He dresses like a madman, looks like a madman, combs his hair like a madman, and shouts like a madman. He is Javier Milei, a mix between John Belushi, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. He has stood up to all of Kirchnerism with a single proposal: freedom. And the proposal comes with a super power: talent.
The only bad thing about Milei is that he is so very, very Argentine, that he is almost impossible to translate into English. A lot gets lost in translation with the 200 thousand swear words and insults he unabashedly hurls against socialists, whom he calls “thieves,” because they steal from the rich who have earned their money fair and square, to give it to someone else.
READ MORE from Itxu Diaz: Javier Milei v. the Socialism Pandemic
Until not long ago, Javier Milei was but an anecdote amongst all the garbage that was Argentine politics, for years infected by Peronism and fleeced by Ali Ba Kirchner and the Forty Thieves. But he has just surprised the world: against all odds, Milei has swept the primaries giving the presidential race a historic turn around.
The leftist press is suffering because it cannot find labels to put on him: ultra, fascist, Nazi, extreme, super. But Milei is none of that, of course, he is just (and I think in this order) an enemy of the left and a libertarian who is content with minarchism to avoid falling into some anarchist utopia in a society like Argentina’s where the state has cannibalized everything for years. By the way, Argentina is the hidden mastermind of the ideological garbage that runs rampant through the whole Hispano-sphere.
The characteristic of Milei that bothers progressives the most is his language. He does not claim any moral superiority of the kind that the left grants itself. He calls a spade a spade, and lives politics with such passion that in debates, he turns red, shouts as if he were in a war, and has no problem mentioning the mother of whoever in order to demonstrate that the economic theories of the left are ruinous and, what’s more, immoral.
Milei coined that reflection that became renowned: “I originally believed that socialism was a mental illness. But later I realized that it was something deeper. Socialism is a disease of the soul.” During his visit to Spain in 2022 to participate in a festival organized by Vox, he shouted to the young conservatives gathered: “Do not be afraid, battle against the left-wing. Do not be afraid, we will win. We are productively superior. We are morally superior. Go, and put up a fight. This is not for the lukewarm, it is to get in the face of the socialists and win the battle against them.” And shortly afterwards he added another of his most repeated ideas: “Socialism is the machine of impoverishment, a miserable phenomenon, of hatred and violence.” (RELATED: A New Heyday for Left-Wing Fascism in Latin America)
On another occasion, he explained the left’s greatest mistake: “Socialists admit that the capitalist system is more productive, but they say that inequality cannot be tolerated and they structure it under the slogan that where a need is born, a right is born. But the problem is that needs are infinite and rights, someone has to pay for them. And since resources are finite, there is a problem of inconsistency. That problem was solved by the economic science of capitalism via the price system. However, the socialists don’t like it.”
Milei’s moral doctrine gives a very specific space — take note, Biden — to the issue of debt: “Since there is a fiscal imbalance, socialists resort to debt, an absolutely immoral policy that implies that the bill for today’s party will be passed on to our children and grandchildren.”
Milei has burst the corrupt shell of the Kirchners. Hopefully he will become president of Argentina. But in the meantime we have an important lesson here: we are better, we are more productive, and that is why we can win. And what has he done, after all? He leads by example … and wins. (Incidentally, thanks to the support of millions of young people who adore El Pelusa Milei as if he were a world-famous youtuber).
