This article is adapted from my unpublished book on the rise of the far-right in the Americas based on research and lived experience in the Silicon Valley in the 1990’s and the 2000’s and in Argentina in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 the 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 INF rules or those of global private creditors. Instead both the US and Argentine economies employ neoliberal political economics, orthodox neoclassical economic theory combined with the realpolitik of national debt along with international trade, various budgets and taxation policy.
As to the people in charge, Argentina’s Minister for Economics is Toto Caputo who used to work at JPMorgan. The US Treasury Secretary is Scott Bessent who worked at Soros Fund Management. Both come from the private financial sector. When they were working for the other side they made speculative, and sometimes destructive, bets against economies with debt problems betting against state financial stability. They now manage that stability. Bessent infamously helped the Soros Fund make leveraged bets against the UK pound sterling, forcing the Bank of England to devalue. Caputo also worked for other Argentine right wing governments in the late 2010’s. He contracted new debt while keeping taxes low which left Argentina in even more debt when he left which is typical of fiscally right wing economists. He is doing under Milei too.
Though neither nation is run on a libertarian model, both Milei and Trump are influenced by extreme libertarian ideas. Milei is a real fan, he claims to be a true believer. Legislation introduced in both nations in 2025-2026 reduced workers rights. Libertarians demonise unions. Any social group that organises together is a ‘collectivist‘. They are careful not to criticise corporations or political parties or religions or even the scouts but unions or even fir brigades are a no-no. Milei and Trump have various taxes including corporate taxation; they’ve also made cuts to the welfare state and both spent much more money on weapons.
New legislation has also been put in place in Argentina to allow AI corporations, run by AI agents not human CEOs, even with no human staff. This absurd idea may provide a mechanism to privatise inventions that may result from AI deployment something we might call “synthetic intellectual property”. Libertarianism nerer share they own! Land, resources, the air, rivers they must all have an owner in this cult. Everything must be property.
The Dollar
On the campaign trail Javier Milei told his electorate he would close the BCRA (the Argentine Central Bank) and dollarise the Argentine economy which would have meant using US currency for all transaction in Argentina taxes, savings etc… eliminating the Argentine peso. He did not do either. Long term this might be the best decision he made for the Argentine economy.
The US and Argentina each have their own problems with the US currency. These are two sides to the same coin. Every nation on the planet has a problem with the US dollar but they’re more acute in Argentina. Comoditised exports like soybeans or gold bring export dollars to the BCRA. Argentina’s imports, however, also require spending US dollars to pay the bill. In a country with a decent currency savings are held in local currency. Neither is the case in Argentina Savings are held in dollars not pesos. Milei and Caputo have caused imports to rise so they need more dollars for imports. Also when paying off their national debt Argentina also needs dollars. Nobody wants Argentine pesos. The country borrows in dollars and so it needs dollars to pay off its national debt and with Argentina being the world’s largest IMF debtor, though denominated in a synthetic currency called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), Washington also prefers that this debt be paid in US Dollars too, hence the dollar shortage. So Trump could help Milei win his mid-terms, he ordered Bessent to feed extra dollars to Argentina. Most of these dollars came right back to the lenders (many in the US) in debt payments. It helped Milei do well in the mid-terms and the economy did not collapse.
The United States has its own problems with its dollar. Trump and Bessent have blown it out. The US republicans (like many right wing governments) increased the national debt to avoid raising taxation and to spend more on defence. Argentina has a dollar shortage because they never save in pesos (instead they buy dollars) which absorbs the local supply. The US prints too many dollars refusing to raise taxation.
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 a different kettle of fish. Milei has postgraduate diplomas in Keynesian economics, he hates Keynes, he knows just enough about the economy 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 by his own kind and those he sees as his heroes (próceres in Spanish, a kind of founding father). 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. As president of a South American nation he has celebrity status.
Libertarianism is the propeller-head faction of the fiscal far right. Milei espouses Rothbardian paleo-libertarianism, the most extreme sect of the cult. Milei even parroted the theories of Rothbard at the World Economic Forum in Davos (twice) to an puzzled audience that listened 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 they gave him just before North America hosted the World Cup. Trump never says no to a golden bribe. Unlike Milei Trump does not claim to understand macroeconomic theory –he has Bessent 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, as a libertarian true believer he puts the markets first and the nation second which is why he should never have become president but that is beside the point.
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 (named after a crypto logo of a Japanese dog) installing the oligarch Elon Musk to minimalise the state and download US State data into Palantir databases to spy on the population. 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 in somewhat of a deficit panic slapped massive taxation on US imports (via tariffs) hoping that his voters would not recognise that this was, in effect, a regressive tax on the poor.
Trump takes on libertarian ideas when 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 that founded the CATO institute and much of the Atlas Network both organs of libertarian propaganda.
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 were quick to realise that libertarian economics serves to protect their own wealth –they can afford excellent accountants and even lobbyists for custom tax laws. Milei is out on the loony fringe when it comes to taxation. He calls it ‘theft’. Neither Milei nor Trump consider no-bid government contracts as theft which it often is.
Poor people typically own little or no property but the extremely rich have lots of property so property rights –including share ownership and the right to profits created by workers are hugely important as is reducing inheritance tax (zero in Argentina).
Trump is quite respectful of political sponsorship. Quid-pro-quo agreements though technically illegal are common in the US plutocracy especially under Trump. He is actively funding and deregulating FinTech and Biotech while disarming environmental regulation (including his predecessors green energy initiatives) — Trump hates wind turbines — all the while Trump is protecting American AI from regulation. That last issue 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 while contributing to increasing climate chaos. Pollution is basically 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 is also invisible to both neoclassical and libertarian economic theory unless climate change (or greenhouse glasses) are given a price. But how does one give a price to extinction? The immunity of capital to climate chaos is breaking down. At the vanguard capital is facing increased insurance costs –due to wildfire and flood damage and deaths in heat waves. Such exposure is beginning to make environmental damage visible to capital. It is causing a bit of a panic. 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 the destruction of war we are seeing in the Middle East and Ukraine) may align with short-term goals of arms makers but again, eventually one has to put a price on death.
Libertarian politicians try to wriggle out of paying for the chaos they are helping to create by arguing 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, under such logic, put themselves first too. Avoiding climate change becomes a zero sum game and the World is condemned to collapse so that no country’s economy or military is weakened. 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, paying damage costs or any limitations on emissions. By financing fake news ‘educational’ and political campaigns to drown out the bad news from the scientist who are focused on real world effects and are increasingly panicked.
No matter say the libertarians. 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, where Trump has turned off essentially free satellite feeds–information on sea-level rise and ocean temperatures– from incredibly expensive satellites. His sponsors do not want society to know, it would be bad for business. Milei’s intentional ignorance includes defunding the state weather service and threatening to leave the Paris accord which Trump quit already. Twice!
Citizens United in the USA, Coups in Argentina
In 1988 the Koch Brothers, who inherited oil refineries from their dad, 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 to politicians they favour. In the US these secretive election payments come in the form of PACs and lobbying– in US elections and after. The argument for ‘legality’ was distinctly libertarian putting individual free speech (even for corporations treated as persons) before democracy. The effect was to enable powerful people and businesses to buy undue influence in elections. Koch’s NGO, “Americans for Prosperity”, along with 14 others contributed 75% of the funding to argue “Citizen’s United” which was finally passed by a biased Supreme Court packed by far right republicans many with libertarian ideas. 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 clubs and professional organisations like the Jockey Club as well as 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 strikes which occasionally resulted in re-distributive economic policies in Argentina –similar to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US. 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 Eva 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 as they do in the US. Cambridge Analytica 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 the same for libertarians, power is power.
Economic historians call them the Austrian School because they first got together in Vienna toward the end of the 19th. Century, to counter the excesses of the Austro-Hungarian empire, especially the power of the emperor to take their property. This makes libertarianism slightly better than monarchy but the World has moved on a century since then. Libertarianism hasn’t. Until 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. Before that variations of the US welfare state, which grew out of FDR’s 1930’s New Deal, were the rule in most nations. If there is anything libertarians hate more than unions it is the New Deal.
The New Deal was a US social pact designed to oppose the chaos and unemployment left after the 1929 Wall Street Crash in the Great Depression. It included basic stuff like pensions and healthcare and even ecological repairs after the dust-bowl to help 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. This means we need to look for new solutions not old ones that never worked.
Deploying Neoliberalism in the Americas
Thatcher and Reagan supported neoliberal experiments in South America. Hayek, a famous libertarian Economist from the Austrian school was more than willing to help the CIA which helped initiate 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 had been 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 citizen dissidents. First Pinochet killed the elected president, a medical doctor called Salvador Allende because he was a socialist.
Students from Hayek’s Chicago School trained by Hayek’s US colleague Milton Friedman were central to Pinochetism becoming his economics advisers with Hayek who visited 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 this cancelling the debt and leaving nothing.
Carlos Saúl Menem, the Argentine president became an solid convert to neoliberalism. The IMF presented Argentina’s deployment of neoliberalism in the 1990’s as a case study for other countries. They loved Menem. As a result of the neoliberal experiment, and previous corruption by dictators and businesses which was expertly converted into national debt, the Argentine economy collapsed in 2001 in the world’s worst ever default. Meanwhile Chile suffered many more decades of Pinochet’s secret police, political restrictions, generalised poverty, and human rights abuses. Neoliberalism was Libertarianism-light. It minimalised (and increasingly privatised) the welfare state into a for profit business. It still does.
Despite this neoliberalism was rarely questioned until it collapsed in the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. This proved, yet again, that economic deregulation of national finances is systemically unstable. Libertarianism is all about deregulation.
What to do about climate chaos?
Maybe we need a new economic system to counter negative human impacts on the climate and counter the challenges of artificial intelligence. Failing that something needed to take over from failed neoliberalism. If we look at historical examples the most likely successors to failed Neoliberalism were authoritarian fascism or a socialist welfare state.
The super-rich saw this risk of socialism long before. They had plans in place to take a different direction. They doubled down pushing for authoritarianism (anything but socialism which would threaten their property). The need es to install something till they could replace that fake democracy with their own AI-run state thereby eliminating democracy altogether.
Climate change has not “gone away”
Both the existential risks from Climate Change and unregulated AI deployment need to be addressed. Not in 2030 not in 2050 but now. We are on the brink of runaway climate change. Under business as usual hurricanes, droughts, fires and disease will break our civilisations apart most probably leading to another world war. Nations will collapse causing mass migration as populations flee unlivable and destabilised climates and famines.
On top of this threat 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 work narrow more focused AI is already replacing human capabilities in many endeavours. It already 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 ecological and social systems and this will have to be compatible with synthetic intelligence. We will need more state planning and science and more ancient knowledge than ever. To do this we will also require reducing the gulf between the rich and the poor to stabilise societies. 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 our political systems will need to be compatible with human and non-human life (‘nature’). 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. Most human societies have become so focused on technologies that we 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 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, what we call the environment. We are already in the sixth great extinction. Excessive use of fossil fuels have destabilised Holocene climatic conditions. Climate chaos has begun. A stable environment allowed our species (and many others) to flourish, and in our case to develop, design and build civilisations. We need another design compatible with the planet not billionaires.
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 good moment to pause and understand this gross dichotomy and take a suspicious look at the owners of these technologies. Trillionaire snake oil salesmen assure us that more machine intelligence will help save the planet while they build thousands of datacentres powered by fossil fuels and cooled by sucking trillions of litres of drinking water from our food and irrigation systems, our rivers and desalinated seas.
Catharsis
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. Then, almost 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 millennia. 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 we use the word sustainable for an economic system that rewards mining the seafloor, overfishing the oceans and farming with GMO seeds in technology packs sold with agrotoxins that turn our 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, another death sentence is not what we need.
Trump and Netanyahu are causing lethal and unsustainable wars, all increasingly likely to end humanity, both have religious end-times cults in their populations that support this too. Meanwhile we can’t seem to deal with our schism with nature? Could these two be related?
Our educations systems tell us to shoot our oligarchs into space yet it is obvious 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 dumber economic theories than the last one. This is a fast train to extinction.
Libertarians are leading the fray, their technological and financial might deploying ever more psychotic technologies tasked with our slaughter, we have seen this tested in Gaza. While Palantir, Anduril and White Stork activate the kill chain, their commercial tech. salespeople claim “70% kill rates”. They’re killing humans. us, there is no ‘them’. Psychopaths like Eric Schmidt or Alex Karp build robot factories to make automated suicide drones to bomb 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 worshiping Silicon Valley man-boy warlords maybe we could do something useful for ourselves not for them? Minimising run-away climate change or regulating AI to prevent their Terminator future. Maybe if we got off their social media platforms we could stop their techno-death cults and get real about building a new economy, an ecological system that will assure humanity a decent future. Maybe while we are at it we might stop species extinction and give our climate and the natural world space to recover from our mistakes? Nature might still welcome us back. We can still 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 have never worked and they never will. They are a large part of the problem.
Time to rebalance human life with all life. Synthetic intelligence fed on the entrails of past failures is not going to bring us Nirvana. These so-called advances in artificial intelligence and the dark money behind it gave us these failed far right experiments in fascism and monsters like Trump and Milei.
The Pentagon War Machine, America First or Israel First are run by messianic military man-boys and their libertarian cults too. Time to end this Hegsethian Pentagon cul-de-sac before it ends us. Hit the brakes on libertarianism, redistribute wealth in a way compatible with life on Earth, not a machine-intelligence zero sum war game. The latter brings nothing but death.
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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