Argentine President Javier Milei once again showed that he enters the world stage not as Donald Trump’s epigone but instead as the role model that Trump and other world leaders should follow.
“We are here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world but, rather, they are the root cause,” he explained to those gathered Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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Milei made the moral case for capitalism, quite a different approach than the more common utilitarian case for capitalism or the theoretic case for capitalism. Yes, the market works. That’s not his main point. Command economies are immoral.
“The problem is that social justice not only is not fair but also does not contribute to the general welfare,” he explained through a translator. “On the contrary, it is an intrinsically unjust idea because it is violent. It is unjust because the state is financed by taxes, and taxes are levied coercively — or can any of us choose not to pay taxes? This means that the state is financed through coercion, and the greater the tax burden, the greater the coercion and the lesser the freedom.”
The clique that uses the state’s monopoly of force to compel everyone else to behave as directed from afar represent justice only in an upside-down world. They are not altruists but bullies. Milei effectively acts as the lone Linderman protecting from the many Moodys and Mikes. His example calls out for two, three, many Lindermans.
And, on this, Trump and other world leaders should pay attention. Pushing for zero or negative interest rates, and spending so beyond the national means as to push the debt further past the size of the gross domestic product and necessitate monetization, created the mess that America found itself in 2022 and still attempts to emerge from as 2024 begins. Managers and experts thought they knew best.
Individuals know best. They know best not about what strangers should do but about their own interests. The free market serves as the ultimate in populism. The democracy of the marketplace votes on the fairness of the price of cars, labor, interest, or any other good and determines whether production should increase or decrease by buying or not. In every other system, a select group of people — call them elites or experts or whatever — imagine themselves capable of ordering the economic choices of strangers. This paradoxically but predictably unleashes economic chaos.
“It should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it has been tried,” Milei pointed out. “It’s been a failure economically, socially, culturally, and it also murdered over 100 million human beings.”
Then why, like Charlie Brown, do we keep trying to kick that ball?
Socialism seduces, like a lonely-hearts club or a miracle-cure advert, by promising chimerical outcomes, e.g., heaven on earth, the brotherhood of man, the perfectibility of man. Among the benighted enlightened, it provides a simpleton’s single-bullet theory of everything, invitation to a club of the omniscient, and the flattery that they should possess the power to manage everything.
Milei, like Trump, exudes a sense of theater. He arrived in Switzerland on a commercial flight while so many conference attendees lecturing about global warming flew on private jets. Trump, particularly at his rallies, emits a rock star vibe. The Argentine, of course, played in a rock band.
Their styles mesh. Their ideas sometimes clash. The North American does not understand what the South American does. One cannot uproot the Left from the institutions merely by delivering speeches. One must drain not the Swamp but their troughs.
Government spending exploded under President Donald Trump. Some of his advisers dismissed the idea of limited government as an atavism of a bygone age. They unwittingly enabled the Deep State, NPR, legal services, endless DEI initiatives, the campuses promoting anti-Americanism, and so many other baleful enterprises. Defunding the termites eating away at America should act as Priority One of the next administration, and Milei’s swift-shanking of Social Development, Women, Genders, and Diversity, Culture, Tourism and Sports, and other leftist employment programs disguised as government ministries offers lessons and inspiration for anyone seeking to do just that.
Milei concluded his address with a message to businessmen:
Do not be intimidated ether by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender to the political class who only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges. You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen. 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 well-being.
One hopes businessmen, to include the one running again for the White House, took heed.
America, after all, cannot borrow Argentina’s Ricky Linderman. We need our own.
