If you don’t subscribe to the sleep-inducing United Nations YouTube channel, you might have missed this plan released by UN Chief António Guterres on March 31. It’s about the UN “saving the world economy” by directly and indirectly seizing more cash from the taxpayers who already pay for it via the 193 countries – mostly via the US – that rule over them.
In a fifteen-minute long video on the “economic impacts” of COVID-19, Mr. Guterres took the path UN-boosters have walked for decades: calling for more worldwide control of businesses, worldwide bailouts, wider monetary meddling, and a mandate to shovel ten percent of worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) into the UN furnace.
What is needed is a large-scale, coordinated and comprehensive multilateral response amounting to at least 10 per cent of global GDP. We must massively increase the resources available to the developing world by expanding the capacity of the International Monetary Fund, namely through the issuance of Special Drawing Rights, and the other international financial institutions to rapidly inject resources into the countries that need them.
That’s right. As usual, the collectivists at the UN try to camouflage their redistribution of wealth by throwing it behind a mask of “saving the world economy”.
But this is precisely what Guterres wants.
The recovery from (the) COVID-19 crisis must lead to a different economy. Everything we do, during and after this crisis, must be with a strong focus on building more equal, inclusive, and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change, and many other global challenges we face.
So, now the UN is combining its rhetoric about “climate change” with its go-to-terminology about globalism and the new issue, a pandemic, to call for more of precisely that which makes society less able to deal with naturally occurring troubles.
Simply put, centrally-planned economies cannot respond to sudden system shocks as dynamically and positively as market-based economies. In fact, collectivism crushes productivity so much that it doesn't allow the leverageable surplus that the division of labor and market trade provide. Pile onto that the problem of diverse resource allocation needed for fast emergency response and re-purposing – resource allocation that can only be properly handled through the price system – and economics dictates that only individual valuation reflected through market transactions can manage “regular” trade, let alone emergency needs.
Economists note that the best way to improve safety in the face of all natural threats is to allow for the greater productivity that free markets afford. Only by letting people save money through competitive market processes can that money be spent on new levels of “sustainability”, health, cleanliness, building safety, and repairs after disasters.
From earthquake-hit Chile to tsunami-damaged Pacific islands, the real world shows sloth and waste on the part of centrally-planned economies, while free-market incentives drive towards better prep and faster responses.
But the UN goals have almost nothing to do with prosperity, living standards, preparations, or responses. They have to do with control and wealth redistribution. As Mr. Guterres explicitly states:
We must massively increase the resources available to the developing world by expanding the capacity of the International Monetary Fund – namely Special Drawing Rights – and the other international financial institutions, to rapidly inject resources into the countries that need them.
Let’s lay this out. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international organization that officially began on December 27, 1946. It is funded through lending by UN member states, with nearly one-fifth of its funds coming from US taxpayers. Some claim that the IMF "repays" the US government and that taxpayers actually profit from these loans, but a 1998 report from the Cato Institute disputes those claims. By '89, the US involvement with the IMF had already added $4.6 billion to the national debt.
Second, the US is the biggest contributor to the United Nations, providing 20 percent of the funds for this 193 state-member bureaucracy.
And this is the UN which hosts the World Health Organization – the organization that has so badly mismanaged the COVID-19 outbreak that in mid-January, it actually Tweeted that the Wuhan coronavirus wasn’t contagious between humans, while its Director General, Tedros Adhamon Ghebreyesus has been accused of multiple acts of corruption.
But Mr. Guterres wants MORE of your money. In fact, he’s slyly implying an entirely new paradigm: a world tax system to make sure that the UN gets that ten percent of GDP. In his speech, he mentions not only “Special Drawing Rights” – which is fantasy money the UN creates through fractional reserve currency creation – but direct redistribution of wealth:
That means designing fiscal and monetary policies able to support the direct provision of resources to workers and households, the provision of health and unemployment insurance, scaled-up ‘social protection’ (seemingly an SJW hammer against 'thought crime'), and support to businesses to prevent bankruptcies and massive job losses…
And its for, as he says, “sustainability” and targeting the “2030 UN goals”, and that, folks, means it’s not just about getting more money through these roundabout means. If one looks into the UN 2030 “sustainable development” goals, one sees that they are all tied to what is called The UN Model Tax Treaty, which has as its goal to push the world population towards electronic transactions, and drawing a UN tax on those transactions.
So Mr. Guterres is tipping his hand, openly awaiting for a day when the UN can directly tax people, rather than waiting for select national overlords to do it.
It seems that COVID-19 isn’t the only destructive force against which we should resist.