January 2025 begins year two of Javier Milei’s four-year presidential term. The first ‘Rothbardian’, ‘paleolibertarian’, ‘anarchocapitalist’ president ever. What do these terms mean and what can this radical Argentine political experiment teach the world?
‘Rothbardian’? ‘Paleolibertarian’? ‘Anarchocapitalist’? That’s a lot of deviant terminology to unpack. These labels place Javier Milei’s curious dogma at the extreme right of the Austrian School of Economics (hereafter Austrian School). Milei is a follower of Murray Rothbard. The Austrian School are extreme ‘propertarians’ the so-called paleo- (or Rothbardian) Austrian School is even more extreme. Propertarians are radical believers in the benefits of property ownership, to them the only good thing is a privately owned thing and by extension property owners are good people. We are not talking about stewardship of the land here. Rothbardians believe property owners must be allowed do anything with their property they see fit. Open pit mining? Diverting rivers for lithium filtering? Industrial agriculture practices such as spraying glyphosate or atrazine near rural public schools? All that is for property owners to decide, not ‘society’. For Rothbard and his followers society does not exist, there can be no State regulation for the “common good”, because, since society does not exist, there is no common good. All property must be private: goods, land and even services. Nothing can be communal. Milei began his presidency by attacking national parks and public education.
Milei himself illustrated this in his campaign with a story about the right of a factory to pollute a river. To environmental policy wonks he was referring to a failed doctrine they call “environmental services”. The false argument goes like this. Rivers get polluted because they have no owner. Markets do what markets do and governments should not intervene. It’s more profitable to dump effluent directly into the river than to filter it first. Absent State regulations (which, to be fair, in Argentina rarely work anyway) only The Market can prevent river pollution. So privatise the river and the river’s new owner will take care of their river property. In a campaign speeches Milei argued as follows:
“This company can pollute the river as much as it wants because [Argentina] is a society which has plenty of water and the price of water is zero”, in the event of a water shortage he added: “someone will take care of appropriating the river [because the water] would cease to be worth zero and the pollution would end”, but until then “A company can pollute a river as much as it wants”
https://projectallende.org/milei-chronicles-9-the-madman-in-the-river/
For Rothbardians ownership is the answer to everything, even pollution. Milei doesn’t even register that anything might live in a river. Fish, turtles, they would never cross his mind. Milei has one focus and that is Capital. The owners of capital are his true heroes. The rest of us are just human capital. If Rothbardians believed climate change was caused by humans, their only ‘solution’ would be to privatise the Earth’s atmosphere so that the new owner would protect it for private gain (itself an absurd concept). As this is impossible, libertarians simply negate 35 years of proof from scientists at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that climate change is happening and that we humans are causing it. Their dogma’s only path to solving such large problems is to let the omnipotent market and its owners take care of it. Rothbardian politicians, like Milei, preach that humans don’t cause climate change. Climate collapse puts limits on capital so, by libertarian logic it simply cannot be happening. The owners of capital and the markets are infallible, if they take the dangers of human-caused climate change into account, a direct result of market activity, their whole theory falls apart but that’s the point.
In this second gilded age of technological hyper-capitalism Milei’s anti-progressive worldview has been shaped by the think-tanks of the Atlas Network and their corporate funders who pay these think-tanks to spread the right[sic.] ideas. For them climate change is an existential risk, not for humanity but for their corporate profits. Elon Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump get to power. The oil companies tossed in a quarter of a billion also (ignoring dark money which is typically much more). Oil barons like the Koch family have spent much more over decades to filter out arguments against their practices.
Milei’s party is called La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advancing). Trump’s voting base includes the religious right of the US Republican party, in Spain there is Abascal’s Vox, in Italy the post-fascist “Brothers of Italy” (Fratelli d’Italia) and Italy’s Primeminister Giorgia Meloni, it’s a growing club. Milei really likes Meloni, he visited her in December 2024 and Meloni gave him Italian citizenship. Milei also attended the Vox conference in Spain in May 2024 while Milei also believes that he is Donald Trump’s favourite president.
Trump, Meloni and Abascal are “nationalists” so they focus their hatred on immigration. Milei on the other hand, like Ursula von der Leyen, is careful to be subservient to Western power alliances but doesn’t mention immigration. All of the above are anti-taxation, pro-fossil fuel energy and have similar stances on the US proxy wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. The conservative extreme right is a hydra but these many guises feed from the same pools of sponsors who are focused on their business interests in cheap fossil fuel energy and low taxes. Their electoral messages are then adjusted to align with local voter preferences and elites. The pathways to power diverge, as do their language and tactics. Milei calls these culture wars. Neither cultural nor religious wars matter to capital.
Capital must be revered, Markets Free (for capital anyway) taxation low and subsidies high. If ‘critical’ resources are available on national territory these must be offered first to Western capital. Wars and sanctions require allies to have the right[sic.] alignment. These are their rules.
National messaging, for example in election cycles, requires that libertarianism — itself a US corporate adaptation of the Austrian School- come in a variety of local packaging. National personalisation of political messages gives local ultra-rightwing candidates options. Post-fascist libertarianism is personalised by algorithms to appeal to the voter’s online ‘self’ to acquire their vote. Algorithms rate, select (or block) content in social media; thereby turning social media platforms into factories of hate for their political enemies. Social media campaigns are capable of mass confusion and division and are particularly good at othering (for example of opposition candidates). Algorithms are very good at winning elections. They work! Libertarian economic theories will never win elections on their own as they only benefit a small minority of voters. Libertarian and far right neoliberal think-tanks try to tell us the real enemies are the socialists, the nationalists, the foreigners, the working class, the unions, but most of all the progressives. Anyone but them!
Neoliberalism has been on life support since the financial collapse of 2008-2011, it now faces the terminal threat of climate collapse. Systemic greed and deregulation of the financial markets crashed the West’s economies in the subprime crisis, now, a dozen years later, the same forces are crashing the environment. One tactic of the funders of right wing think-tanks is to double down rather than deal with the intrinsic problems of the causes of climate change. The hard right says that instead of fixing regulation and working together as a society we need to deregulate more and act as individuals. Climate collapse is an inconvenient truth to Atlas funders.
Milei isn’t neoliberal, he’s liberal without the ‘neo’ prefix. He says he’s trying to return to a fabled Argentine ‘liberal y libertario’ conservatism that existed (in his mind) about 100 years ago. In the 1920’s Argentina was then one of the world’s richest nations measured in GDP per capita. Milei tries to present this as a MAGA play (Make Argentina Great Again) copying Trump, but Argentina was never “Great”, it was rich but not powerful. In the 1920’s women still had to wait three decades for the vote in Argentina, long before racism was a ‘problem’ (for the racists that is) and when Argentina was a mainly Catholic nation before the “confusion” of religious freedom and atheism. In the 1920’s nobody had ever heard of climate change; it was long before AI drones or social media algorithms. Like all mythical pasts this was a time of assumed certainty but, in reality, it too was a time of monsters. If the 1920’s was the decade that brought us both the Nazis and the Fascists, will the 2020’s bring the World postfascism, or, more locally, Latin American Neo-fascism?
Few Argentinians knew Milei before voting him in as president in December 2023, they certainly didn’t know about his Austrian School economics and most still don’t. They saw a candidate, a media showman, a clown, a destructive rebel with a chainsaw, ready to take on the state. Local mainstream media and social media had taught voters to hate the corrupt state. Corruption was a basin of filthy bathwater stirred by politicians. Workers’ taxes disappeared down this same plug hole into the mouths of a slimy political caste. Milei became a protest vote in a nation with compulsory voting. He didn’t come to change the bathwater, he came to throw out the baby.
During the previous government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic a young population (of future Milei voters) was forced to live alone in tiny urban studios or with their parents living increasingly online. They were radicalised by algorithms to hate the State that separated them from lovers and friends. Milei took advantage of social breakdown during the pandemic. One in two Argentines are now below the poverty line but Milei still remains somewhat popular. Voters don’t like to admit they might have voted against their own interests, rather, like the funders of right wing think-tanks, they double down.
Milei’s policies also have a blind side, libertarian culture wars have their own taboos, ideas and policies can be cancelled too. Anti-woke, anti-progressive, anti-welfare state arguments and anti-taxation memes are concocted by groups like The American Conservative Union and broadcast at CPAC conferences. Milei has attended at least two CPAC conferences since he was inaugurated, and in late 2024 he founded CPAC Argentina. Conservative Political Action Conferences advocate wars against ‘cultural Marxism’ (itself a made-up term), Milei spoke to this “anti-woke” war in January 2025 at The World Economic forum in Davos, Switzerland sparking a major march against fascism in Argentina on February 1st. 2025.
At least for the majority of Argentinians, those who do not possess capital, paleo-libertarianism hearkens back to the age when white christian men with property titles were the only people who could vote. Milei’s Make Argentina Great Again advocates a return the nation to a fabled time before the 1930 Félix Benito Uriburu fascist (nationalista) coup d’état which began Argentina’s decade of infamy. At that time fascism was also brewing in Europe while the Argentine economy boomed as it stepped up food production to feed Europe in the interwar years.
Milei has repealed many Argentine State measures to reduce the gap between rich and poor. They were shock absorbers for a very unequal society, most are gone now. For a libertarian, if wealth trickles down, that’s incidental. Milei’s doctrine leaves all that “equality stuff” in the hands of the Market. Libertarianism is an elite project. In the Argentina of 2024 quite the opposite (trickle-up) happened; it’s in full flow in 2025. Milei has been very successful for the very rich, but a disaster for the poor. The Argentine national minimum wage was revised (upward) in December 2024. In dollar terms it is now the same as the minimum wage in cheaper Chinese cities, about $270 per Month ($1.35 an hour) but goods and services are priced about three times higher in Argentina than in China. Milei’s doctrine requires him to remove all price controls even on monopoly medicines. Markets had a heyday, then slumped. Pharmaceutical prices rose more than 230% in 2024. Milei took away much of the existing support for pensioner’s medicines for good measure leaving them with the choice of buying medicines or food. Every coin has a flip side…
- property rights, yes, renters rights, no!
- right-to-life, yes, women’s or gender rights, no!
- investor’s rights, yes, labour rights, no!
- tax-breaks for miners, yes, native tribal land rights, no!
- extinction, if it has to happen, yes, climate regulation, no!
Milei is not the first president to play with such dangerous political experiments using Argentina as a laboratory. In the late 1980’s, in tandem with its neighbour Chile under de facto President Pinochet, Argentina’s President Menem experimented with some radical economics proposed by Pinochet’s Chicago Boys. The Chicago boys, is how South Americans refer to ultra-orthodox anti-Keynesian libertarian and extreme neoliberal economics from the economics faculty of the University of Chicago who set up shop in Santiago de Chile just before the Allende Coup d’État. The Austrian School Mises, then later Hayek and Friedman all taught at the Economics Faculty in Chicago. In the 1970’s and 1980’s the Chicago Boys advocated ideas from the Austrian School for Pinochet’s Chile advocating neoliberalism on steroids. Menem went along with this. The IMF liked these neoliberal formulas and invited Menem along to give positive speeches on neoliberalism in other nations.
Year two of his presidency and Milei has begun to settle back into the comfort of his autocratic throne content with the policy battles that he has won so far, a cruel economic adjustment at the cost of impoverishing most of the citizenry while balancing the external account and dropping taxes on a few key economic sectors such as meat and grain exports (but not taxes on workers). Milei accelerated (then slowed) inflation but at the cost of tripling prices in dollar terms and freezing, as well as eliminating, many salaries. The biggest winners were the banks the biggest losers the pensioners and lower paid state workers.
To do this Milei played fast and loose with democracy by abusing autocratic presidential decrees known locally as Urgent National Decrees or DNUs (another trick he learned from Menem). Not even de facto presidents during Argentine dictatorships resorted to DNUs with such fury. Milei’s apparent disdain for the Argentine Congress and Senate seems to be working well. The legislatures have begun to vote with him (against their party whips). When Milei’s DNUs were rejected by the Federal Congress such as when Congress tried to increase pension payments, Milei missed the American Conservative Union’s CPACMexico.com conference to stay home and veto that vote. He sent Agustin Laje in his place, another Argentine right-wing culture warrior, a genius political consultant, and an Opus Dei cultural fascist.
Milei called out the corruption of vote-buying in the national Congress which he also experienced in his two years as a deputy. The practice seems rampant in all parties. In November 2024 a Peronist senator, Edgardo Kuieder, crossed into Paraguay for the fifth time in just a few weeks. Kuieder had voted with Milei multiple times though he is supposedly in the opposition. This time the Paraguayan border police asked Senator Kueider to search his backpack. Border guards found a cool quarter of a million US dollars in undeclared cash. As if that were not enough, that same month, a deputy from Milei’s coalition ‘PRO’ party was also found with undeclared apartments in Miami worth $2.6 million under suspicion of money laundering. This was followed in the last few days of 2024 with similar, if not worse, activities from Daniel Santilli, also from the PRO coalition, and one of the most active speakers against corruption. Santilli faces charges for illicit enrichment for not registering some of his offshore companies that manage rental incomes in the US and Argentina supposedly owned by his 83 year-old astrologer mother. Milei’s crusade against what he calls a corrupt political ‘caste’ is unraveling but Milei is a bulldozer, he won’t stop till he is stopped and his allies in Mauricio Macri’s party don’t want to wash their dirty linen in public either. The Peronist and left opposition parties remain divided.
Despite these minor setbacks Milei is looking forward to even greater success in 2025. He is excited to get to work with Donald Trump and Elon Musk and hoping they’ll help with Argentine national debt held by the IMF (though this looks unlikely). The US has bigger fish to fry but Argentina does have lithium, gold, oil, natural gas and soybeans.
Milei’s war against the state will now move on to privatising state assets, many of which the previous government had taken out of private control like the water system. Again this will be an orgy of capital. Everything must go in this end-of-times sale: gold mining licenses, lithium, the excellent land of the Pampa, Patagonian fresh water lakes, oil and gas infrastructure, ports, roads, hydroelectric dams, water, airports (or possibly not the airports as Milei’s former boss currently runs the concessions on these airports). Paying a bribe to a government official to win a contract (or a privatisation bid) is technically illegal in Argentina but Milei doesn’t see things that way. If a government official accepts the bribe, Milei explicitly rejects the notion that the company that paid the bribe is doing anything wrong. The private sector, his Austrian School logic goes, can do no wrong. He argues that the politician taking the bribe should, possibly, be fined or jailed, but the private sector paying the bribe is acting correctly. It’s just the cost of business sold. The planned 2025 privatisations will be swift but not transparent.
If the world is watching Milei’s anarchocapitalism they should realise that this system is quite the opposite of Anarchism. Bakunin and Proudhon would be turning in their graves. For Libertarians property is not theft, property (and the markets) are Gods. Menem and the chaos of the 1980’s that ended in the 2002 economic collapse, are back in Milei’s Argentina with a vengeance. Milei even copied Menem’s sideburns.
