Viva la libertad carajo! Pearl clutchers who speak Spanish might be offended at the statement which became the official rallying cry for the newly elected President of Argentina, Javier Milei. Milei became an international superstar recently for his foul-mouthed tirades against “sh** leftists,” socialists and “leftards” to whom he declared you “cannot give an inch,” or they will kill you. His interview with Tucker Carlson, however, saw a more muted and subdued figure, who thoughtfully explained his opposition to abortion, socialism, and big government.
The leftist media has referred to him as the Donald Trump of Argentina, or as a far-right populist. On the other side, Fox News is reporting that Milei is the world’s first libertarian head of state. National Conservatives are claiming it’s foolish for MAGA to embrace him, as he’s a “creation of the Koch brothers, and Reason magazine.” No less than Ron Paul’s own foreign policy Institute has thrown him under the bus, claiming he’s not the great libertarian hope.
So just who really is this mop-top, chainsaw-wielding character who has captured the attention of the world, and even shaken up American right-wing politics since his landslide election? Milei has promised to cut taxes, slash government spending, and make a bonfire of government regulations. “Everything that can be in the hands of the private sector will be in the hands of the private sector,” he said to Radio Mitre. He has proposed radical economic changes to a country grappling with 140% inflation, droughts, and food shortages. Argentina has defaulted on its sovereign debt three times, the peso has fallen more than ninety percent against the dollar and 4 out of 10 Argentines live in poverty. Milei faces an unbelievable challenge, and since he’s not a dictator, he’ll be forced to work with a government made up of political rivals and the socialists who he called “sh*t leftists” during his campaign.
Milei’s path to becoming an economist began when at an early age he decided to quit football after he saw people throwing their bodies on top of groceries at supermarkets. He considers himself to be an economist from the Austrian tradition, a school of thought which inspired the free market conservative revolution in the 1980’s of the UK’s Margaret Thatcher and the US’ Ronald Reagan. Austrian economics is referred to as such because its founders were Austrians who fled the Hitlerism of Europe to set up shop in the United States. Milton Friedman’s own thinking was heavily influenced by it, and Javier Milei is a proponent of its most radical form: Anarcho-capitalism. There are around ten different schools of libertarian thought, of which the Anarcho-capitalism favored by Milei is one branch.
Milei may be an anarchist in the streets, but his policies reveal a minarchist in the sheets. Milei became an anarchist in 1995 after reading an article by Murray Rothbard, but he acknowledged the problems with putting those ideas into practice