MILEI: "OK so let's take a look at economic externalities: a corporation that pollutes a river. Who cares? Where’s the damage? Where is the damage? That corporation can pollute the river as much as it wants. Do you know why? Because something’s missing, partial equilibrium, they don’t see the general equilibrium problem, which is that in Argentina there’s a water surplus. So in a society with a water surplus, what is the price of water? Zero. So, who’s going to claim ownership of that river? Nobody! Because there’s no money to be made from it. So what happens if water starts to become scarce? Yes. It will no longer be worth zero. Suddenly there’s a business. That’s when someone will step in to take ownership of that river, and then there will be property rights to ensure that, let’s say, the pollution is brought to an end."
Javier Milei, speech excerpted in “Patagonia for Sale”
Introduction
This essay examines libertarian influences in Artificial Intelligence (AI), in arms manufacturers and in the oil industry. Donald Trump and Javier Milei are both riding a wave of funding for the dissemination of libertarian socioeconomic ideas. Far right political messaging is being coordinated internationally with deep pockets. Extreme libertarian political and economic positions may nudge us toward World War, what we do know for sure is that this movement is certainly detrimental to the climate, a luxury we cannot afford.
Libertarian economics is a defunct socioeconomic theory, it offers nothing new but dovetails well with fascism. As a rulebook for building policy it is also entirely incompatible with taking any action to avoid worst-case climate chaos. This is exactly the point! Bringing back stale political theories from the early 1900’s like libertarianism is done to preserve unipolar military power in Washington, and to harden property rights for billionaire corporate shareholders. In the Silicon Valley it is also being used to protect AI from regulation, especially AI deployment in Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs or military drones). It is also being used as an argument against taxing extreme wealth. In a word, libertarianism is antisocial.
This essay is adapted from my upcoming book that examines libertarian ideas in the Americas, ideas that are promoted by algorithms in social media trained to distort democracy. Similar algorithms helped monsters like Milei, Trump and US vice-president JD Vance get elected. Libertarian economic theory is an elite project that serves no social purpose at all for most people, quite the opposite, libertarianism by its nature is antisocial. It helps blinker society from seeing our climate peril; then nature strikes back with disasters. Libertarian ideas are buying time for the continued use of fossil fuels to power up business as usual, to stall action on the climate. Worse still libertarians argue for building thousands more data centres and scaling up various wars for oil and gas supplies (Iran, Ukraine and Venezuela). More resources for AI and war requires more mining and burning lethal quantities of fossil fuels into the atmosphere. All this for unnecessary and destructive economic activities. This essay takes a look at the agenda of those who continue to try to sell these unpopular libertarian ideas.
Killer Clowns
Javier Milei is the world’s first libertarian president, one hopes he shall also be the last. He was elected to the Argentine presidency in December 2023, on a post-pandemic protest vote, defeating a weak candidate from the divided social democrats; the Peronists. Milei stood as a libertarian economist who would privatise the Argentine State, implying that the market would eliminate state corruption. Subsequent corruption scandals ( involving Milei and his sister ) showed if anything that corruption in the Argentine government had got worse; prices spiked and the internal economy collapsed but there was a boom in commodity exports.
Milei sees himself as an economist not a politician. Like all successful illusions, this is partly true. Milei worked a few years as a corporate economic consultant in an Argentine conglomerate called Corporación América then run by Eduardo Eurnekian who is one of Argentina’s richest men. He gave Milei his nickname “El Loco“. Like Trump’s obnoxious antics on the reality show The Apprentice, Milei also worked in Eurnekian’s broadcast media channels including A24 where he appeared on talk shows developing his loathsome media personality. Milei had a Rolling Stones cover band, and even claimed to have been a tantric sex coach. As to his economics qualifications Milei has two postgraduate diplomas in economics. To the untrained Milei talks a good talk on the economy, he knows just enough to be dangerous.
Milei’s conversion to the cult of libertarianism came late in life when he read Murray Rothbard’s books. Rothbard was an obscure New York economic theorist who made a living promoting libertarian ideas. Rothbard’s texts seem to have stirred something messianic in Milei’s addled brain. Libertarian ideas are Milei’s safe place, an infinite font of secret economic truth however delusional. Rothbard became his dogma. Milei now identifies as a Rothbardian paleolibertarian. The president parroted Rothbard’s bizarre ideas to surprised audiences at two World Economic Fora in Davos.
Milei likes to get out of Buenos Aires when he can. He prefers to travel abroad to give talks at libertarian or at far right political conferences like the US-run Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC.org) based just outside Washington DC it now has franchises from Buenos Aires to Budapest. At the podium Milei’s gormless smirk draws a crowd. His propeller-head fans sell out venues. They don’t come for the content (Milei’s speeches are often quite unintelligible) but they come for the show. Milei sometimes sings a few Argentine rock songs and he loves to dance to YMCA but he always ends his speeches with his signature: “Viva la libertad Carajo!” shouting same three times in quick succession. Libertarians are his people, they make him feel loved. He often wears the conservative blue suits his sister bought him but he prefers to don his leather jackets especially when he takes to the stage to sing.
Donald Trump is not a dogmatic libertarian and he’s neither naïve nor messianic. He doesn’t even claim to be an expert on macroeconomics. Trump is the boss, he’s an opportunist, he’s transactional and knows nothing about political theory. Unlike most libertarians Trump’s a nationalist. He’s a president-CEO running a dangerously competitive nuclear power like a money-laundering business. Trump’s USA is an Empire in decline, it has problems with the dollar and military overreach. In a unipolar world Trump would not need to assert “America First”, but those days are over.
Trump returned to power in 2024 defeating an unprepared candidate, former vice-president Kamala Harris. Peter Thiel convinced Trump to take JD Vance on as vice-president. Vance had questioned whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler”, he was a “Never Trump” guy, but, clearly, Thiel has influence with Trump. Thiel schooled Vance for years as a libertarian Venture Capitalist (VC). Thiel was his political sponsor to the tune of fifteen million dollars when Vance stood in the Ohio Senatorial race. Vance became an Ohio Senator and Trump’s VP.
Trump understands his job is to sell fiscal far right ideas to his MAGA base. They’re not enamoured with his wars. They don’t like datacentres. They also hate the fact that AI is taking away their jobs but Trump, like Milei, is a showman. They trust him. He’s a brilliant communicator and a natural liar who basically invented the Epstein-class, he is not religious but knows when to bow his head to Jesus. Trump learned that religious alliances, no matter how unlikely, win elections on the far right. If that means cuddling up to Pentecostal Christian sects so be it. Benjamin Netanyahu primes these same religious groups with end-times Zionism whenever he can when he visits the US.
Silicon Valley VCs have really deep pockets, people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen have got behind libertarian ideas, they are also tempted by government contracts. Unlike Milei who is a true believer, Trump sees the libertarian cult as a lucrative opportunity. Libertarian sponsorship, like Pentecostal religious alliances, are a pathway to power.
Trump’s presidential style is that of a ‘Caudillo’ a Spanish word that describes a populist warlord. General Francisco Franco ran Spain’s fascist government from 1936 to 1975. His official title was Caudillo. Trump is clan MAGA’s Caudillo.
Trump is comfortable with plutocracy. This has become obvious even to his distracted electorate. His autocratic style saw millions march across the US in a “No-Kings” backlash. Trump always listens to power and especially to money. His gives access to his libertarian political sponsors, many in the oil sector and those in the Silicon Valley, not because he’s a believer, but because they open their deep pockets to him. Republicans have fed from the libertarian trough for years. In all that time only one libertarian deputy (elected as a Republican) ever managed to get a seat at the federal level. Libertarians are very unpopular once you get to know them.
Crypto
Trump has pardoned some of the worst money laundering crypto CEOs, most of them were convicted of fraud by the SEC, some sold drugs online. Subsequently Trump acquiesced to generous donations from the crypto lobby and was amenable to lobbying to reduce crypto regulation. He removed SEC jurisdiction over crypto which brings FinTech Apps closer to competing with Wall Street banks. Trump’s family crypto company World Liberty Financial has made billions from stablecoin investments. Their $USD1 is marketed as The Dollar Upgraded.
Koch Industries is some of the most influencial old money behind US libertarians. They have tried everything to make libertarian ideas popular. The Koch brothers launched the CATO Institute in 1977 handing it over to Milei’s hero, Murray Rothbard. They also helped with the Atlas Network, think-tanks which have been peddling libertarian ideas for decades with little success.
When it comes to Security Policy Trump is authoritarian. Trump promised his electorate peace then went to war on three continents, most crucially in Iran. Trump blew an extra Trillion US dollars of his budget on Homeland Security’s ICE and on the Pentagon in his second term, money that he did not have. It takes a certain kind of president to permit the US military to use AI for live targeting in warfare. Trump deployed Project Maven in Iran and allowed Israel to deploy similar technologies (Habsora/Gospel) to choose targets in Gaza. Giving our current AI technologies such control of autonomous weapons is risky in the extreme with people dying unnecessarily.
Trump put Elon Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk’s PayPal partner Peter Thiel ascribes to Curtis Yarvin’s libertarian reduction of the state. Yarvin is described as Thiel’s House Political Philosopher. Yarvin used a different acronym “RAGE”, Retire all Government Employees. Musk tried this out but it did not work, he broke the government but did not save money. Musk did however take advantage of his DOGE position to raid government data, using technical employees from his own companies to download US State data citizens into Palantir databases. Musk gave the US state the tools they need to supercharge US authoritarianism allowing them to catch up with China. Some of this Medicare data made it’s way into the Palantir ELITE App used to hunt ICE targets when they invade US cities. ICE subsequently used ELITE to fill their detention camps with targets (even children) wreaking havoc with human rights.
Trump has cut taxation, mainly benefiting the very rich. The cuts were originally renewable every 5 years then he made them permanent. This left a massive hole in the budget. First Trump emitted more debt, then in a fiscal panic he slapped taxes on US imports. Trump figured that his voters would not recognise that import tariffs were just a regressive tax on the poor.
Trump also tried to intervene in the US central bank (the FED) to drive down interest rates. All these measures are desperate means to plug the hole in the budget. Taxing the rich and reducing the Pentagon budget would calm the markets but with Trump and his libertarian Silicon Valley warlords that will not happen. Milei would never intervene in interest rates. To do so would mean intervening in private bank profits. As a dogmatic libertarian Milei puts the markets first and the nation second. That the Argentine electorate chose such a president is (at best) counterproductive.
Religion
The far right is never far from religion. Milei, like Trump, learned that attaining power on the far right requires alliances with religious socially conservative cults. In Argentina and the US some of these votes come from Jewish and Pentecostal Christian sects. Funding can also be accessed from the considerable resources available to the invite-only catholic cult Opus Dei.
Milei himself has moved on from Catholicism. He tells anyone interested that he’s studying the Torah to convert to Judaism instead. As president of Argentina Milei has visited Israel multiple times. He cried on camera at the wailing wall in Jerusalem. Milei is more supportive of the attack on Iran than Trump. On his 15th trip to the US since being elected Milei spoke at the Yeshiva University in New York. “I am the most Zionist president in the world”, he told his audience.
Libertarian Talk, Neoliberal Walk
Argentina’s Minister for Economics is Luis (Toto) Caputo, he used to work at the New York investment bank JPMorgan. The head of the US Treasury is Scott Bessent, he worked at Soros Fund Management, so both came from the private financial sector. When they worked for the other side they made speculative, often destructive, financial bets against economies with debt problems, sometimes betting against the state’s financial stability. Bessent infamously made leveraged bets against UK finances forcing the Bank of England to devalue the pound. Caputo was also minister for economics under previous right wing governments. Under both Macri and Milei Caputo contracted new state debt, leaving the next government to clean up after him. Such practices are typical of the fiscal right in many nations. Bessent and Caputo are now tasked with maintaining the public trust by sustaining financial stability in their respective states.
To understand libertarians it can be helpful to separate economic theory from economic practice. Neither the US nor the Argentine economies are libertarian, they’re neoliberal. This latest libertarian craze is a contrived attempt by the very rich to turn back the clock on economics to shift right and block left. Bessent and Caputo are both neoliberal (though they are fiscally right of centre). They may have studied a little more Hayek than Lord Keynes but they are still on the conservative side of orthodox neoclassical economics. The US and Argentine economies have been neoliberal sincebthe 1980’s. They trade globally, which means they are required to practice debt realpolitik. Libertarian economics is theory not practice.
Libertarianism and neoliberalism are related. Hayek redefined ‘neoliberalism’ as the bastard child of libertarianism at a conference in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland in 1947, it was first tried out in the “West” in the 1980’s. Neoliberalism was Hayek’s (and later Friedman’s) reactionary attempt to privatise the welfare state, clawing back negotiating power from workers and unions in a time of economic growth and low unemployment in Europe and the US. It deployed austerity and flexibilization of labour where it could. Neoliberalism is libertarianism-light, a compromise that, rather than erase social services altogether, instead offers to privatise services for health, education, pensions or transport, thus allowing corporations to make profits providing these services to the state. Libertarianism advocates removing all social supports, a Darwinian survivalist power grab by elites pushing an extreme right political agenda. It is a university degree with a state backed loan to pay fees rather than free education.
Libertarians suspect anything not driven by the profit motive, they label people who act this way as ‘collectivists’. They distrust self-organised groups demonising unions. When Milei came to power he tried to privatise local football clubs which went down like a lead balloon.
Libertarian States are top-down, with power at the top. Milei and Trump reduced corporate and individual taxation; they’ve cut back the welfare state and they both spent much more money on weapons. Argentine legislation in 2025 and 2026 reduced workers rights. Both presidents increased national debt. They’re both anti-socialist and they both try to equate anti-fascism (AntiFA) with terrorism, leaving society with the obvious question as to where that leaves them.
In mid 2026 the universities ran out of funds to teach with. Milei refused to pay them more. He risked jail-time by ignoring the Argentine federal Congress when they instructed Milei to release agreed funds to the public Universities. As an elite project libertarians hate the idea that the poor might be able to achieve a quality education. Faculties placed banners on their buildings saying: “In a democracy laws are obeyed.” They too realised that libertarians are antidemocratic.
Libertarians in AI and Crypto
In the mid 20th century many libertarians were industrialists and oil men. In the 2020’s the most lucrative extractive industries mine human knowledge for AI. The world’s richest libertarian cult leaders are now Silicon Valley VC investors. One of them, Peter Thiel (personal wealth nearly thirty billion US dollars) recently relocated to Buenos Aires leaving California in an attempt to avoid a state billionaire wealth tax to pay for public healthcare and food for California’s poor.
Argentine legislation has been put in place to allow for the creation of AI corporations, which may be owned and managed by AI agents (not human CEOs). They will also be able to operate without any human staff. This absurd idea can provide a mechanism to privatise synthetic Intellectual Property (IP), enabling the patenting of synthetic IP made by AI. This has already happened.
In the UK, DeepMind (a Google AI) was taught how to predict the folding structures of proteins. This won DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, a Nobel Prize but also created a conundrum… To whom did this synthetic IP belong? DeepMind’s human CEO donated this synthetic knowledge (the descriptions of protein structures) free to humanity. Humans are also made of proteins after all.
Milei could never fathom giving anything to humanity. Where is the profit in a donation? For libertarians synthetic intellectual property, like rivers and even the air itself, must all be owned (preferably by a corporation). None of this makes any sense from a societal perspective but libertarians don’t do society. Libertarians do property. They do profit.
Debt and the Dollar
On the campaign trail Javier Milei told his electorate he would close the Argentine Central Bank and dollarise the Argentine economy. This would have meant that Argentina would use the US currency for all transactions: taxes, savings, payments etc… This would have eliminated the Argentine peso. Both Ecuador and Panama dollarised their economies, it did not go well for either. Milei then renegued on his promose. Long term this might have been Milei’s best economic decision, but it did not make him popular with his voters.
Both the US and Argentina have problems with the US currency; they’re two sides of the same coin. Every nation need dollars, especially for commodity imports, but it’s much worse in Argentina because of it’s unstable currency.
Countries with stable currencies enable their populations to accumulate savings in that local currency. These local savings, in banks or funds, help provide credit to loan into the local economy, recycling those deposits with newly created money. Money moves trough the economy stimulating it in a virtuous circuit.
Argentina is a commodity export-driven economy, especially since Milei has helped to de-industrialise the country. Argentina regularly devalues its currency to cheapen its local labour supply in dollar terms keeping local wages depressed. They call this competitive devaluation. It’s not good for Argentine workers unless local costs like energy and food are locally cheap which requires subsidies or price controls. Under Milei local prices (in dollar terms) have tripled. In mid 2026 many products service and food are more expensive than in the US. Poverty and consumer debt have both spiked.
Argentina’s commodity exports such as soybeans, copper or gold, bring dollars to its central bank. However Argentina’s imports require spending these central bank dollars to pay the bills. Argentinians keep their savings in cash dollars (not pesos) thus creating a further dollar shortage by absorbing the local dollar supply. Caputo’s supercharged neoliberalism has exploded imports and also caused international and internal debt to rise. Like an addict Argentina needs more and more dollars.
Argentina, like most nations, is deep in debt, but because of its awful credit history it pays extortionately high interest on this debt. For Argentina the inflated IMF interest rates are relatively cheap so the country is the world’s largest IMF debtor. The IMF is a lender of last resort something has got to give financially in Argentina, but not until Trump says so.
Trump decided to help Milei win his mid-term elections, for now it makes geostrategic sense for Trump to keep the Argentine economy afloat. Milei is a useful idiot for Trump and for Netanyahu. Trump ordered Bessent to feed extra dollars to Argentina to prevent a default just before Milei’s mid-term elections. Most of these dollars went right back to lenders in debt payments, it was good business. The loan (technically a swap) helped Milei to do well in the mid-terms and prevented economic collapse. The Argentine economy, Caputo and Milei are all now hostages to the US dollar.
For the United States government the US dollar is one of its greatest strengths but also its Achilles heel. US banks lend too many dollars and the nation has been running a deficit for decades sucking in imports creating debt. It is increasingly difficult to manage this debt due to rising debt and interest payments (now over a trillion dollars annually). Trump and Bessent have also blown out US debt by lowering taxes on their 0.01% billionaire friends, and funding Netanyahu’s wars. Republicans typically do this but at Trump’s levels the debt will soon be unsustainable.
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, the worst such gap in almost half of the history of the 250 year old republic. In Argentina the wealth gap is worse than the US, it always has been. The social instability caused by these extremes pose a threat to billionaire wealth in both nations. Trump’s billionaire sponsors were quick to realise libertarian economic arguments help protect their own wealth, they have excellent accountants and can even afford lobbyists for custom tax laws when they may need them.
Worst case scenario billionaires can buy their own countries, many of the richest have shown investment interest in forming their own Network States like Próspera on Roatán Island in Honduras. Milei too, is out on the loony fringe when it comes to taxation. He calls taxation ‘theft’. Curiously neither Milei nor Trump seem to consider no-bid government contracts as ‘theft’.
Trump respects his political sponsors. Quid-pro-quo agreements, though technically illegal, are common in a plutocracy. For example Trump is busy deregulating FinTech, Biotech and Crypto sectors; all of which have massive Silicon Valley VC investment arms. VC investors sponsor Trump’s MAGA political project. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
Trump is also enthusiastically disarming environmental regulation. He has reversed most of Biden’s green energy initiatives replacing them with perverse policies like increased fracked gas LNG exports and local incentives for “clean coal”.
Most important for the Silicon Valley billionaires Trump continues to protect American AI from regulation. Even AI’s own technologists warn that this is an extremely dangerous policy. Perversely, when advanced Anthropic Claude models exposed security risks to banking in mid 2026, Trump panicked, changing his mind, and imposing controls on AI to protect banks. He even deciding to start talks on coöperating on AI regulation with China, a 180-degree turn on regulating AI.
Poor people typically own no property. Centi-millionaires and billionaires can buy a new mansion every week just with the income from their wealth without even selling share assets. Libertarian economic theories generalise property rights beyond land and buildings to also include share ownership and the right to profits created by workers in firms those investors own. Copper fastening property rights is hugely important to the rich, as is preventing or eliminating wealth taxation while minimising inheritance tax. If AI is to replace workers then ownership in firms with AI production may require new laws such as Bernie Sanders’ sovereign wealth fund bill might be necessary to keep countries afloat and to keep the poor and unemployed from abject poverty. That would be very anti-libertarian.
In Argentina both wealth taxes and inheritance tax are zero or close to zero however during the COVID-19 pandemic a tiny wealth tax was imposed on the super rich to pay for the damage done to the economy. This panicked some very rich Argentines which did not hurt Milei’s election campaign.
Climate Chaos
Libertarian deregulation of environmental controls gives the private sector excuses to continue to make profits even if the creation of these profits requires using more fossil fuels which, in turn, worsens climate chaos. The Gods of the market (shareholders of corporations fired up by fossil fuels) can thus continue to dump environmental costs on society. This goes for all manner of commercial activities many of which are entirely unnecessary. For example building more hotels, selling more cruise ship tourism, global military expansion, wars, and thousands of new AI datacentres.
Milei and Trump both deny human-caused climate change. That their denials are baseless and wrong does not matter to them nor does it cause them sufficient political damage due to generalised ignorance about the climate as well as disinformation. All they need is money, votes and power. Climate chaos is invisible in both neoclassical and libertarian economic theory but it is becoming increasingly visible.
Putting a price on the carbon (in greenhouse gases) and taxing those emissions brings them back into the economic system because it gives the climate damage. Acost that they must pay. The owners of corporations know this so they’ve doggedly resisted this tax to protect their profits. While putting a price on carbon might remove some excess greenhouse gas emissions it will do nothing for biodiversity loss. How much does one fine a company for contributing to the extinction of a species?
Of course the acceleration of sea level rise accelerating, and with extreme weather, the immunity of capital to climate chaos is breaking down. This began in Switzerland with the re-insurance sector. Actuaries in re-insurance firms analyse coverage to house insurance for example. If a city burns someone has to pay the rebuilding costs. Reinsurance backstops wildfires and flood damage as well as deaths in heat waves. These fires can happen in asset-rich areas like the 2025 fires in Southern California, reinsurance pays out billions.
Insurance exposure is beginning to make environmental damage visible to capital, they pay it in insurance if there is insurance available for purchase. If not mortgages become impossible for lack of insurance coverage in certain areas like Southern California. This is causing a bit of a panic. Libertarian economic theory buries this climate chaos like an ostrich’s head in the cinders. It is a way to refuse to face reality. Human and environmental costs, such as famines, have been purposefully and massively underestimated. Freedom to pollute is nonsensical but it is also libertarian gospel. Industrial and military emissions along with the destruction of war are great for the short-term goals of arms makers but in the long term they’re suicidal for society. Libertarians don’t do long term.
Libertarian politicians are hell bent on wriggling out of paying for the climate chaos they are helping to create. In their blinkered world it helps to argue that ‘society’ does not exist. Margaret Thatcher, a dead UK prime minister who helped launch neoliberalism also had libertarian tendencies. She 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”.
Thatcherite libertarian logic makes climate change irrelevant. Even if it were relevant corporations “must look to themselves first” which means they will always protect their own profits not the global climate. This is what they do now. They often greenwash their activities with vapid corporate responsibility initiatives.
This is also an international coordination problem to fight climate change. Competing nations, under such game theory logic, put themselves first too. No nation has an incentive to act first to cooperate on the climate so they negate climate change. In a competitive zero-sum game, no nation will be first to allow their military or their economy be weakened. Zero sum means the world is condemned to collapse. This needs to change but it can’t under libertarian logic. Again that is the point!
Neither Milei nor Trump discuss climate chaos, species extinction or biodiversity. For a libertarian and for neoliberals these concepts are intangibles. Economists call them ‘externalities’ because they literally can’t be counted in dollars. Sponsors of libertarian think tanks go further to shield themselves. Many are in the oil sector. Some oligarchs literally buy their own media channels, newspapers and social media platforms. This allows them to finance fake news or to censor the real news. They can also write opinion pieces to back certain political campaigns. They can also drown out articles from increasingly panicked scientists. The Washington Post editorial board wanted to take a stance against the last re-election of Donald Trump. The newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who also owns Amazon Inc., and various rocket ships stopped that from happening. Like Mafia bosses on a climate trial, they attempt to destroy evidence by removing witnesses. You are less likely to hear climate scientists if they are never interviewed.
Milei and Trump are even more proactive, they have helped to destroy climate science in their own nations, defunding climate research and even weather forecasting. In the US Trump has even turned off data on sea-level rise and ocean temperatures (beamed down from space from incredibly expensive climate monitoring satellites). Trump’s oil sponsors do not want society to know the truth about such global chaos in the making. That would be bad for business. Milei’s intentional ignorance went beyond defunding science. He also threatens to leave the Paris accord. Trump has done this already… Twice!
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 lend economic arguments to the CIA. The 1973 Chilean Coup d’État was 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 1973 coup. They stayed on while Pinochet’s fascist military forces (the DINA) hunted and assassinated former politicians while in Chile the lives of thousands of Chilean citizen dissidents were taken by Pinochet’s troops. Pinochet was also responsible for the death of his predecessor, an elected president, the socialist doctor, Salvador Allende.
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. Hayek’s and Friedman’s students were called the Chicago Boys they helped launch South America’s first neoliberal experiments in Chile.
Argentina was the next experiment in torture and neoliberal economics. The IMF itself adopted neoliberal ideas selling them in Argentina and elsewhere, it helped them loot third world nations forcing them to sell assets to multinational corporations to pay off national debt. This left the States with nothing; they had to buy their own water, petroleum, electricity and healthcare from foreign multinationals in their own nations. Profits went abroad, costs stayed local, the nations got poorer. They borrowed more debt to keep their heads above water, the problems got worse.
Carlos Saúl Menem, the Argentine president became the next 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. The Argentine neoliberal experiment allowed Menem to convert odious international debt (from corruption by the previous dictatorship 1976-1983) into national debt, he effectively dollarised the economy (one peso to one dollar) then the clock started ticking, nine years later it fell apart, the Argentine economy collapsed on Christmas 2001 in the world’s worst default to that date. In the political chaos that followed there were five presidents in just one week and 37 people were shot dead by police in the streets.
At the same time across the Andes Chile suffered many more decades of Pinochet’s secret police (the DINA), political restrictions, generalised poverty, and human rights abuses. Neoliberalism, it had become clear, was Libertarianism-light. It minimalised (and increasingly privatised) the welfare state into a for-profit business. It still does.
Despite its victims, neoliberalism was rarely questioned until its internal inconsistencies brought down Wall Street then collapsed German, British and many more private banks in the subprime mortgage crisis which began in 2007 and became the Euro Crisis in Europe. Like all banking crises this one was the result of speculative excess made possible by economic deregulation, the neoliberal political system was just as fragile as its libertarian ancestor was. Silicon Valley libertarians continue to demand deregulation and increase risk and Trump is giving it to them quid-pro-quo.
Humans and Nature
Could it be that humanity has reached a fork in the road (coinciding with improvements in AI). Maybe it’s a pitchfork not a fork? Beijing China and the Silicon Valley in California are both locked and loaded building war technology from AI often to kill each other. On a human level this means that humanity is becoming even more of a rogue species disconnecting ourselves more and more from life (while destroying biodiversity) and burning the atmosphere. Is this healthy? Maybe we need to stop destroying nature and messing with our environment and give life a chance to recover, allowing time for biodiversity to again become diverse, to regain its splendour. Maybe that might save us and it will definitely save many more species.
This is not the road we are currently on, quite the opposite, our economic systems see no costs to biodiversity, therefore there is no reward (and no mass focus) on biodiversity in our societies. It is, in fact, a fringe topic for most people. Could it be time to pause for a moment and try to understand this gross dichotomy between technology and life. Maybe it is time to take a suspicious look at the owners of these wonder technologies and their use in killing people while damaging the environment, and human societies that depend on that environment.
Silicon Valley capital is hell-bent on making and training ‘thinking’ machines. They call each iteration of their synthetic intelligence “models”. The models are named after Greek mythology, one was actually called Mythos. This fabulously expensive race to the bottom of biodiversity is entirely unnecessary. Their marketing people (marketing their shares and not their products) say they just need to build a few thousand new datacentres. They don’t say these will need to be powered by fossil fuels and cooled by sucking trillions of litres of drinking water from our food and irrigation systems.
Nobody believes them so their leaders say they have to have the datacentres because of military competition with China or Washington DC (depending on which side of the pacific ocean they are on).
But what do they want to do with these new AIs if they ever really become really useful? They are not solving climate change that is for sure. Instead they are selling the Pentagon, the Ukrainians, the Israelis and the Chinese Communist Party more weapons. Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs), basically suicide drones. Killing machines. Their marketing laud how AI can “optimise the kill chain”. Musk and Besos fire hundreds of rockets into space to send thousands of new military satellites up there to fight more wars and kill more people more accurately. Is this really what we need right now?
Technology fetishes are accelerating our suicide, destroying our planet and creating instruments of war more efficient at killing us. That is you at the end of the kill chain, in a world war everyone is someone’s enemy. Now these same psychopaths tell us we must be capable of winning a war with autonomous AI-driven weapons adding this to the nuclear threat. Something tells me another extinction technology is not going to be a solution to anything.
Then, almost as an aside, they tell us that if we keep building this tech it might help save the planet also. Noting that 4500 data centres were already running in the US, some of them with the electricity consumption of whole cities. The Climate Information site “DeSmog” wrote in July 2026: “The myth of AI was that it would lead to human flourishing and progress. Yet, in the span of a few short years, Big Tech has gone from promising climate breakthroughs to breaking the climate”.
Accelerating human technological activity is undermining biodiversity and the environment, threatening life on Earth. These are the very living substrates we have depended on for millions of years to keep us alive. We have already kickstarted a planetary sixth great extinction. Excessive use of fossil fuels have destabilised the Holocene climate. Climate chaos has begun. It was this very stable environment that allowed our species (and many others) to flourish, it gave us the chance to build civilisations and we are knowingly breaking (to build more war machines).
We need another civilisation, a different kind of economics if you like and definitely different politics, something compatible with the planet not something that helps billionaires become trillionaires.
We don’t need machine learning to teach us how to re-balance our relationship with ‘nature’. Humans have lived in balance with nature 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 main economic systems. 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.
Who are the AI companies trying to fool?
War
Trump and Netanyahu are causing lethal and unsustainable wars, all increasingly likely to end humanity. Both were voted in by religious end-times cults by local populations who support these wars. Meanwhile we can’t seem to deal with our schism with nature? Could these two facts be related?
Our education 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 (which didn’t work either). This is a fast train to extinction.
Libertarians are leading the fray toward extinction of the poor without private bunkers, 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 technology salespeople claim “70% kill rates”. They’re killing humans, that’s you and me! 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 with hastening human destruction.
But we are still here.
Revolution or Extinction
Rather than worshiping Silicon Valley warlord man-boys maybe we could do something useful for ourselves not for them? We could start with minimising run-away climate change and regulating AI to avoid 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 dystopian dark AI machine future.
Take back control from these idiot man-boys. The future is nature. The future is feminine. The future is ecological and social. It always was.
Degraded and futile libertarian economic theories have never worked and they never will. They bring no solutions, they are 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 them gave us 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 libertarian cults. Time to end this Hegsethian 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.
This essay is adapted from the author’s soon to be published work on the rise of the far-right in the Americas, the result of research and lived experience in the Silicon Valley in the 1990’s and the 2000’s and in Argentina in the two following decades.
https://x.com/thejuicemedia/status/2072271204724183361/video/1