Javier Milei’s Ideological Influences
The first head of state to espouse the ideas of Austro-Libertarianism
The new President of Argentina has given a speech to the World Economic Forum in which for the first time a head of state has gives a statement of distinctly libertarian principles. Javier Milei is the leader of Argentina’s libertarian party, so obviously he is at least nominally some sort of libertarian. But ss is clear from his speech, Milei is not just someone on the centre-right who thinks a bit less regulation would be good, or that we have become a bit too censorious when it comes to freedom of speech. He is not even an extreme free-marketeer like Margaret Thatcher. Rather, he is an out and out Austro-Libertarian, in the style of Murray Rothbard, and seems to be taking himself to be directly applying these ideas in the form of his far reaching free-market reforms. So, what are they?
While most people who know much at all about politics can probably give a fairly accurate, if vague, definition of libertarianism, it is a fairly niche and certainly unpopular ideological orientation. At least compared to something like “socialism” or “nationalism” which have self-identifying advocates in every nation. To be a self-identified libertarian is pretty rare outside of the United States, even rarer among those involved in party politics. For comparison, the British Parliament has only one member who is a libertarian, and he does not often publicly identify as such.
This Austro-Libertarianism is a particular form of neo-classical liberal political and social philosophy that emerged in the mid to late 20th century in America, that is partnered with a particular school of economic thought that came from Austria a generation or two earlier. It combines a commitment a theory of “natural rights” that each individual has over their person and possessions, that are defined in a way that make almost any state action illegitimate and unjust, with a particular philosophy of economics that is highly sceptical of mathematical modelling and regards economic activity through an almost post-modern epistemic lense. The two come together in a moralised notion of “the free market” that can do no wrong. The market, on this view, not only provides vast social benefits but also leaves the individual entirely sovereign. It is the means by which human beings can generate positive-sum benefits, and escape the zero-sum interaction of war and slavery. Libertarianism typically claims to be the purest form of liberalism. It is strongly critical of “social justice”, deeming it to be a perversion of justice simpliciter, and a guise under which the individual is subjected to a totalitarian set of values imposed upon all society by the state for the purported greater good, that necessarily comes at the expense individual liberty.
Murray Rothbard was the first to really bring together Austrian economic ideas and classical liberal notions of natural rights. He was an American economist and clearly highly influenced by Ludwig von Mises. He was fairly prolific in political, social, and legal philosophy as well as economics. He had a significant effect on Robert Nozick who, while he did not make libertarian ideas much more popular, made them somewhat more respectable in virtue of his position at Harvard and friendship with John Rawls (the “genius” of post-war political philosophy). Hayek and Mises are more famous than Rothbard, especially in the traditional academic sense of having influence on the profession, but neither of them had quite the style necessary to have the sort of ideological following outside of intellectual circles as Rothbard did. Rothbard was far more polemical and seemingly interested in developing an “ism” which could be applied to any and all questions of social philosophy. His approach to arguing is very attractive to those who value “purity” and bullet-biting. His reasoning was deductive, austere, and aggressive. Self-described Rothbardians publish articles and books that purposefully push their principles to their logical, intentionally repugnant, limits, to demonstrate their superior purity in their devotion to them. An obvious example of this would be Walter Block’s series of books called Defending the Undefendable.
Being a Rothbardian (which is basically synonymous with being an Austro-Libertarian) is a very unfashionable kind of libertarian to be; libertarianism already being an ideology much maligned within academia, and much cringed at on the internet. It is a bit like being a Marxist, but inverted. It is both a theory of economics and of social philosophy. It is a commitment to the near-sanctity of a particular author’s word, and worship of his genius. It is to hate your fellow travellers more than your ideological enemies because they are seen as heretics. It is to have the strongest possible opinion on the value of capitalism. Most people familiar with the work of both agree that they would have both been insufferable on twitter. Of course, Marx is the most famous anti-capitalist theorist, and Rothbard is probably the most staunchly pro-capitalist theorist you could get.
The part of Milei’s speech to the WEF that related to data regarding economic growth speaks for itself. The central message there is capitalism has been an extraordinary success in terms of eliminating hunger and disease, and that we should be safeguarding capitalism rather than making it our enemy. I will focus on communicating some of the more obscure and perhaps odd-sounding philosophical statements he makes, that are a commonplace in the broad Austro-libertarian space, but nonetheless have significant nuance to them.
Milei makes a series of negative remarks about “social justice”. It is not immediately clear why someone going on about the wonders of ending poverty, and about the supreme value of human liberty, should be opposed to social justice. But he has a very particular thing in mind when he says this; following F. A. Hayek’s book on the topic, published as volume two of his three volume book Law, Legislation, and Liberty. On the Hayekian view, social justice is a conceptual innovation of post-war liberalism that departs from the traditional view of justice. The classical view of justice was one primarily about corrective justice; when one person or group commits a particular class of wrong against another person or group, this is an injustice, and demands a certain remedy for it to be corrected. Justice calls for things to be put back in order; for the status quo ante to be restored. This is achieved by forcing the violator to cease and then compel them to make the victim whole again, broadly speaking. Injustice presupposes a particular agent of the injustice; a wrong-doer. Namely, a thief, a murderer, a fraud, etc. Social justice as Hayek understood it was concerned not with the relations between private persons but rather with the overall socioeconomic shape of society, specifically the distribution of wealth. A society could be unjust under a standard of social justice, not because anyone has done anything wrong, but because the pattern of some socioeconomic variable like income emerges in a way that deviates from the favoured pattern.
Traditional justice was concerned with means: what are morally prescribed under just laws were certain means by which one goes about pursuing ones ends: you may not steal or lie or break your contracts, etc., but other than that, you get to choose your path, and you are responsible for whatever you achieve (or don’t achieve). Social justice on the other hand, unavoidably prescribes ends. If the standard of social justice says that everyone should have an equal income, the state will have to intervene in the free choices of persons if they don’t happen to spontaneously produce these results. The aggregated result of our severally, voluntary choices will scarcely produce any particular rational pattern at all.
Social justice pushes us toward a centrally imposed plan, and to that extent reduces our freedom to make our own plans. The way that Nozick would later put it his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia is that “liberty upsets patterns”, and that the imposition of a pattern therefore requires curtailing liberty. This is strongly connected to Hayek’s earlier book The Road to Serfdom in which he argued that the new post-war approach to economic “planning” in liberal democracies was a slippery slope to totalitarianism. The planners would find they have to impose more and more restriction as their plan increasingly proves to run counter to the pattern that spontaneously emerges from the nexus of free choice.
Milei also invokes a broader dichotomy that comes from Hayek between collectivism and individualism. Collectivism refers to all those ways of organising society that take the society as a whole the be the relevant unit of analysis and moral importance. In this he includes ancient tribal groups, as well as modern large-scale totalitarian communist and fascist states, as collectivist forms of organisation. Indeed, he believed that both communism and nationalism were both atavistic deployments of the overwhelmingly powerful bureaucratic modern state; making the state into the tribe. Our minds, Hayek believed, are not optimised for large-scale diverse societies where we have thin but peaceful social bonds with those outside of our own tribe (those we have thick social bonds with, of family, friendship, religion, culture, or locale). Rather, our minds evolved in small-scale kin-based units of social organisation. And we struggle to deal with the idea that our neighbours might be neither family nor enemies, but something in between. Individualism is the order of modern, extended, pluralistic, complex, and diverse societies – what we often just call liberal societies. It is where the individual, rather than any social collective, the ultimate unit of moral analysis. Individual rights make thin demands upon us, and enable us to live in an overlapping web of different kinds of individuals, groups, organisations, and associations that coexist. Individual rights demand that we tolerate one another. They mandate only peaceful coexistence and benign neglect. This is a rather artificial form of social existence in the context of the rest of human history.
Milei seems to rather haphazardly equivocate between collectivism, social justice, and socialism. While that may be intellectually careless in this context, but he echoes a fairly strong pedigree of political thinking that explicitly seeks to demonstrate the common problems with all three ideas. In his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isiah Berlin sought to demonstrate the common risk involved in all “positive” conceptions of freedom. That is, conceptions that say real freedom is the freedom to… be, obtain, achieve such and such. Where freedom is defined as some specific set of ends or goals, any choices you happen to make that do not appear to be directed at them can be legitimately interfered with for the sake of your own freedom. Berlin believed that religions, as well as the modern secular ideologies of the twentieth century like fascism and communism, have positive conceptions of liberty, that generate the possibility that collective can force the individual be authentically free. “Negative” conceptions of freedom say that freedom is to be free from… interference, coercion, domination, etc. Berlin identifies these with English proto-liberal thinking of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. They are agnostic about what individuals should do with their freedom, they just say they are free where they are not interfered with, coerced, or otherwise impressed upon by the public authorities or the rest of society by force.
But Milei goes beyond the neo-classical liberalism of Hayek and Berlin. He makes clear his commitment to the very strongest kind of libertarianism when he talks about taxation. Murray Rothbard argued that taxation was just what we call organised plunder. Most poignantly in his text The Anatomy of the State. He inherited the idea from the nineteenth-century American natural law anarchist, Lysander Spooner, who argued that same. The state is just the mafia cartel that beat all the others, and we call its extortion taxation. Milei does not seem to want to abolish the state as Rothbard did, though he does seem to believe the state’s very existence is prefaced on the unfreedom of the people. Taxation is the most basic state function that no state can live without. For libertarians it is what defines it against other kinds of organisations in society: it claims the sole right to make its money through force rather than voluntary exchange. Since taxation is non-consensual taking, it is morally indistinguishable from stealing. “Taxation is theft” is a mantra of Rothbardians which sums up their commitment to undeniable yet profoundly impractical moral syllogisms. On this view the extent to which you are taxed is the extent to which your property rights are violated, and your ability to do as you choose with your possessions is revoked. This is the sense in which Milei thinks that freedom decreases as taxation increases.
Milei does indicate some nuance here in identifying a broader problem with this basic fact about how the state finances its activities. It is not merely that the state takes by force that is socially harmful, but also that, because it take by force, there is no mechanism to ensure what is does actually produces any value for the people. Unlike private firms on the market that go bust if they cannot efficiently produce goods and services that people actually value.
It is in this vein that Milei announces that the entrepreneur is “a moral hero.” The entrepreneur rises and falls in proportion to how well he can bring goods and services to market that the community value. More than this, the entrepreneur also needs to do so by making use of a smaller bundle of scarce resources than his competitors. It is not just that he will lose customers if he provides them with shoddy goods, but that even if he provides quality goods, he will get pushed out by a competitor who can produce the same outputs but with fewer or cheaper inputs. The entrepreneur specialises in doing more with less, in a way that is constantly alert to the needs and desires of society. Of course, he makes his profits, but this is nothing compared to the benefits brought to society by his innovations. The ethics and economics of entrepreneurship as libertarian ideological meme comes in part from Ayn Rand, but more so from the work of Israel Kirzner, another economist of the Austrian school trained by Ludwig von Mises.
The adherence to the Austrian school of economics entails not only the positive attitude towards free markets and entrepreneurship, but entails a negative attitude towards neo-classical economics, which Milei also echoes in his speech. Neo-classical economics uses abstract models of the market which are not “realistic” but nonetheless are hoped to provide useful predictions. Austrians often blame neo-classical economics for the turn away from free-market ideology in professional economics on the basis that, because reality did not fit their models, they seek to use government policy to change the reality. They increasingly sought to make the economy more like their unrealistic models, rather than change the models along the lines of the reality of how markets work. Central to neo-classical orthodoxy is that there is such a thing as “market failure” which warrants government intervention. What Milei seems to believe is that what appear to be market failures are really failures to have a market – they are government failure in disguise. He says that anywhere it looks as though a market is performing badly, it is always going to be because of some government intervention that is poisoning it. The remedy is not to have more government intervention, but less. Here again we see the anxiety about the spiral of government intervention; the ratcheting up effect of state overreach. Milei says that there is “no such thing as market failure”, by which he means that two or more people voluntarily exchanging goods with one another cannot fail to be mutually beneficial. The only way for a market to not be mutually beneficial is when coercion is introduced; because coercion is that which makes people do things that do not want to do, by definition.
Milei has radical ideas and is aware that they are radical, but in true libertarian style he also insists that they are the legacy of the West. On this view the West has failed to properly live up to its own promise. The idea of individual liberty is regarded as this great gift that the West brought to humanity, and yet systematically seems to undervalue. The West – perhaps in its “decadence”, takes its fruits for granted, and fails to reproduce the conditions necessary to them. This has more than a tint of the reactionary to it, and is the mode of thinking the drives some libertarians into more general conservatism, or even into much more sinister right-wing ideologies. Such a pivot is by no means inevitable, and many libertarians consistently abhor all the illiberal aspects of all other right-wing ideologies. Indeed, such a consistency is often a sort of ideological purity that libertarians test one another against. But it is the wedge issue upon which alliances with the broader right are typically attached.
Libertarians strong anti-statism often slips into being anti-West, to the point of so anti-state, becoming complacent to the dangers of their own state’s enemies. In the US for example many libertarians downplay the threat of China, Russia, Iran because they believe that narratives about their hostility empower their own governments to be more illiberal. Milei does not seem to have fallen into this tendency, he appears to be strongly aligned to “the West”, supporting Ukraine against Russia, supporting Israel against Hamas, and withdrawing Argentina’s application to the BRICS, which he sees as a counter-weight to the West, and an alliance dominated by China.