U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has seen the global problems brought on by the United Nations, and he knows how to fix them: more socialism.
Guterres, the former socialist prime minister of Portugal, said that the coronavirus pandemic has shown “the lie that free markets can provide healthcare” and bemoaned the patriarchy and income inequality in a speech that was part of the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture Series on Saturday. He blamed developed countries for not sharing resources with underdeveloped ones, calling for a New Global Deal to ensure that power, wealth, and opportunities are shared more broadly and fairly at the international level.
Guterres has it exactly backward, of course. Socialist countries have seen their living standards decline, whereas even the poorest nations (including formerly socialist countries) see improvements the moment they loosen the reins on the economy and allow free markets to thrive. A global redistributionist plan likely wouldn’t help matters much either, and it would be mostly the United States giving even more money for the U.N. to waste in its bloated bureaucracies.
Like any good socialist, Guterres stuck to vague platitudes for most of his speech, refusing to name names or offer any concrete solutions to the mix of real and imagined problems he mentioned. He brought up violence against women but refused to name countries where it was at “epidemic levels.” Guterres did say that more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty globally — bet you can guess how that happened — but then complained about the nonissue of income inequality.
The deep irony of Guterres’s speech is that the U.N. is partly responsible for the current problems. It was the World Health Organization that lied about the severity of the virus, fell for and willingly spread Chinese propaganda, and helped facilitate the spread of the virus globally. Add a bit of extra irony for the fact that some of Europe’s most highly praised socialist healthcare systems were also the first to be overwhelmed by COVID-19, resulting in much higher death rates. In contrast, the U.S. system weathered the storm well and is still holding its own amid a second coronavirus wave.
The U.N. has been at odds with the values of freedom-loving countries for some time now, pandering not only to the Chinese Communist Party but also to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and terrorist regimes such as Iran.
The U.N. is not a tool for global prosperity but rather an obstacle to it. Like most things that come out of the world diplomatic body, Guterres’s speech misdiagnoses the problems and offers no solutions. Each passing day shows that the U.N. is a waste of American time and American dollars.
