This article is adapted from my unpublished book on the rise of the far-right in the Americas based on research and lived experience in the Silicon Valley in the 1990’s and the 2000’s and in Argentina in the 2010’s and 2020’s. I dissect the current phase of libertarian influence in arms manufacturers, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the oil industry as global climate chaos worsens.
Libertarian Talk, Neoliberal Walk
First let’s divide economic theories from practice. Neither the US nor the Argentine economy operate under pure libertarian economic principles. They can’t, the modern global financial system is not designed to integrate such primitive monetary systems under the rules of the IMF or those of global private creditors. Instead both the US and Argentine economies employ orthodox neoliberal political economics combining neoclassical theory with the realpolitik of national debt, trade and taxation. The Argentine Economics Minister, Toto Caputo (JPMorgan) and the Secretary of the US Treasury, Scott Bessent (Soros Fund Management) both come from the private financial sector. They made speculative (and sometimes destructive) bets against public bonds in secondary debt markets, the kind of work that makes money crashing state finances (that they now manage). Bessent, in the 1990’s, helped the Soros Fund make leveraged bets against the pound sterling forcing the Bank of England to devalue in the 1990’s. On the campaign trail Javier Milei told his electorate he would close the Argentine Central Bank, the BCRA, and dollarise the economy (eliminating the local peso). He didn’t do either which is probably the best thing he did for the Argentine economy.
The US and Argentina both have problems with the US currency. Argentina specialises in commodity exports (paid for in dollars) and much of its imports also require US Dollars (which is largely their own choice and a reflection of the distrust in the peso). Also Argentina’s national debt is mostly in dollars. The IMF debt is in SDR but paid off in dollars. The United States has its own problems with its own currency as US deficits continue to expand US debt. Argentina suffers a dollar shortage and the US is printing too many so Bessent feeds Milei extra dollars which come back to the US in debt payments. Two sides of the same coin.
Though neither practice pure libertarian economics both Milei and Trump are influenced by extreme libertarian ideas, indeed Milei is a fan. Legislation introduced in both nations helped to reduce workers rights (libertarians demonise unions as collectivists) and reducing the welfare state. New legislation has also been put in place in Argentina to allow AI corporations (run by AI agents not human CEOs) with no employees or human staff. This absurd idea may provide a mechanism to privatise inventions that may result from AI deployment a kind of “synthetic intellectual property”.
Who are these weirdos?
The Argentine president sees himself first and foremost as an economist. Before entering the political fray Milei had some experience with microeconomics as a corporate economist working on various projects for one of Argentina’s richest men, Eduardo Eurnekian, who gave Milei his nickname: “El loco“. Macroeconomics, especially for a nation bleeding massive debt payments, is quite a different kettle of fish. Milei who has postgraduate diplomas in Keynesian economics knows just enough to be dangerous. His conversion to the cult of libertarianism came when he read a few obscure books by Murray Rothbard. Milei does nothing by halves, his libertarian conversion was messianic. In his mind he had discovered the economics equivalent of the holy grail, somehow the whole world had missed this secret economic truth ‘libertarianism’. Milei desperately wants to be accepted and important, needing to be accepted by his own. Even in his third year as president many of Milei’s international trips are to libertarian talking shops so he can exchange daft economic ideas with other converts where being President gives him celebrity status. Libertarianism is the propeller-head faction of the fiscal far right. Milei espouses Rothbardian paleo-libertarianism, the most extreme aspect of the cult. Milei even parroted the theories of Rothbard at the World Economic Forum in Davos (twice) to an puzzled audience in disbelief.
Trump is neither naïve nor messianic. He too claims he deserves a Nobel prize –for Peace, not Economics– but when he went on to attack Venezuela and Iran FIFA invented a peace prize for him which he got just before North America hosted the World Cup. Trump does not claim to understand macroeconomic theory –he has Bessant for that– but this did not stop him from intervening in the FED to drive down interest rates. Milei would never intervene in private bank profits that way, as a libertarian he puts the markets first and the nation second.
Trump implements libertarian ideas when it suits him. He deregulated crypto then made billions in crypto investments. He put together the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE (also named after a crypto logo) giving it to Elon Musk to minimalise the state and download the US State data into Palantir dtabases. Trump then went on to blow out the US budget spending hundreds of billions to turn Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, part of Homeland Security) into storm-troopers capable of invading US cities running down undocumented US residents for deportation. He also tripled the Pentagon budget then made his own tax cuts permanent leaving a massive hole in the budget filled by more debt emission. Trump then slapped massive taxation on US imports (via tariffs) hoping that his voters would not recognise this as the regressive tax on the poor that it is. Trump takes on libertarian ideas from business if they are sold to him by libertarian political sponsors. Such is the case with the PayPal mafia in Silicon Valley and the oil sector such as Koch Industries which founded the CATO institute and much of the Atlas Network.
The 0.01% and the 99.99%
The gap between the extremely wealthy and everyone else in the US in the 2020’s has surpassed even the Gilded Age of the robber barons. Trump’s billionaire sponsors have been quick to realise that libertarian economics serves to protect their own wealth; they can afford excellent accountants and lobbyists for custom tax laws. Milei is out on the loony fringe when it comes to taxation calling it ‘theft’, however neither he nor Trump seem to consider no-bid government contracts as theft.
Poor people typically own little or no property but the extremely rich have lots of property so property rights (including rights to share ownership and profits) are a major focus of the 0.01%. This is why libertarian copper-fastened protections on property rights are very popular to many.
Trump is quite respectful of political sponsorship quid-pro-quo agreements. He has been actively funding and deregulating FinTech and Biotech while disarming environmental regulation and his predecessors green energy initiatives, all the while keeping American AI from regulation which is just plain dangerous. When AI exposed security risks in banking with advanced Claude models Trump changed his mind and reimposed safety controls on algorithms (for capital).
Climate Chaos
Libertarian deregulation of environmental controls maintains or improves private sector flexibility to continue to make profits in increasing climate chaos (while dumping the costs of environmental damage on society). Milei and Trump both deny human-caused climate change. That this position is false is entirely irrelevant to them but it invisible to both neoclassical and libertarian economic theory unless it is given a price. How does one give a price to extinction? Only the vanguard of increased insurance costs –due to wildfire and flood damage and deaths in heat waves– are beginning to make visible such environmental damage to capital. Future environmental costs (on agriculture for example) have been purposefully and massively underestimated. Suicidal economic policies such as ‘freedoms‘ to pollute are nonsensical. Industrial and military emissions (and destruction in war) may align with short-term goals of arms makers but again one has to put a price on death.
Libertarian politicians even argue that the concept of ‘society’ does not exist. Margaret Thatcher, a British prime minister that helped launch neoliberalism but who also had libertarian tendencies, famously said “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first“. Climate change is irrelevant under such logic. Corporations must look to themselves first, nations also put themselves first too. Avoiding climate change becomes a zero sum game and the World is condemned to collapse so that no country is imared. This needs to change.
Neither Milei nor Trump discuss climate chaos, species extinction or biodiversity. For a libertarian these concepts are intangibles. Economists call them ‘externalities’. They just don’t figure on balance sheets. Sponsors of libertarian think tanks go further to shield their sponsors (many in the oil sector) from regulation, damage costs or limitations on emissions. By financing fake news ‘educational’ and political campaigns to drown out the bad news. Both Milei and Trump have helped to destroy climate science in their own nations. They have defunded climate research and weather forecasting at home, and, in the US case, even in space. Trump has turned off essentially free satellite feeds–information on sea-level rise and ocean temperatures– from incredibly expensive satellites because he does not want to know. Milei’s intentional ignorance included defunding the state weather service and threatening to leave the Paris accord which Trump quit (twice).
Citizens United in the USA, Coups in Argentina
In 1988 the Koch Brothers helped instigated Citizen’s United a legal decision that made it possible for corporations, and their owners in the global 0.01%, to give infinite sponsorship –secretive expensive election interference and PAC lobbying– to US elections. The argument for this legality was distinctly libertarian putting individual free speech (even for corporations treated as persons) before the common good of democracy. The effect was to enable buying undue influence in elections. Koch’s NGO, “Americans for Prosperity”, along with 14 others contributed 75% of the funding to argue “Citizen’s United” in the US courts system which was finally passed by a biased Supreme Court packed by far right republicans. The US became the best democracy big money can buy.
Argentine political economic policies have traditionally aligned to the interests of a local ruthless elites, landowners principally who are well networked in professional organisations and lobbying groups. Their interests in turn typically align with private interests in nations where they export their meat, grains, metals, and various energy exports (like oil and lithium). First the partner nation was Spain, then Britain, and now it is mainly the US and China with Brazil and other neighbours.
Groundswell political activism led to workers’ strikes which occasionally resulted in re-distributive economic policies in Argentina –similar to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Presidents Hipólito Yrigoyen and Juan Perón both tried to give more negotiating power to unions but both were toppled by fascist coup d’États. José Félix Uriburu deposed Yrigoyen and José Martínez de Hoz and his military Junta killed 30,000 people to eliminate Evita Perón’s legacy.
Land redistribution in Argentina never happened so land ownership remains extremely concentrated. Recent Argentine election campaigns deployed AI in algorithmic online voter targeting both in Argentina and the US. Cambridge Analytica (CA) helped president Macri to get to power in 2015. Macri’s PRO party is now aligned with Milei’s LLA party. In the US Cambridge Analytica famously helped create MAGA and helped Trump win in 2016.
Both the US and Argentine presidents respond to a small cluster of extremely rich libertarians (like the PayPal Mafia) who sponsor think tanks in the Atlas Network and the CATO Institute as well as the far-right internationale of CPAC.ORG. Peter Thiel recently relocated from California to Buenos Aires.
The Austrian School
Libertarianism is a school of political economics disguising itself as an economic theory. It is basically an elite project focused on less taxation for the rich and more property rights with more concentration of wealth and power by corporate owners. Meritocracy and inherited privilege are treated the same. Economic historians call them the Austrian School because they first go together in Vienna in the early 1900’s to counter the excesses of the Austro-Hungarian empire, especially the power of the crown. This makes libertarianism slightly better than monarchy but the World has moved on a century since then, while libertarianism hasn’t received a facelift. Till recently this fringe economic cult has never been deployed in real life but its derivative theories –orthodox neoclassical economic theory and neoliberal political economics– have been more successful and currently drive the economies of many of the World’s nations.
Neoliberalism took on a hegemonic role from the post-war welfare states in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The US welfare state gre out of FDR’s 1930’s New Deal which libertarians hate. The New Deal was a social pact designed to oppose the chaos and unemployment after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that resulted. It included pensions and healthcare and even ecological repairs after the dust-bowl to repair soils. Back when Reagan and Thatcher tested out neoliberalism little was known of the extreme risks of climate change and AI wasn’t even on the horizon. Both are now existential risks for humans, the latter is brought to us by Silicon Valley libertarians.
Deploying Neoliberalism in the Americas
Thatcher and Reagan to support neoliberal experiments in South America and Hayek wanted to work with them. This lead to the 1973 coup d’État in Chile organised by President Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Staff from Hayek’s Economics faculty at the University of Chicago were already deployed to the Catholic University of Chile before the coup and worked through the period while Pinochet’s fascist military forces took the lives of thousands of Chilean citizens, after first killing the elected president, Dr. Salvador Allende because he refused to flee.
Students from Hayek’s Chicago School trained by Friedman were central to Pinochetism becoming his economics advisers with Hayek himself visiting Pinochet multiple times. Hayek got on well with Pinochet. The Chicago Boys launched South America’s first neoliberal experiments in Chile but Argentina was to be next. The IMF came on board with Neoliberalism helping loot third world nations using national debt. The IMF advocated selling off profitable state companies to multinationals so that the income from the sale could be used to pay off international banks that held the debt.
Carlos Saúl Menem, the Argentine president became an solid convert to neoliberalism. The IMF presented the Argentina deployment of neoliberalism in the 1990’s as a case study for other countries. As a result of the neoliberal experiment, and corruption becoming debt, the Argentine economy collapsed in 2001 in the world’s worst default up until that time. Meanwhile Chile suffered many more decades of secret police and political restrictions with generalised poverty, and human rights abuses. Neoliberalism was Libertarianism-light. It minimalised and increasingly privatised the welfare state, it still does. Neoliberalism was rarely questioned until it collapsed in the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 proving, yet again, that economic deregulation of national finances is systemically unstable.
Dealing with Climate Chaos?
?Failing the creation of a new economic system (which will be necessary to counter negative human impacts and the challenges of artificial intelligence) the most likely successors to failed Neoliberalism were authoritarian fascism or a socialist welfare state. The super-rich saw this risk before having planned for this choice. They acted to push for authoritarianism (not socialism) till they can replace democracy with their own AI state thereby eliminating democracy altogether.
Both the existential risks from Climate Change and unregulated AI deployment need to be addressed. We are on the brink of runaway climate change. Under business as usual hurricanes, droughts, fires and disease will break our civilisations and lead to world war. Nations will collapse causing mass migration as populations flee unlivable and de-stabilised climates with famines. We may also be on the cusp of creating AI which we don’t (and possibly will never) understand. While Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will likely never replace human capabilities in many endeavours, it works well in some more technical fields which alone will cause major social change and unemployment.
If we survive AI (by regulating it) we will still need to design human (and nature) ecological and social systems compatible with synthetic intelligence. This will also require reducing the gulf between the rich and the poor to stabilise societies and the billionaires realise that when this happens they have the most to lose so they have doubled down on failed neoliberalism advocating something even worse, libertarianism.
Humans and Nature
AI algorithms will continue to change our economic systems but they will need to be compatible with human and non-human life. We use the phrase ‘nature’ to describe a false division between ourselves (as a monkey species) and the rest of life on Earth. Maybe this is our most intractable problem. Many human societies have become so focused on technologies that we humans have become a rogue species, one that can no longer see how we are connected to the rest of the life on ‘our’ planet.
Meanwhile the US and China are plowing ahead with human technological and financial advances to create something even more removed from ‘life/nature/biodiversity’. This is helping to undermine the living substrates that has engendered life for a billion years on Earth. We are already in the sixth great extinction. The destabilised if the stable Holocene climatic conditions has begun. This had allowed our species (and many others) to flourish, develop and to design and build civilisations. Now what?
If we accept that the problem for the rest of the planet is our imbalance with ‘nature’ (and that is a big ‘if’) and we also recognise that we are hell-bent on creating ‘thinking’ machines.
Maybe it is a useful moment to pause and understand this gross dichotomy and take a suspicious look at the owners of these technologies, the trillionaire snake oil salesmen who assure us that more machine intelligence will help save the planet while they build thousands of massive datacentres powered by fossil fuels and cooled by sucking trillions of litres of drinking water from our food and irrigation systems, our rivers and even from desalinated seas.
Humanity has reached a fork in the road. We need to choose between fighting nature or allowing nature to regain its resplendent biodiversity something which we are only beginning to understand. For now the snake-oil salesmen sell us datacentres, UAV military killing machines and rockets to send hundreds of thousands of new military satellites into space. As an aside they tell us that if we keep building this tech it might help save the planet also.
Who are they trying to kid?
We don’t need machine learning to teach us how to re-balance our relationship with ‘nature’ we have done it for Milenaria. The degradation of our relationship with soils, seas and the atmosphere is a product of extreme greed which is the driving force of our current economic system. Libertarian versions will take this situation from bad to worse as the owners of these technologies board their rockets to Mars or bury themselves in New Zealand bunkers.
How can an economic system that rewards mining the seafloor, overfishing the oceans and farming with GMO seeds in technology packs sold with agrotoxins that turn soils into deserts? Technology fetishes are accelerating our suicide, destroying our planet and creating instruments of war more efficient at killing us. Now these same psychopaths tell us we must make war with autonomous AI-driven weapons to add to the nuclear threat, adding yet another death sentence if not for the planet then at least for us. This lethal and unsustainable upswelling in acts of war are more likely to end humanity than to save us and we can’t seem to deal with our schism with nature. Could these be related?
Our educations systems tell us to shoot our oligarchs into space while we need a focus on protecting our planet from them. The dogs of war, states like Israel, the US, the UK and North Korea sell us pretty cellular phones, electric cars and even stupider economic theories, a fast train to extinction.
Libertarians are leading the fray, their technological and financial might deploying ever more psychotic technologies to the task of our slaughter. While Palantir, Anduril and White Stork activate the kill chain, their commercial tech. salespeople claims 70% kill rates (killing us). Psychopaths like Eric Schmidt or Alex Karp build robot factories to make automated suicide drones to bring chaos to our cities. AI corporations, their libertarian owners and their incel technologists are chomping at the bit for mouthwatering Pentagon, IDF, CIA and Mossad contracts. They are all aboard to hasten our destruction.
But we are still here.
Revolution or Extinction
Rather than venerating psychopathic PayPal immigrants from Apartheid South Africa or the likes of Marc Andreessen or Eric Schmidt you could find a way to pause runaway climate change or prevent their Terminator future. Let’s stop listening to idiotic techno-death cults and get real about a new economic and ecological system that will assure a decent future. Let’s stop species extinction and give the climate and nature a chance to recover. Come back to nature, choose life not a dystopic dark machine future. Take back control from these idiot man-boys. The future is nature. The future is feminine, it always was. The future is ecological and social. Degraded and futile libertarian economic theories never worked and they never will.
Time to rebalance human life with all life. New synthetic intelligence learning from past failures and the dumb ideas they were built upon does not offer nirvana. These so-called advances in artificial intelligence and the dark money behind it, result in failed far right experiments, monsters like Trump and Milei.
The Pentagon War Machine for America and Israel First is run by messianic military man-boys and their cultish libertarian ideas are the problem not the solution. Let’s end this Hegsethian Pentagon cul-de-sac. Time to hit the brakes on libertarianism and redistribute wealth in a way compatible with life on Earth not machine-intelligence zero sum war games.
If this requires a revolution I’m already there. Are you with me? We have nothing to lose but our extinction.
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