Milei’s Fever Dreams
BUENOS AIRES—With his wild hair, flashing eyes and lashing tongue Argentina’s new libertarian president Javier Milei is fast becoming the world’s fourth instantly-recognizable Argentine revolutionary icon after Ché Guevara with his Cuban cigar and red-star emblazoned beret, Eva Perón with her outspread welcoming arms and tight bun of blonde hair, and Pope Francis with his white robes, deep humility and constant commitment to social justice.
The big difference of course is that Milei is a revolutionary of the reactionary right, not a progressive like his forebears, for he seeks not to champion social justice, but to be its fiery nemesis. On the campaign trail for congress in 2020 Milei called Francis a “communist turd” and “the representative of the Evil One on Earth” for the pope’s support of social justice, which Milei loathes.
Now, into the second month of his presidency, Milei has extended the pope a courteous invitation to visit his home country. This reversal could be a good sign if it is a harbinger of a softer, gentler Milei to come. So far this seems unlikely.
Milei’s twentieth-century predecessors in their different ways, “el Ché” by creating a socialist utopia, “Evita” by fashioning a worker’s paradise, wished for the less-fortunate many to partake in the accumulated wealth of the few. Pope Francis, over three decades older than Milei, is also a product of the previous equality-conscious century.
But Milei, his feet firmly anchored in an increasingly selfish present, is as much a child of his era as “el Ché,” “Evita” and “Francisco” were of theirs, and therefore envisions a world where the fortunate few can multiply their wealth without hindrance or compassion, and without having to feel guilty about sharing their bounty only with themselves.
It’s a message that has won Milei powerful new friends. Chief among them is Elon Musk, richest man in the world, owner of X (formerly Twitter), Tesla and SpaceX. Musk was so impressed by Milei’s paean to capitalism at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 17 that he shared the full 23-minute video of Milei’s speech twice on his X account, once translated into English by the WEF official translator and a “better version” dubbed into English by AI replicating Milei’s own voice.
Musk was so eager to transmit his excitement for Milei’s speech that he posted a picture of a couple having sex, the woman astride the man with her back to the camera, while the man (who bears a reasonable likeness to Musk) is fixated not on the woman above him but on a laptop resting on his stomach transmitting Milei’s speech, with the caption: “So hot”.
Musk and Milei share more than the first initial of their last names, they are both born and raised in the southern hemisphere, Musk in South Africa, and are almost the same age (Musk was born in 1971, Milei in 1970). Milei has said that Musk called him to express interest in Argentina’s lithium deposits and mentioned Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink in an important speech announcing his broad deregulation program and they have frequently commented on each other’s X posts.
Milei’s Davos speech appealed to other billionaires in his same age group such as Marc Andreessen, born 1971, co-founder of Netscape, who posted on X: “President Javier Milei, techno-optimist,” over a video of Milei declaring himself an adherent to Andreessen’s techno-optimist creed.
Listening to his words at Davos, Milei’s appeal to billionaires is not difficult to understand. “Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general wellbeing,” Milei said in preacher-like tones. “You are the true protagonists of this story and rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch and unconditional ally.”
Milei’s almost holy crusade against taxation and social justice seems to be music to the ears of billionaires such as Musk and Andreessen. “The problem is that social justice is not just, and it doesn’t contribute to general well-being. Quite the contrary, it’s an intrinsically unfair idea because it’s violent. It’s unjust because the state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively.”
It is a deeply-held belief. “Social justice is an aberration, fuelled by envy, which is a sin, and financed by taxes, which is theft, another sin,” Milei has said on other ocassions. The president claims his ultra-capitalist philosophy is backed by “the Forces of Heaven,” which he salutes in each of his presidential speeches.
To remove any doubt where those forces reside, he has claimed, bursting into tears on television at the thought, that he is not important, that it is his sister Karina who is Moses, the real purveyor of the law made word, while he is merely Aaron, brother and spokesperson of the true prophet. If it sounds like something out of Monty Python, then you’re getting the right impression of Milei, rather than the pasteurized version being sold to, and sometimes sold by, the financial press.
Karina Milei is now the facto First Lady to her never-married 53-year-old brother, plus presidential secretary with broad thumps up, thumbs down power over cabinet appointments. Milei’s first act as president was signing a decree overturning the rule prohibiting presidents from naming close kin in office to appoint his sister.
He calls her “The Boss.” Three years ago, she was a Tarot reader on Instagram and a medium who helped clients communicate with their dead pets. Her top client? Her brother, who it has been widely reported receives political and economic advice from his dead dog Conan. Far from denying he talks to God through his dead dog, Milei jokes about it in interviews. Shortly after being elected president Milei posted an AI-generated image of himself with his dead dog Conan and the four clones he had made out of Conan’s cells on his Instagram account with the caption “family album.”
Milei’s philosophy is not only tailor made for billionaires. Indeed, Milei for eighteen years was a trusted aide of one of Argentina’s richest men, Eduardo Eurnekian, owner of airports and television concessions, who launched Milei’s political career on his flagship television channel A24 in 2018. If ours is an age of narcissistic billionaires, Milei holds the key for their guiltless exploration and exploitation of our, or rather, their age.
Milei has often been compared to Donald Trump, their physical attributes, that indescribable hair and that frazzled unkempt look, lend themselves to this journalistic shorthand, but he is upon closer look another beast entirely.
Not only because Milei is a product of Argentine culture, having more in common with other South American caudillos, or strongmen, than with Trump, but because Milei is a man of deep faith, a theological warrior, a born-again Rothbardian economist willing to rip his country asunder to rebuild it along the principles of American economist Murray Rothbard, who died in 1995. This libertarian-reactionary outcast with a cult-like following in the US (but regarded askance by academia) is Milei’s intellectual and spiritual guide.
Milei is a born-again Rothabardian since an epiphany he had in 2013 reading Rothabrd’s 1962 book Man, Economy and State. “I had been teaching microeconomics for more than 20 years,” Milei said in one interview. “But when I finished reading Rothbard, I said, ‘Everything I taught about market structures is wrong. It’s wrong!’”
Milei turned Rothbard dogma such as “Tax Is Theft” and the abolition of the Central Bank into presidential campaign slogans. He went as far as saying in media interviews that he would be in favour of not only the sale of body organs but also, in time, the sale of children by their parents, referring to Rothbard’s “The Ethics of Liberty” in which this idea is proposed. Three times he was asked by his interviewer if the answer to “could parents sell their children?” shouldn’t be “no”. Three times he deflected giving “no” as an answer.
In another interview, asked if he believed in democracy, Milei replied: “Are you familiar with Arrow’s impossibility theorem?” Asked again and again, his answer remained that he couldn’t answer the question unless he was first allowed to explain the theorem by 1972 Nobel economics prize winner Kenneth Arrow, a social-choice paradox that posits that no voting system is flawless and identifies the shortcomings in each. The interviewer gave up.
His frequent references to Rothbard tend to fly over the head of most interviewers, ignorant of the fact that Rothbard, inventor of anarcho-capitalism, is to economics what Trump was to medicine when he suggested injecting people with disinfectant—at best a quack, at worst a malignant if unintentional sect leader.
But bankers and business leaders are not about to quibble over such irrelevant details when it comes to Milei. They hear only his siren song of deregulation and reduction of state interference in their affairs. With such a carrot dangling before them, any questioning of Milei’s spiritual world or his devotion to Rothbard, who flirted with Holocaust denialism and racial segregation, is consigned to irrelevance by business and finance leaders.
The world’s eighth-largest nation is at a crossroads that even stronger democracies would have trouble navigating. Milei, if he cannot be first stopped by those of his allies who perceive the danger inherent in his holy quest, plans nothing less than turning Argentina into Liberland, a quasi-fictional libertarian paradise that actually exists as an unrecognized micronation in Southeast Europe.
This he announced in the early days of his political campaign dressed head to toe in a shiny caped black and yellow Captain AnCap costume. Get it? Black for anarchism and yellow for the gold of capitalism. “I have come to announce the creation of Liberland,” Captain AnCap explained to the camera, bursting into song as he rendered Liberland’s national anthem.
In Milei’s fictional Liberland there is no state and there are no laws. Free and unfettered capitalism creates a peaceful and harmonious society. In his zeal to reshape Argentina along the lines of this quack intellectual utopia, Milei if unchecked could become almost the Pol Pot of capitalism.
As his boldest act of government shows, the president wishes to destroy every vestige of the old Argentina, which Milei confusedly assigns as the handiwork of socialist design. To this effect he has sent a mega-package to Congress, a combined bill of law and a presidential decree that jointly contain 1649 articles that overturn or modify labor, environmental, gender, education, consumer, business, finance, culture and health system laws that over more than 100 years have made Argentina the country it is today, with free public education right up to university level, free public health, and a hodgepodge of a social welfare system that is a far cry from being the populist, socialist free-for-all Milei makes it out to be. For all the bluster about Argentina as a populist social paradise, it is really quite a tame capitalist nation, in which even the despised Peronists bow to the IMF.
In fact, some of the “socialist” reforms Milei seeks to undo, free public education chief among them, were the creation of Argentina’s 19th century conservative leaders who decided Argentines required a leg-up if they wished to compete with their northerly capitalist competitor, the United States.
Argentina is, despite its bad rap as a populist disaster area, by far one of the most livable Latin American nations, a magnet for immigrants from its less fortunate neighbors, as well as a constant stream from Europe, and also Russia since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with enviable education and health indices, with progressive social policies, the first major Latin American country to introduce abortion and same-sex marriage, all despite an appalling economic record, not just today, but stretching back to its independence from Spain in 1816.
Massive overspending coupled with incessant state borrowing and rampant corruption, leading to inflation, half-hearted dollarization programs, social instability, nine foreign defaults, is not a thing of today or the birthchild of Peronism, as Milei claims and journalists repeat. This calamitous, but evidently survivable, state of affairs stretches back into the early nineteenth century.
The first convertibility program was introduced in the 1860s, the second in the 1880s. Even Charles Darwin in his Voyage of the Beagle, passing through Argentina in the 1830s, comments on the rampant corruption and quirky ways of Argentina’s politics, with prescient words still applicable today. Darwin admired Argentina’s gauchos, ranch hands usually of mestizo origin equivalent to US cowboys, but was not impressed by the country’s ruling class. “The character of the higher and more educated classes who reside in the towns, partakes, but perhaps in a lesser degree, of the good parts of the gaucho, but is, I fear, stained by many vices of which he is free. sensuality, mockery of all religion, and the grossest corruption, are far from uncommon. nearly every public officer can be bribed. The head man in the post-office sold forged government franks. the governor and prime minister openly combined to plunder the state. Justice, where gold came into play, was hardly expected by any one,” Darwin wrote.
Additionally, and here’s the scary part, Milei is asking Congress to delegate its law-making prerogative to him personally, so that the world’s first Rothbardian president can draft new laws or repeal old ones at whim by a mere stroke of his presidential pen. That is more power than any democratically-elected president, and even some of Argentina’s many nasty dictators, who always set up some makeshift form of Congress to legislate, has ever had.
This unprecedented power would include, as he has recently warned us via Twitter, the ability “to reduce or eliminate the power of the state.” This from a man whose hatred of the state is such that during his campaign, on daytime television, he creepily compared the state to “a pedophile in a kindergarten, with the children in chains, and coated in vaseline,” a disturbing step beyond Rothbard’s definition of the state as a mere criminal enterprise. Congress seems to be willing to cede Milei’s wish to emasculate the perceived aggressor.
It would be tempting to interpret the surrender of Argentina’s legislators to Milei (he got 56% in the presidential second electoral round in November) as a sign of Argentina’s sudden conversion to libertarianism. But it would also be mistaken, akin to walking in the Argentine rain without getting wet because you don’t know where the raindrops are.
As mentioned before, Milei cannot be judged by US or European standards. He is almost exclusively a product of his country’s and South America’s history, a history deeply steeped in “caudillismo,” strongman politics, in which true democracy has been the exception and dictatorship, or severely limited democracy, the rule.
Argentina has responded to Milei more as a strongman than as a man of ideas. His ideas take second place to the sheer energy of his electric personality. A Messianic flock has found again its Messiah, as it did in the 1940s with that other strong duo Juan and Eva Perón, as it did in the 19th century with dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas and his influential daughter Manuelita, in more recent years with that other power couple, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, as Brazil has with Lula, as Venezuela did with Hugo Chávez, who also promoted a personality cult around himself. Indeed, despite inhabiting opposite ends of the political spectrum, Milei has a lot in common with Chávez, including a complete disregard for democratic norms, the demand for enabling acts assigning himself virtual one-man rule, and their undisputed roles as regional paradigm-shifters, in the case of Chávez as leader of South America’s “pink tide”, in the case of Milei as a new prophet of capitalism.
Milei is seen as someone who can take charge of not only the reins of power but also wield the whip needed to control the untamable horses of Argentina’s unruly political actors. Democracy, grafted upon former former Spanish and Portuguese colonies by an enlightened group of 19th-century liberals, never fully took hold in South America, as its long history of internal strife, feuding 19th-century warlords and 20th-century military dictatorships attests. Caudillismo, strongman rule, the organic South American alternative, has been a much better fit.
What’s vital to Argentina is not what Milei believes but simply that he is. Congress is surrendering all power to him not because its legislators have been awakened from their proverbial stupor by the clear tones of Rothbard’s voice but because they instinctively react to a caudillo/president on a mystical quest, because he proclaims in his every speech to act in the name of “the forces of heaven,” because he listens to no one, except his sister Karina, because he wants all power for himself, because he is willing to assume full personal responsibility for putting order in a country of forty-seven million kings and no subjects that is in a perpetual unholy mess since 1816.
As the fugitive Belgian Nazi collaborationist Pierre Daye, who met with General Juan Perón in Buenos Aires to organize the Nazi escape, wrote in his memoirs in the early 1950s: “Argentina is a country of fascists who don’t obey orders.”
In a strongman society Milei’s personal attributes are more powerful motivators than his political or economic ideology. The proof is that Congress is not attaching any conditions for Milei to march right or left or head safely down the middle. Just give him the power and let him guide us out of this mess whoever he deems best, is their message.
The 40 years since the collapse of Argentina’s last military dictatorship in 1983 have been the longest democratic interlude in our country’s history. The only similar long period of relative political stability was the Conservative Republic that, thanks to fraudulent elections and military presidents, lasted 42 years between 1874 and 1916. This is the period Milei seeks to emulate, mistakenly painting it as an era of unhindered capitalist-driven growth when Argentina rivalled Canada, Australia and much of Europe in terms of GDP growth.
Except that this growth was not driven by real capitalism nor stopped by the “socialist” governments that followed, which were socialist only in the feverish imaginings of Milei and his followers.
The economy of Milei’s golden age was an era of recurring social, economic and debt crises. Argentina’s economy grew thanks not only to its fertile Pampas region, but also to excessive and unpayable private and state borrowing. And it then collapsed driven by that same excessive borrowing, plus the rampant graft, corruption and tax evasion of the country’s absentee landlords, who poured the profits of Argentina’s booming agricultural exports not into reinvesting in the land that they quickly abandoned as soon as it made them rich, but into building the gaudy Parisian palaces that they made their semi-permanent homes.
The almost entire land-owning class of the two generations of Argentina’s Conservative Republic grew up speaking French, not Spanish. Argentina’s failure to become Canada or Australia is because Argentina borrowed too much and failed to reinvest its profits at home. Instead, export earnings in gold francs were smuggled back to Europe hidden in cheese export shipments, to be spent there by its absentee landlord class.
Capital flight is an age-old problem in Argentina. As countless other “saviors” in the past, Milei plans to issue yet another tax pardon to the wealthy evaders willing to repatriate their offshore plunder, perpetuating a two-century-old cycle of evasion and tax pardons that have made it impossible to balance state accounts. This age-old magic trick, an almost inside joke between the country’s business community and the political class, is camouflaged by blaming the deficit instead solely on socialist overspending. But it’s hard to balance any budget if the big tax creditors can postpone payment until the next fiscal pardon.
Oblivious to all these real reasons for Milei’s electoral triumph, especially also to the fact that Brazil’s reelected president Lula da Silva is achieving far better economic results than Milei by applying diametrically opposed policies, right-wingers in the US are celebrating that Milei is the first libertarian president elected to office in world history, a fact that is being hailed as paradigm-changing.
“Rothbardian Javier Milei Takes Control of a Major Country,” hailed one US libertarian media after his election, comparing Milei’s “revolution” to the triumph of Marxism in the 1917 Russian revolution.
Not only cult-like Rothbardians are depositing perhaps ill-advised positive expectations on Milei, so are the IMF and the banking world. What are the implications of this? If, as may yet happen, Milei’s experiment ends in a fiasco of hyper-inflation and social chaos, as the similar 2000-2001 economic policies of then-president Fernando de la Rua did, it will be a tremendous setback for real democratic free-market reforms in Argentina.
De La Rua was forced to abandon the presidential palace in a helicopter to avoid being physically ripped to pieces by an irate middle-class population that had taken to the streets after their savings were confiscated by banks that not only closed their doors but boarded them up with wooden planks.
The fact that De La Rua’s labor minister and economy vice-minister, Patricia Bullrich and Federico Sturzeneger, are Milei’s two main political allies behind his Napoleonic redrafting of Argentina’s entire legal canon, does not bode well.
If Milei turns out to be nothing more than a flash in the pan of libertarianism, while “populist” Lula continues to report economic advances, the libertarian dream could conceivably be finished, at least in Argentina.
If instead Milei pulls even a small, sickly rabbit out of his Rothbardian top hat, it will be a true game-changer. Historical precedent is against him. Previous shocks attempts to cut welfare subsidies, privatize state companies and tie the peso to the dollar failed spectacularly during the 1976-83 dictatorship and again in the 1990s, applied incongruously by a right-wing Peronist, Carlos Menem, that last time.
But even a half-way scenario with monthly single-digit inflation, if he manages to tame December’s 25.5% spike, and only sporadic street protests, could pave the way for a formidable North-South axis of authoritarian presidents if Donald Trump wins the US elections.
Moved by Milei’s socialism-bashing Davos speech, Trump posted on his Truth Social site that he is looking forward to aiding his southern emulator. “The new President of Argentina, Javier Milei, who truly loves his country, is working hard and, according to many in the “know,” MAKING GREAT PROGRESS! He inherited a “total mess,” but he is MAGA (MAKE ARGENTINA GREAT AGAIN!), working very hard and, against long odds, will succeed. I look forward to helping him in the future!”
It was not Trump’s first energetic endorsement of Milei. After his electoral victory in November, he posted a video message saying: “The whole word was watching, i am very proud of you, you will turn your country around.”
If that happens, the histories of the US and Argentina may become so intertwined that any prediction today would be nothing short of a fantastical shot in the dark. Especially if through some feedback loop Trump pulls that joker card out of the Argentine president’s authoritarian pack and confers upon himself Milei-like power to enact legislation single-handedly bypassing the US congress.
