Meet Javier Milei, the world’s only electable libertarian
Dan Hannan
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Meet Javier Milei, Argentina’s libertarian candidate. He calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, names his English mastiffs after Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman, and wants to close down most of the Argentine government. Oh, and he is currently the favorite to be the next president, having just won Argentina’s important primaries.
How can such a thing happen? It is a firm rule of politics that libertarians don’t exceed low single-digit poll results. In the United States, for example, the Libertarian Party never managed more than 0.5% in any presidential election in its first 40 years.
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In 2016, it achieved what I guess counts as a breakthrough. Facing the repulsive alternatives of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and doubtless buoyed by the important and highly sought endorsement of this column, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson secured a record 3.3%. That, until now, has been as good as it gets.
Yet, somehow, a shock-haired, wild-eyed economics professor who proposes to scrap the central bank, legalize drugs, and privatize state schools is polling in the mid-30s, comfortably ahead of his rivals, the left-wing Peronists and the center-right coalition.
How has Milei managed it? In the superficial analysis of most international media, he is a far-right populist who (as every newspaper from the Economist and Le Monde to the New York Times and the Washington Post has claimed) “admires” Trump and Brazil’s recently ousted strongman, Jair Bolsonaro.
It is hard to stress how wrong this analysis is. It stems from a tendency, widespread on the Left, to lump all your opponents together. “X disagrees with me, and Y disagrees with me, so X and Y are the same.”
In fact, Milei is a down-the-line classical liberal. Unlike Bolsonaro, he has no time for culture wars, being relaxed about same-sex marriages and transgender people — “so long as no one sends me the bill for their operation.” He supports immigration, except for criminals. Unlike Trump, he wants to dismantle tariffs unilaterally, a move that would solve many of Argentina’s economic problems but a counterintuitive and therefore unpopular one.
The claim that he is some kind of Pampas Trump rests on a remark he made during a 2021 interview, in which he said he had “an almost natural alignment” with the American and Brazilian leaders because they had “taken on the Left from day one.” Like them, he said, he had a “very clear agenda, which runs against anything that smacks of socialism or communism.”
But Milei’s worldview could hardly be more different from those of the other two. On the night he won the primary, he defined his philosophy as follows: “Liberalism is the unrestricted respect for one’s neighbor’s life plan, based on the nonaggression principle and the defense of the right to life, liberty, and property.” Hmmm. I’m not exactly getting Adolf Eichmann vibes.
The only issue on which Milei is arguably more conservative than libertarian (I say “arguably” because plenty of libertarians share it) is abortion. He takes the view that the “life” bit of “life, liberty, and property” starts at conception.
So, to repeat, how does a politician who would be a fringe candidate anywhere else get to head the polls?
For an answer, look at the state of the Argentine economy. Inflation is currently running at 116%, which is far from historically unusual. The average annual rate since 1980 has been 206%, making for a total price rise of over 900 billion percent. Interest rates, as I write, are 118%.
Argentina last had a properly pro-market government in 1916. Since 1946, it has been dominated by Peronism, a corporatist, nationalist, interventionist, and protectionist ideology that is generally considered left-wing, although it appeals to a certain kind of integralist NatCon.
There were occasional military interludes and even, after 2015, a feeble attempt at reform under Mauricio Macri. But Macri could not overcome the Peronist deep state, and in the 2019 elections, the burnt fool’s bandaged finger went wobbling back to the fire.
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Might that have been the last time? Argentine voters seem finally to have reached the view that their problems are too deep-rooted to be susceptible to gradual reforms. They need to tear the weeds out by the roots, scrapping the peso, disbanding state bureaucracies, taking on vested interests, and opening to the world.
The rest of us could, of course, attempt some market reforms before we follow the once-wealthy Argentines into penury. But the moral of the story is that we, too, will probably leave it until too late.