You Will Own Nothing

by Carol Roth

I am known as someone with a commonsense approach to just about everything, so when I first heard that the World Economic Forum (WEF), an international organization connected to a cadre of elites that includes business, financial, and political leaders, put out a set of predictions for this decade that included the disappearance of ownership, I figured it was a conspiracy theory. The WEF has courted, developed, and associated with business magnates and political heavyweights like Bill Gates, Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and former chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel. The WEF hosts a fancy networking forum in Davos, Switzerland, yearly. They put out “thought leadership” around social, political, business, and economic concepts. Surely there must have been some mistake that this organization littered with the global elite would be predicting the end of private property? It didn’t take much research to find that it was right out in the open. The WEF’s 2030 predictions included the stark warning, under the guise of sunshine and rainbows, “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” And that’s just the beginning. Yes, property rights and the ownership they convey, the cornerstone of freedom and wealth creation opportunities, have come under fire. And I am quite certain that owning nothing and being devoid of the opportunities that come with ownership makes you poor and unfree, not . . . happy. What is being said by the elites...