The hastily designed Website CPACMexico.com counts down to the American Conservative Union’s get together in Mexico City, August 2024. It will need some last-minute adjustments. The US Conservative Union runs conferences for the ultra right wing. They’re called “Conservative Political Action Conferences” or CPAC for short. A surprise announcement just five days before the conference from Buenos Aires says that President Milei has opted out of CPAC Mexico citing health issues, with other’s speculating of relationship problems with his vice president. Another Argentine is going in his place: Agustin Laje. Laje is also a libertarian from Argentina like his President Milei.
So what is CPAC and why should I care?
CPACMexico.com is just a Mexican conference but CPAC itself is a US invention. CPAC.conservative.org is based just outside of Washington DC in Alexandria, Virginia. It is currently focused on the conservative US candidates like Donald Trump’s election campaign but it acts as a permanent lobby for the extreme right. It has become a home to various right-wing factions and stubbornly pushes them toward the far right. It’s permanent mandate is to lobby US Congress and Senators toward the far right on specific bills and to rate their performance using a rating system. The ratings favour big business and the rich. As to the ratings themselves; the worse the better. Policy ratings reward anti-taxation, anti-abortion, anti-government and positively laud private property. Progressives get about 0% (see below) and neo-nazis advocating for the flat tax hover around the can-do-better 90% rate. Those in the middle get pushed toward the right for a better score. Anarchocapitalist’s ratings tend to be at the 100% end of the scale too. CPAC sponsors like it that way. If the CPAC foundation rated foreign leaders, Javier Milei would rate pretty high too. They don’t do international ratings; at least not yet.
Freedom to sell one’s kidney
The funding for CPAC and for the closely aligned (and better known) CATO Institute come from corporate donors and from their rich shareholders who are against taxation. Libertarians are more than obliging on this referring to taxation as ‘theft’. Libertarians just want the State to adjudicate and protect property rights (deeds and titles). They promote a minimal state (minarchism) with the taxation of wages (not wealth, land, houses or even jet-fuel) to pay for military and police protection, a conservative legal system and lots of jails. They want the state to remove any threat to (their) private property. Libertarians resent communism, socialism, the local poor and, especially, poor foreigners.
If there is anything that unites the loony right it is their relationship with property. As a visual meme think of a six year old in a screaming tantrum: “It’s MINE! and I can do whatever I want with it!“
For paleolibertarians unshackled property rights also extend to one’s own body as well as land or buildings. In the case of bodies; adults and children are openly recommended to sell themselves, yes literally. This is the paleolibertarian no-holds-barred image of labour. Body parts too are fair game to these freeloading free marketeers. Organ sales are defended in Propertarianism. Nothing is more yours than your kidney. Individual rights are sacrosanct but libertarians rarely defend human rights. Milei’s team are busy trying to erase protections for worker, women, indigenous, trans, gay and human rights in Argentina right now.
Climate Change? No Thanks!
Since the primary focus of paleolibertarianism is defending the right to do whatever one wants to with their property, this implies a total negation of human-caused climate change. If libertarians are forced by logic to accept that the climate was changing, and humans were responsible, that would imply imposing restrictions on capital. That, in turn, would be non-libertarian so they can’t believe in climate change and deny it instead. Maybe that is why the Koch Brothers helped fund Rothbard to found the CATO institute which defends the oil industry. Are you getting the picture yet?
AMLO shows incredible diplomatic restraint
Earlier in August AMLO commented on the fact that Javier Milei had not advised the Mexican embassy in Buenos Aires of his intended trip in a press conference Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said that Mexico is “a free nation without censorship or (political) persecution”. Before planning his Mexico trip Milei had already insulted AMLO in a viral video calling him and people like him “assassins” [who are] “repugnant and pathetic”. Now Milei’s not coming! AMLO, for his part, isn’t missing much. “I am not in agreement with [Milei’s] way of thinking nor his way of being.” he said at a Presidential press conference when asked about the visit.
Who Will be at CPAC?
CPAC speakers are all hailed as “Freedom Fighters”. The freedom they speak of are free markets and libertarian property rights: polluting rivers, cutting down the Amazon, demolishing art galleries… You just need to own the land.
Among the South American speakers the Bolsonaros will be represented by one of the (now indicted) former presidents’ sons, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a charming chap with a fetish for guns.
There are two Chilean speakers too; one hard right commentariat professional, Axel Kaiser, who is an ideologue academic and a regular speaker at libertarian events in the southern cone. There are very few libertarians around so the same faces turn up everywhere. Possibly much more significant is the appearance of José Antonio Kast.
José Antonio Kast stood in Chile’s last presidential elections against Gabriel Boric. They were neck and neck but Kast lost. Kast, it seems, was a little too right wing even for Chile! While on his presidential campaign journalist Paulina Allende-Salazar asked Kast why his policy proposal of immediate release of genocidal Pinochet military wasn’t mentioned in his presidential campaign. Kast fluffed his answer indicating he only wanted to release those of “advanced age” — which, she reminded him, is all of them— then he backtracked to house arrest in certain cases.
Kast’s German father emigrated to Chile in 1947, burning his military papers, he pretended to work for the Red Cross. The ruse didn’t work but he managed to escape the de-nazification of Germany arriving in Chile from Bavaria. Kast’s brother was also an economist under Pinochet, working with the University of Chicago’s economists such as Hayek and Friedman. The Chicago school of Economics, a nest of Libertarians, had a relationship to the Chilean government. They’re referred to in South America as the Chicago Boys. Both Friedman and Hayek liked Pinochet, neither were big fans of democracy.
Like Milei Agustin Laje is also a salesperson for the ‘philosophy’ of Libertarianism; he’s also a follower of Milei’s Rothbardian sect of the Loony right. In his late teens he studied counter-terrorism in Latin America in National Defense University in Washington DC. Laje’s typical battlegrounds in Argentina are the so called “Culture Wars”. He is anti-‘woke’, socially on the right he’s associated with Opus Dei. Laje’s main problem with trans people is that he advocates that spending public money on health issues for trans people is stealing money from rich white Christians.
Laje’s main schtick is being an anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-trans straight white catholic libertarian. He likes to argue that “the left” and gay and trans-lifestyles are typically associated with pedophilia and speaking of the privlege of white rich men is absurd. When asked why this might be so he lists off a number of little-known libertarian libraries of un-refutable facts from books he has supposedly read on the subject.
Below this “culture war” façade he is of course loyal to libertarian anti-taxation and pro-security hard-line policies against crime. He, like his president Milei, argues for removing public services, nothing should really be public according to them: Fire Brigades, Public Transport, Ambulances, Public Hospitals, Ports. All that absolutely has to be public are some basic property-orientated security and legal services.
Argentine liberals get caught up in inane debates that boggle the mind. A favourite concerns two neighbouring towns separated by a river. Libertarians argue that governments must stop spending money on infrastructure. Instead communities on both sides of the river should build private bridges (with their own architects, one has to assume, somehow meeting in the middle) to connect the towns and span the river using locally sourced private money and private contractors. Once it is up and running this can be paid for later by automatic traffic tolls. These privatisation ad absurdum arguments usually leave even the most friendly journalists staring blankly at the libertarian stunned; even they can see that such arguments just don’t hold water.
Some speakers are less political and even more bizarre, remnants of the right wing insanity of the COVID pandemic. For example there is Dr. Ryan Cole, an anti-vaxxer doctor from Idaho in the US. Cole is being sued by a woman who he diagnosed with cancer, a cancer that Cole assured her was associated with her receiving a COVID-19 vaccination. Turned out there was nothing wrong with her womb, Dr. Cole was wrong on both counts and so her hysterectomy was unnecessary (hence the law suit). In this case she wasn’t a libertarian selling her own organs.
LIbertarians in Mexico
CPAC is a natural hangout for the extreme right populists like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. But Libertarians like Laje and Milei are even more extreme. Milei’s the world’s first national leader to profess missionary zeal for the socioeconomic theories of Murray Rothbard. Missionaries see their job as evangelizing religions; the same goes for economic theories. The idea is to convert unbelievers to the cause. Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister in Greece, calls economics “mathematicized religion”. It’s “a religion with equations and a bit of bad statistics”, he clarified.
Milei’s sect is called Rothbardian Libertarianism. In his missionary zeal Milei does some serious flying around the world giving boring talks to the converted. Not this time it seems. Milei has an advantage over his peers. He is president of Argentina which he uses as an economics laboratory for untested libertarian economic theories. Back in the laboratory the INDEC (the Argentine state’s official statistics organism) shows that 65% of Argentinians live below the poverty line, with 20% in misery. How Laje will paint lipstick on that pig remains to be seen.
Religion
The ultraconservative hard right are vehemently anti-Muslim and pro- Judeo-Christian. Buddism and Hindus don’t even register, Libertarians are not very well traveled especially in Asia, theirs is a largely male white-supremacy world. When it comes to the wars in West Asia they’re Zionist but also respect the Saudi dictatorship, in fact they respect power and money in general. Libertarians are always pro-USA.
Back in the US, CPAC uses anti-communism arguments to demonize public health and other social services. They’re pro-rich and very pro-business. CPAC welcomes all with a small donation or by buying a CPAC Mexico ticket. They’re $315 bucks for the VIP tickets (dinner included).
Maybe it might be smart to come with your own health insurance in case you choke on a bone. They might refuse to call you a public ambulance.
Line Up, Line Up
Well there are still a few tickets on sale why not get one? Get on over to the ticket page and put your money down. If you don’t want to do the conference maybe you can just do the dinner in Chapultepec for 100 bucks.
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