solution. Only He can topple them; no protests, lawsuits, or votes by the masses can make an impact unless He deems it so.

On a personal level, we must all do everything we can to prepare ourselves and our families by reducing or completely eliminating dependence on the state. I know living completely off-grid and hidden from society is impractical or even impossible for most of us, but getting as close as we can to a state of complete self-reliance is crucial.

As for localization, that is less of a solution than a delaying mechanism. Globalism is spreading like a plague, but through organized localization we can stave of the effects for a time. I’ll go into much more detail about this in the future because I feel it is an important and necessary step. In the meantime, trying to build our own little “Galt’s Gulches” may be delusional but achieving a localized ecosystem can still be beneficial. With that said, here’s Jörg’s article…

In 1990, socialism seemed to be done once and for all, but the times have changed. In the last twenty years, socialism has again become fashionable beyond the academic fringes. The covid-19 crisis demonstrated how quickly and thoroughly the traditionally free societies of the West may be transformed by small groups of determined and well-coordinated decisionmakers. Top-down central planning of all aspects of human life is today not merely a theoretical possibility. It seems to be right around the corner.

Now, the renaissance of central planning is an intellectual and practical dead end, for the reasons that Ludwig von Mises explained one hundred years ago. But if Mises was right, then how can we explain the renaissance of socialism as a political ideal? To some extent, this might be explained by the fact that new generations are likely to forget the lessons that were learned, often the hard way, by their ancestors. However, there are also other issues at stake. In what follows, I shall highlight two institutional factors that have played a major role: state apparatuses and ownerless private foundations.

1. State Apparatuses

An important driving force of the socialist renaissance has been the constant growth of state organizations. This includes all organizations that are largely financed by the state or thanks to state violence. For example, the so-called public service media are state organizations in this sense. In contrast, the so-called social media networks are mixed forms. It is true that they have received significant state support (for their establishment and for the expansion of the internet infrastructure). But they are also financed through advertising.

Socialism is growing out of the already existing state organizations. The crucial importance of this connection has been emphasized again and again by liberal and conservative theorists. A ministry, an authority, or a state-subsidized television station do not fully belong to the competitive life of ordinary society. Special rules apply. They are funded by taxes and other compulsory contributions. They are literally living at the expense of others. This has two important consequences for the renaissance of socialism.

On the one hand, state organizations are constantly forced to justify their privileged existence and therefore have a special need for intellectual services. Good cobblers and good bakers do not need to convince their customers with verbose theories. Their services speak for themselves. But creating and maintaining a government monetary system or a government pension system requires a constant torrent of words to pacify taxpayers, retirees, and the whole gamut of money users.

On the other hand, these intellectual suppliers typically have a personal agenda. State organizations are irresistibly attractive to ideological do-gooders of all stripes. This becomes clear as soon as we realize what doing good things really means.

Every day private companies and private nonprofit organizations create new products and new services—thousands of attempts at improvements. But their achievements fit into the existing social network. They are contributions that take into account the objectives and individual sensitivities of all other people. Private organizations thrive in competition. By contrast, the ideological do-gooder does not want to care about the sensitivities of other people. But that is only possible if his own income does not depend on those others, and if his plans can also be carried out against the will of the others. And that is exactly what the state, especially the republican state, enables him to do.

From the classical liberal point of view, the republican state should not pursue its own agenda. It should not be private, but public, should only provide the framework for free social interaction. But this theory hurts itself with the horror vacui it provokes. Ownerless goods will sooner or later be homesteaded by someone. Even an abandoned “public” state will sooner or later be taken into possession. History over the past two hundred years has shown that this privatization of the public state does not necessarily have to occur by coup or conquest. It can also grow out of the bosom of the state itself. The domestic staff, the servants of the state, can make themselves its masters.

Abandoned goods hold a magical attraction for people. An abandoned state magically attracts ideological do-gooders into the civil service. They are trying to privatize public space, to transform it into an instrument for their agenda. At first there may not be a consensus among them, but at some point the best-organized and best-connected groups gain the upper hand. The sociologist Robert Michels called this process the iron law of oligarchy.

The bureaucratic oligarchy can influence personnel decisions in terms of its ideology. Their ministry becomes “their” ministry (or their school, their university, their broadcasting service, etc.). It becomes an ideological state apparatus as defined by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Through commands and prohibitions, an ideological state apparatus can convey its ideology to the outside world.

Notice that the bureaucratic oligarchy is only a small minority. This explains why the oligarchic ideology is typically a socialist ideology. Only where there is private property is it possible for a minority to undertake anything that might displease other people. But the oligarchs of a republican state cannot assert property rights. The state does not belong to them—they just control it. In order to be able to direct it inexpensively, they must avoid inciting the majority to resist them. The easiest way to do this is through a socialist ideology. Slogans like “We govern ourselves” cover up the real power relations.

A classic case is the French ministry of education, which was appropriated by a coalition of Communists and Christian democrats after the Second World War. In those years, Professors Paul Langevin and Henri Wallon (both members of the French Communist Party) pursued a strategy of centralizing and homogenizing all secondary schools, along with a dumbing down of the entry requirements. With the help of their allies, Langevin and Wallon slowly but steadily filled all the key positions of the ministry with their people while greatly expanding it. Thus, they made “their” ministry resistant to reform. No bourgeois minister has ever dared to make it a “public” institution again. So it has remained in the Communist inheritance to this day. The supposed servants of the commonwealth have become the real rulers, against whom the elected representatives can only grind their teeth.

This tendency toward privatization is at work in all public institutions in all countries. President Donald Trump had not understood this before his 2016 election. He is probably wiser now, but the problem remains.

A state apparatus is often the first place where socialist reforms are implemented. In the past, state organizations have served as laboratories for expensive socialist labor-law reforms (quotas for civil servants, vacation regulations, etc.), for the typically socialist control of language (political correctness), and for harmonizing thought and action.

Over the past thirty years, international bureaucracies have played a growing role in making the world a better place for socialism. Intergovernmental organizations such as the European Union, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the International Monetary Fund have always served as reservoirs for intelligent radicals who found no place in national politics. But the influence of these people has grown considerably in recent years as they have played a key role in covering up interventionist failures.

This can be explained as follows: The state, which rules over the media and education, can gloss over and explain away its failures. But talk does not help when people see with their own eyes how things are abroad. The competition of political alternatives is ruthless, and the comparisons show time and time again that socialism and interventionism do not work. Hence the urge of all socialists to rule out alternatives as much as possible from the outset. So-called international cooperation and the abolition of the nation-state in favor of international organizations serve the same purpose. By proceeding as uniformly as possible, states aim to prevent the population from realizing that there are political alternatives and perhaps even better alternatives.

Another weapon in the socialists’ arsenal is the use of secret services to further their aims. The importance of these services cannot be overstated. This cloak of secrecy, often funded by substantial off-the-books resources, is particularly favorable for socialist agitation as long as the socialists are in a minority. Secrecy is a weapon often used successfully upon the unwitting citizenry.

It should never be overlooked that the socialists will use any and all areas of society and control of the state to further their aims and agenda.

2. Ownerless Foundations

The same iron law of oligarchy also applies to the large private law foundations (the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc.). Although these organizations are usually not themselves financed by taxpayers’ money, they—and the US foundations in particular—have made decisive contributions to the renaissance of socialism, for three main reasons.

First, the executives of such institutions are in constant search of self-affirmation and self-justification, and are therefore prone to activism.

Self-justification is particularly necessary if the organization does not provide a clear statement of purpose. The large US foundations serve general goals such as “progress” or “humanity.” Words of this kind must of course be backed by concrete content, and this is where the ideological suppliers come into play, just as in the case of the state bureaucracies.

Ideological do-gooders find an ideal playground in the large private foundations, especially when the founders let the supposed “experts” run free and entrust them with the management of the organization’s assets without any strings attached. The executives of such ownerless foundations are then subject to even fewer restrictions than their colleagues in government offices. While the high bureaucratic officials are still responsible to the elected political leadership (even if this responsibility is small for the reasons mentioned above), the directors and supervisory boards of the private foundations are among themselves. Nobody gets in their way—nobody they have not themselves accepted into their illustrious circle. Ownerless private foundations will therefore sooner or later serve those ideologies that are highly valued by the leading experts. As in state institutions, there may be temporary rivalries among the leading forces. In the end, however, the best-organized and best-connected groups prevail with regularity. From then on, their ideas determine the foundation’s direction.

These ideas are often diametrically opposed to those of the founders, as Niall Ferguson explains in “I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken.” In my opinion, the most important reason for this contrast is to be seen in the fact that the founders no longer have to prove themselves and also reject excessive activism on the part of their foundation for other reasons. They know the importance of free competition. They know that excessive donations from foundation money can seduce the recipients into laziness and frivolity. They want to help others. But above all they want these others to know how to help themselves.

Things are completely different in the case of the supposed experts who run the foundations. In contrast to the donors, many of them have not yet been able to show that they can achieve great things themselves. The decision-making power over the foundation gives them the opportunity to put their stamp on the world. This temptation is just too great for most. Those who have large resources at their disposal can make it their business to improve the world according to their taste.

The history of the US foundation system provides numerous cases of this tendency, well documented by Waldemar Nielsen. The largest American foundations of the twentieth century (Ford and Rockefeller) in particular committed themselves to changing American society in the 1950s and 1960s. Such activism is more or less inevitable if ideological do-gooders have free rein and well-filled treasure chests.

Second, the cooperation between private foundations and state organizations has a very similar effect. Such cooperation concretely means the joint pursuit of goals; the pooling of private and state funds; and the exchange of personnel. The private foundations thus come into the ideological orbit of the state institutions, as Ludwig von Mises explained in Human Action; and state institutions are captured by the “managerial” spirit of private foundations, to use Paul Gottfried’s phrase.

The private foundations like the partnership of the state for reasons of prestige and use it to “leverage” their own activities. One example among many: The Ford Foundation had already developed the basic principles of what would become the American welfare state in the 1950s and financed them on a small scale. But the means were lacking for large-scale application. Things changed when US president Lyndon Johnson adopted the Ford model and used taxpayer money to spread it across the country.

This partnership is also very welcome to the state because its bureaucrats also feel confirmed by the friendly response and the active support from the Potemkin-style world of “civil society” financed by foundation funds.

Third, the combination of grandiose objectives and enormous financial resources entails the tendency to pursue large and highly visible projects. (The tendency also exists for cost reasons. For a private foundation it is usually cheaper to finance a few large projects than thousands of small initiatives.) These large projects must be planned for the long term and centrally managed. The management of large foundations is therefore typically associated with a perspective on the economy and society that is very similar to that of a central planning committee. The case of other large companies is very similar.

Because of this perspective, the executives of large organizations can succumb to a special kind of delusion, which we propose to call the Rathenau delusion in honor of the great German industrialist who flirted with the socialist planned economy at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Rathenau delusion consists in seeing only a difference in scope between the private planning of very large companies and the centrally planned economies of entire nations. In fact, there is a categorical difference here. Rational economic planning always takes place within an order based on private property and monetary exchange. It is this order that orientates the numerous individual plans and coordinates them. Mises taught us that the rationality of economic activity is always and everywhere rooted in a microeconomic perspective and presupposes a social order under private law. By contrast, the basic socialist idea consists precisely in abolishing this superordinate order and replacing it with top-down planning. But whoever does this saws off the branch on which he is sitting. Instead of making rational economic activity easier, he makes it impossible. This is exactly what Mises proved a hundred years ago.

For the past seventy years, the major US foundations have been the main drivers of socialism, even more so than the state bureaucracies. Something similar can be said about the Bertelsmann Foundation and other German foundations. They also apply a saw with great relish to the capitalist branch that carries us all.

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About the Author

Jörg Guido Hülsmann is senior fellow of the Mises Institute where he holds the 2018 Peterson-Luddy Chair and was director of research for Mises Fellows in residence 1999-2004.  He is author of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism and The Ethics of Money Production. He teaches in France, at Université d’Angers. His full CV is here. Article cross-posted from Mises.