Editor’s Note: Last month, Wise Man Doug Casey said he’d been invited—“probably by mistake”—to a secretive gathering of the self-identified “elite.” We waited for over a month to get Doug’s debrief of the event… and it did not disappoint.
Big names like “super investor” Warren Buffett, master trader George Soros, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld all made prominent speeches at the event. Below, Doug shares the first part of what he gathered from his time in “the lion’s den”…
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From Doug Casey, chairman, Casey Research: Recently I made a few comments about the world’s self-identified “elite”, and also about the migrants that are plaguing Europe.
Happily, I was able to do some one-stop shopping on both of these topics when I was in New York to attend a very elitist and Globalist conference. I’m not going to name it because its organizers/sponsors are business partners of mine. And since they spent multimillions putting it together, and I pretty much despised their invitees, I’m not about to identify it exactly. Just let me say that the conclave has aspirations to become another Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, Atlantic Council, or Davos. Same kind of people, same ideas. Uniformly bad ideas. But ideas that the public has been brainwashed into thinking are good.
A lot of people are afraid these groups control the world, or at least governments. They don’t. They’re social gatherings for high-level government employees and NGO types who like to network, and feel relevant. And lots of their minions, who enjoy the rich food, pretending they’re big shots too, while listening to pontifications by actual big shots. They hope they can cozy up to them, close enough to ride a richer gravy train.
The avowed purpose of this conclave was to “build the public-private partnership”—the exact definition of fascism. So there were also lots of big-league corporate types who want to “make a difference”, and rich guys who want to be known for something besides having money.
Buffett
The program opened with Warren Buffett’s talk about how he didn’t need $50 billion, didn’t believe anybody else did either, and why he was a “philanthropist” who would give it all away. The avuncular Buffett is an investment genius; I enjoyed and agreed with everything he said on investing. But, like his friend Bill Gates, he’s also an autistic idiot savant. That’s someone who is a genius at one thing and a fool at most everything else.
Most people assume that if you know about investing, you must also know about economics, which is a related discipline. But that’s completely untrue. It’s analogous to thinking that someone who knows how to drive a car also knows how one works. Economics is the study of how men go about producing and consuming; investing is the practice of allocating capital for maximum returns. Buffett’s grasp of economics is shallow, conventional, and unrelated to his success as an investor.
Furthermore, if Buffett was really a philanthropist, he wouldn’t dissipate his $50 billion on poor people in Third World countries (which is where I suspect most of what’s left after administrative expenses will go). That will assuage some liberal guilt but will vanish without a trace like water poured into the Sahara.
And actually just make the root problem worse in many ways. If he really wants to help his fellow man, he would continue compounding capital at 20%, forever. Capital makes the world wealthy; consuming or frittering away capital makes the world poor. But enough on Buffett. He only exasperated me for about 40 minutes out of two full days.
Soros
Much worse was George Soros. He spent his time not just passively endorsing (like Buffett), but actively promoting disastrous policies. In essence, these were his major points. 1) Brexit should be overturned, regardless of the vote. 2) The EU should spend at least $200 billion a year (in addition to what individual countries spend) both to make migrants welcome and to install a Marshall Plan for Africa. 3) All of Europe should import migrants at least proportionally to the 1 mm entering Germany. He recognized that the migrants represent an “existential crisis” for Europe but believes the solution is to accommodate them. 4) The EU should actively arm against Russia. 5) The EU in Brussels should be granted the right to tax.
As I listened to him I felt I’d been transported to Bizzarro World, or perhaps some magic land from Gulliver’s Travels, where everything is upside down, wrong is right, and black is white.
Just as much of Soros’ presentation was on migration, so was much of the rest of the conference. It’s very much on the minds of the “elite.”
His new Marshall Plan would consist of Europe and the U.S. sending trillions to African governments to develop the Continent. Strange, really. Africa has received about a trillion of foreign aid over the last 50 years; that capital has either been wasted on uneconomic boondoggles, or shipped off to the bank accounts of the ruling class. Soros is far from naïve; he’s got to know this. I wonder what he actually hopes to accomplish, and why? After all, he’s 84 years old, and doesn’t need any more money. Well, it’s hard to be sure how some people’s minds are wired. And, as Lamont Cranston once asked, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”
Incidentally—completely contrary to conventional wisdom—I consider the much-lauded Marshall Plan to have been an unnecessary and destructive boondoggle. But this isn’t the moment to explain why that’s true.
As I said above, the Summit was centered on migration. I’ve recently commented on the subject, and will reiterate a few points below before returning to the views of the Globalists and self-identified Elite.
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A Word on Migration
Let me start by saying I’m all for immigration and completely open borders to enable opportunity seekers from anyplace to move anyplace else. With two big, critically important, caveats: 1) there can be no welfare or free government services, so everyone has to pay his own way and no freeloaders are attracted 2) all property is privately owned to minimize the possibility of squatter camps full of beggars.
In the absence of welfare benefits, immigrants are usually the best of people because you get mobile, aggressive, and opportunity-seeking people that want to leave stagnant and repressive cultures for vibrant and liberal ones. That was the case with the millions of immigrants who came to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And they had zero in the way of state support.
But what is going on in Europe today is entirely different. The migrants coming to Europe aren’t being attracted by opportunity in the new land so much as the welfare benefits and the soft life. Western Europe is a massive welfare state that is providing free food, housing, medical care, schooling, and living expenses to all comers. Benefits like these will naturally draw in poor people from poor countries. For the most part they’ll be unskilled, poorly educated, and many will have a bad attitude. The question arises why—since they’re almost all Muslims—they aren’t being welcomed by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, or Brunei, which are wealthy Muslim countries.
What we’re talking about here is the migration of millions of people of different language, different race, different religion, different culture, and different mode of living. If you’re an alien and you’re 1 out of 10,000, or 1,000, or even 100, you’re a curiosity, an interesting outsider. And you’d have to integrate in the new society. But an influx of millions of migrants can only destroy the old culture. And guarantee antagonism—especially when the locals are forced to pay for it. In many ways, what’s happening now isn’t just comparable to what happened 2,000 years ago with the migration of the Germanic barbarians into the Roman Empire. It’s potentially much more serious.
Although most of the migration will be out of Africa, it’s supposed to be official Chinese policy to migrate about 300 million Chinese into Africa in the years to come. They’re employed in building roads, mines, railroads and other infrastructure. The Africans like the goodies, but don’t like the Chinese. It has the makings of a race war a generation or so in the future. The problem won’t only be tens or hundreds of millions of Africans migrating to Europe, but tens or hundreds of millions of Chinese migrating to Africa.
The EU is a huge aggravating factor with the migrant situation. Brussels is full of globalists and doctrinaire socialists who not only promote bad policies, but make the whole continent pay for the mistakes of its most misguided members. The migrants, who are manifestly unwelcome in Hungary, Poland, and other Eastern European countries, will prove another big impetus for the breakup of the EU.
Millions of Africans will want to emigrate, especially to the homelands of their ex-colonial masters in Europe. The colonizers are now themselves being colonized. Fair enough, I suppose; a case of the sins of the father truly devolving upon the sons. If I was an African from south of the Sahara, I’d absolutely try to get to Italy or Greece or France or Spain or on my way to Northern Europe to cash in on the largesse of these stupid Europeans.
I’m a fan of what’s left of Western Civilization. I hate to see it washed away. But that’s what will happen if the floodgate is opened.
Unless the Europeans get in front of this situation, it’s not just some refugees from the Near East they’ll have to deal with. Especially with the economic chaos of The Greater Depression, it’s going to be many millions from Africa, and then perhaps millions more from Central Asia, and even India and Bangladesh. The world is becoming a very small place. What happens when scores of thousands of migrants set up a squatter camp someplace—with no food, shelter, or sanitary facilities? What will happen when there are scores or hundreds of squatter camps? Unlike the Goths and the Vandals, who became the new aristocracy, the chances of the Africans integrating is essentially zero. The situation is likely to be most stressful…
Some will say “But you have to be charitable, you can’t just let them starve because they’ve had some bad luck.” To that I’d say an individual, or a family, can have some bad luck. But the places these people come from have had “bad luck” for centuries. Their bad luck is the consequence of their political, economic, and social systems. Their cultures—let me note the elephant in the room—are backward, degraded, and unproductive. It makes no sense, it’s idiotic, to import—at huge expense—masses of people who have a culture of “bad luck.”
On just one day recently, the Italian Coast Guard rescued 10,000 Africans off the Libyan coast—almost all men from Guinea, Gambia, Nigeria, and neighboring countries—and transported them to Italy. It’s hard to see them ever going back home. But it’s certain they’ll encourage their friends and families to join them.
The situation can only get worse. Why? In 1950, the 250 million Africans were only 9% of the world’s population; it’s 27% now, but there will be 4 billion, for 40%, in 2100. Making that observation is highly politically incorrect, and presumably racist. I’ll have more to say on racism in the future. But the fact is that Africa has always been an economic basket case; if Vasco Da Gama had thrown out a wheel when he was rounding the Cape, he would also have had to throw out an instruction book on how to use it. But nobody could have read it.
Be that as it may. But Europeans made things worse when they conquered the continent and divided it up into political entities that made zero sense from a cultural, linguistic, religious or tribal viewpoint. That guaranteed chaos for the indefinite future. That’s why it’s always a mad scramble to get control of the government in these countries, in order to loot the treasury, entrench one’s cronies, and punish one’s enemies. Until there’s a bloody revolution, and the shoe goes on another foot.
Here’s the takeaway. The population of Africa is going up by several billion people in the years to come. The net wealth of the continent is going nowhere. The locals will want to move wholesale to Europe, where the living is easy. And where the politically correct Cultural Marxists are anxious to destroy their own civilization.
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of think tanks in the U.S. alone, most located within the Washington Beltway, that believe that these people should be encouraged to migrate, or imported en masse. They’re populated by partisan academics, ex-politicos, retired generals and others circulating through the revolving doors of the military/industrial/political/academic complex.
They’re really just propaganda outlets, funded by foundations, and donors who want to give an intellectual patina to their views and, to use a popular phrase, “make a difference.”
Think tanks, and their cousins, the lobbyists and the NGOs, are mostly what I like to call Running Dogs, who act as a support system for the Top Dogs in the Deep State. Their product is “policy recommendations,” which influence how much tax you have to pay and how many new regulations you have to obey. Think tanks are populated almost exclusively by people who are, simultaneously, both “useful idiots” and “useless mouths.” They’re no friends of the common man.
The migration policies they’re promoting are creating minor chaos now. With world-class chaos in the wings.
Let me repeat, and re-emphasize, what I said earlier. The free-market solution to the migrant situation is quite simple. If all the property of a country is privately owned, anyone can come and stay as long as he can pay for his accommodations. When even the streets and parks are privately owned, trespassers, beggars, squatters, migrants, vagrants and the like have a problem. A country with 100% private property, and zero welfare, would only attract people who like those conditions. And they’d undoubtedly be welcome as individuals. But “migration” would be impossible.
This is how the migration problem could be solved. You don’t need the government. You don’t need the army. You don’t need visas or quotas. You don’t need laws. You don’t need treaties to solve the migration problem. All you need is privately owned property and the lack of welfare benefits.
Instead, think tanks will come up with some cockamamie political solution. But the good news is that it will speed up the disintegration of the EU.
My prediction that the Continent will one day just be a giant petting zoo for the Chinese is intact—assuming the current wave of migrants approve. There will also be an exodus of capital and people from Europe to parts of Latin America, plus to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This is, obviously, bad for Europe and good for the recipient countries, since these emigrants will be educated and affluent.
But, having said that, let me take you back to the conference where migration was a major topic of discussion by the elite… [Continued tomorrow.]
Reeves’ Note: If you haven’t seen it yet, Doug Casey has just released his latest and most controversial prediction yet. It involves a shocking currency ban (not gold) that may soon take effect under the Trump presidency.
Already, Fed members have met in private to discuss this matter. And the savings of millions could be devalued if this goes into effect. To watch the video and discover the four steps Doug is taking to prepare, click here.