January 2025 begins year two of Javier Milei’s four year presidential term. The first ‘Rothbardian’, ‘paleolibertarian’, ‘anarchocapitalist’ president ever. What does this mean and what can this radical Argentine political experiment teach the world?
‘Rothbardian’? ‘Paleolibertarian’? ‘Anarchocapitalist’? That’s a lot of deviant terminology to unpack. These labels place Javier Milei’s curious dogma at the extreme right of the Austrian School of Economics. Austrians are extreme ‘propertarians’. Propertarians are radical believers in the benefits of property ownership, to them the only good thing is an owned thing. For Libertarians good people own property. They must be allowed to do with their property as they see fit: open pit mining, diverting rivers to filter lithium from other salts, agroindustrial practices that spray glyphosate or atrazine near rural public schools. That’s for property owners to decide, not “society”. Society does not exist, there can be no state regulation for the “common good”. All property must be private, there is no common good, nothing can be communal (not goods, land nor services). Milei began 2024 by attacking national parks.
Milei himself illustrated this is his campaign with a story about the right of a factory owner to pollute a river. To environmental policy wonks he was rabbiting on about “environmental services”, another bad idea. The false argument goes like this. Rivers get polluted because they have no owner. Markets do what markets do and governments should not intervene. It’s cheaper to dump effluent directly into the river than to filter out the bad stuff. Absent regulations, which, to be fair, in Argentina rarely work anyway, only the Market can prevent river pollution. So privatise the river and the river’s new owner will take care of their property. In one of Milei’s campaign speeches he said it this way:
“This company can pollute the river as much as it wants because [Argentina] is a society which has plenty of water and the price of water is zero”, in the event of a water shortage he added: “someone will take care of appropriating the river [because the water] would cease to be worth zero and the pollution would end”, but until then “A company can pollute a river as much as it wants”
https://projectallende.org/milei-chronicles-9-the-madman-in-the-river/
For Rothbardians ownership is the answer, even to pollution. Milei doesn’t even register that anything might live in a river, fish would never cross his mind, rather Milei has one focus and that is Capital. The owners of Capital are his heroes and the rest of us are human capital. If Rothbardians believed climate change was caused by humans – their only solution would be to privatise the Earth’s atmosphere so that the new owner will protect it, and absurd concept that takes buying bottled water to a new level. This is impossible so Libertarians negate the IPCC.ch scientific proof that climate change is happening. This dogma’s only path to solving such large problems (let the Market and its owners take care of it) is impossible so Rothbardian politicians, like Milei, preach that humans don’t cause climate change. Climate collapse puts limits on Capital so, by Libertarian logic it simply can’t be happening. The owners of capital and the Markets are infallible. In this second gilded age of technological hyper-capitalism Milei’s anti-progressive worldview has been shaped by the think-tanks of the Atlas Network and their corporate funders who pay these think-tanks to spread the right[sic.] ideas. Elon Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump get to power, this is chump change to them. The oil companies have spent much more over decades to filter out arguments against their practices.
Milei’s party is called Liberty Advancing (La Libertad Avanza), Trump’s main base is the religious right of the US Republican party, in Spain there is Abascal’s Vox, then there’s the post-fascist “Brothers of Italy” (Fratelli d’Italia) and Italy’s president Giorgia Meloni. Milei really likes Meloni, he visited her in December 2024 and Meloni gave him Italian citizenship. Milei also attended the Vox conference in Spain in May 2024. Milei also believes that he is Donald Trump’s favourite president.
National personalisation of political messages gives local ultra-right candidates options. Trump, Meloni and Abascal are “nationalists” so they focus on immigration. Milei on the other hand, like Ursula von der Leyen; is careful to be subservient to Western power alliances but doesn’t mention immigration. All of the above have are anti-taxation, pro-fossil fuel energy and have similar stances on the US proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine. The conservative extreme right is a hydra but these many guises feed from the same pools of sponsors, their electoral messages aligned with local voter preferences and elites. The pathways to power diverge, as do their language and tactics (Milei calls these culture wars). Neither cultural nor religious wars matter to Capital; Capital must be revered, Markets Free (for them anyway) and taxation low. If ‘critical’ resources are available on national territory these must be offered first to Western Capital. Wars and sanctions require allies to have the right aligned too. This are the rules.
International messaging requires that libertarianism — itself a US corporate adaptation of interwar Austrian economic thought- come in a variety of local packaging. Post-fascist libertarianism is personalised by algorithms to appeal to your inner self, personalised for voter acquisition. Algorithms rate, select (or block) content in social media; thereby turning social media platforms into factories of hate. They’re capable of mass confusion and division and are particularly good at othering (for example of opposition parties or candidates).
Algorithms are very good at winning elections. They work!
Neoliberalism has been on life support since the financial collapse of 2008-2011, it now faces the terminal threat of climate collapse. One tactic of the funders of right wing think-tanks is to double down rather than retreat. Systemic greed and deregulation of the financial markets crashed the West’s economies in the subprime crisis, now a dozen years later the same forces will crash the environment. The hard right says that instead of fixing regulation and working together as a society we need to deregulate more and be individuals. Climate collapse is an inconvenient truth. Economic theories will never win elections on their own as they only benefit a small minority. Libertarian and far right neoliberal think-tanks try to tell us the real enemies are the socialists, the nationalists, the anti-nationalists, the foreigners, the working class, the unions, but most of all the progressives. Anyone but them!
Milei isn’t neoliberal, he’s liberal without the ‘neo’ prefix. He says he’s trying to return to a fabled Argentine ‘liberal y libertario’ conservatism that existed in his mind a 100 years ago. In the 1920’s Argentina was then one of the richest nations (measured in GDP per capita). Milei tries to present this as a MAGA play (Make Argentina Great Again) copying Trump, but Argentina was never “Great” it was rich not powerful. The 1920’s were three decades before women had the vote, long before racism was a ‘problem’ (for the racists that is) when Argentina was a mainly catholic nation before the confusion of religious freedom and atheism. In the 1920’s nobody had ever heard of climate change; it was long before AI drones or social media Algorithms. Like all mythical pasts this was a time of assumed certainty but in reality it too was a time of monsters. If the 1920’s was the decade that brought us both the nazis and fascism, will the 2020’s bring the world post fascism; what many describe as Latin American Neofascism.
Few Argentinians knew Milei before voting him in as president in December 2023, they certainly didn’t know about his Austrian economic cult and most still don’t. They saw a candidate, a media showman, a clown, a destructive rebel with a chainsaw ready to take on the state both the local media and social media had taught them to hate so much. Corruption was a basin of filthy bathwater stirred by politicians, workers taxes disappeared down this same plug hole into the mouths of other slimy politicians. Milei became a protest vote in a nation with compulsory voting. He didn’t come to change the bathwater, he came to throw out the baby.
During the previous government, a young male population was forced to live alone in tiny urban studios or with their parents. In an attempt to prevent the contagion of the COVID-19 virus these young men lived increasingly online. They were radicalised by algorithms to hate the State that separated them from lovers and friends. Milei took advantage of pandemic social breakdown. One in two Argentines are now below the poverty line but Milei still remains somewhat popular. Nobody likes to admit they might have made a mistake, rather their egos double down.
Milei’s policies also have a blind side, libertarian culture wars have their own taboos, ideas and policies can be cancelled too. Anti-woke, anti-progressive, anti-welfare state arguments and anti-taxation memes are concocted by groups like The American Conservative Union and broadcast at CPAC conferences CPAC.org, Milei has attended at least two since he was inaugurated, where such vote buying is seen as a war against ‘cultural Marxism’ (itself a made-up term). Every coin has a flip side…
- property rights, yes, renters rights, no!
- right-to-life, yes, women’s or gender rights, no!
- investor’s rights, yes, labour rights, no!
- tax-breaks for miners yes, native tribal land rights, no!
- extinction of non-human species and maybe humans too, yes, climate regulation, no!
At least for the majority of Argentinians, those who do not possess capital, paleo-libertarianism harkens back to the age when white christian men with titles to property were the only ones who could vote. Milei wants to Make Argentina Great Again to return the nation to a fabled time in before the 1930 Félix Benito Uriburu fascist nationalista coup d’état which began Argentina’s decade of infamy. While Fascism was brewing in Europe and the US, Argentina was booming with food exports. Argentina was far from European wars, it stepped up food production to feed Europe in the interwar years.
Milei has repealed many measures to reduce the gap between rich and poor, they never really worked except as shock absorbers for a very unequal society but they don’t work at all now. For a libertarian if wealth trickles down, that’s great, but this doctrine leaves all that “equality stuff” in the hands of the Market. Libertarianism is basically an elite project after all. In the Argentina of 2024 trickle-up happened, it’s in full flow. Milei has been very successful for the very rich. The national minimum wage was revised upward in December 2024. In dollar terms it is now the same as the minimum wage in smaller Chinese cities, about $270/Month (or $1.35 an hour) but goods and services are priced about three times higher in Argentina than in China. Milei removed all price controls even on monopoly medicines, the almighty markets had a heyday, pharmaceuticals rose more than 230% in a year. Milei took away much of the existing support for pensioner medicines for good measure.
Milei is not the first president to play with such dangerous political experiments using Argentina as a laboratory. In the late 1980’s in tandem with its neighbour Chile, Argentina experimented with some radical economics proposed by Pinochet’s Chicago Boys. These were neoliberal formulas; the IMF liked them; they IMF invited Menem along to give positive speeches on neoliberalism in other nations.
The Chicago boys, is how South Americans refer to as ultra-orthodox anti-Keynesian libertarian and extreme neoliberal group of economists from the University of Chicago. Mises, then later Hayek and Friedman taught at the Economics Faculty in Chicago. In the 1970’s and 1980’s the Chicago Boys advocated ideas from the Austrian school, neoliberalism on steroids.
Year two of his presidency and Milei has begun to settle back into the comfort of his autocratic throne content with the policy battles that he has won so far, a cruel rebalancing (adjustment) of the economy at the cost of impoverishing most of the citizenry but balancing the external account while even dropping taxes on a few key economic sectors such as meat exports (but not on workers). Milei accelerated then slowed inflation but at the cost of tripling prices in dollar terms and freezing, as well as eliminating, many salaries. The biggest winners were the banks the biggest losers the pensioners and low paid workers for the state.
To do this Milei played fast and loose with democracy by abusing autocratic presidential decrees known locally as Urgent National Decrees or DNUs (another trick he learned from Menem). Not even de facto presidents have resorted to DNUs with such fury. Milei’s apparent disdain for the Argentine Congress and Senate seems to be working well. The legislatures have begun to vote with him (against their party whips). When Milei’s DNUs were rejected by congress such as when congress tried to raise pensions, Milei used his presidential veto. Milei missed the American Conservative Union’s CPACMexico.com conference to keep pensioners in poverty with his veto. He sent Agustin Laje instead, another Argentine rightwing culture warrior, a genius political consultant, and an Opus Dei cultural fascist.
Milei called out the corruption of vote-buying in the national congress which he also experienced in his two years as a deputy. The practice seems to be rampant in all parties. In November 2024 a Peronist senator, Edgardo Kuieder, crossed into Paraguay for the fifth time in just a few weeks. Kuieder had voted with Milei multiple times though he is supposedly in opposition. This time the Paraguayan border police asked Senator Kueider to look inside his backpack. Border guards found a cool quarter of a million US dollars in undeclared cash. As if that were not enough, that same month, a deputy from Milei’s coalition PRO party was also found with undeclared apartments in Miami worth $2.6 million under suspicion of money laundering. This was followed in the last few days of 2024 with similar, if not worse activities from Daniel Santilli, also from the PRO and one of the most outspoken on corruption who faces charges for illicit enrichment for not registering some of his offshore companies that manage rental incomes in the US and Argentina supposedly owned by his 83 year old astrologer mother. Milei’s crusade against what he calls a corrupt political casta is unraveling but Milei is a bulldozer, he won’t stop till he’s stopped and his allies in Mauricio Macri’s party don’t want to wash their dirty linen in public either.
Despite these minor setbacks Milei is looking forward to even greater success in 2025. He is excited to get to work with Donald Trump and Elon Musk next year and hoping they’ll help with the debt at the IMF. The US has bigger fish to fry but Argentina does have lithium, gold, oil and natural gas and soybeans. Milei’s war against the state will now move on to privatise state assets, many of which the previous government had taken out of private control like the water system. Again this will be an orgy of capital. Everything must go in this end-of-times sale: gold mining licenses, lithium, the excellent land of the Pampa, oil and gas infrastructure, ports, roads, hydroelectric dams, water, airports (or maybe not the airports as his former boss runs the A2000 concessions on Argentina’s airports). Paying a bribe to a government official to win a contract or a privatisation bid is illegal (sort of) in Argentina but Milei doesn’t see things that way. If a government official accepts the bribe, Milei explicitly rejects the notion that the company that paid the bribe is doing anything wrong, the private sector, his Austrian logic goes can do wrong. He argues that the politician taking the bribe should, possibly, be fined or jailed but the private sector paying the bribe? That’s just the cost of doing business. The 2025 privatisation will be swift but not transparent. Every transaction is a good transaction.
If the world is watching Milei’s anarchocapitalism they should realise that this system is quite the opposite of Anarchism. Bakunin and Proudhon would be turning in their graves. For Libertarianism property is not theft, property and the markets are Gods. Menem and the chaos of the 1980’s are back in Argentina with a vengeance, Milei even copied his sideburns.
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