Notes on the phenomenon of Javier Milei

For some time now, a change in statist ideas breaks into our country that had taken hold of many people, begins a slow but hopeful transformation from statism to liberalism, especially but not only in young people who point to Alberdian values.

This intellectual change has been working for a long time from the academy but today it arises at the political level, where although for the time being a minority, it is growing. This last plan is due to Javier Milei, who proceeds against the unsuccessful and impoverishing notion of granting the state apparatus functions that contradict the constitutional tradition of circumscribing them to the protection and guarantee of individual rights prior to and superior to the constitution of a government. .

In this context, Milei has been battling with great merit and perseverance. in the urgent need to release creative energies from the trap imposed by megalomaniacs, via suffocating regulations, colossal expenses, astronomical taxes, galloping inflation, labor legislation contrary to work, exchange manipulations and closures on international trade, along with slaps against the independence of powers and repeated threats to freedom of the press, all in the face of alarming corruption.

It has also categorically spoken out against homicide in the womb known as “abortion”, in line with scientific pronouncements such as, in our midst, that of the National Academy of Medicine. He has explained the errors of the so-called “environmentalism” as an excuse to destroy private property through figures such as “diffuse rights” and “plural subjectivity”, in line with pronouncements such as those of the Nobel Prize in Physics Ivan Giaever, the founder and Weather Channel’s first CEO, John Coleman and former Greenpeace Canada President, Patrick Moore. He has proposed the system of vouchers for education in order to finance demand and not the politicization to which disbursements inexorably lead to feed supply, as the Nobel Prize winner in Economics Milton Friedman insisted, also applicable to health systems. And he has detailed his reforms in three steps to get out of the hive we are in.

It has been wrongly said that Milei is the anti-politics when in truth time and time again he has spoken out against indecency in politics to vindicate it in the Alberdian sense. This, of course, does not exclude paying attention to other paradigms linked to the monopoly of force that we call government, such as the debate on the prisoner’s dilemma, information asymmetry, public goods, externalities, the Kaldor-Hicks theorem and the Nash equilibrium. Only conservative minds entangled in heavy mental cobwebs of the status quo are unable to look further and understand that knowledge is not a port but a navigation, which is why, as the motto of the Royal Society of London says: nullius in verba, that is, there are no final words. As John Stuart Mill has pointed out, “all good ideas pass through three stages, ridicule, discussion, and adoption.”

Milei suffers attacks on many fronts: the socialists, those who cannot digest jealousy and envy, those who are in transit from authoritarian ideologies but still cannot chew pills that are too big, operations with falsehoods by politicians who see their spaces threatened and, of course, the ever-present well-intentioned nonsense. In any case, it is appropriate to underline how the character in question has forced the shift in the axis of the debate in the discourse of other politicians who are far removed from liberal thought but who have had to change the speech in order not to lose votes; In this sense, it is only necessary to pay attention to the always indiscreet files.

What has been said in no way means that we have coincidences in everything that expresses this candidate. Liberals are not a herd and we detest single thought; So welcome exchanges of ideas. As Karl Popper has taught us, knowledge has the characteristic of provisional corroborations subject to refutations, which allows progress. This does not adhere to relativism, which, in addition to making this position relative, opposes the necessary correlation between the judgment and the object judged, since things exist independently of our opinions. The task of reducing our sea of ​​ignorance turns it into a permanent pilgrimage in search of fertile land on which to sustain ourselves. Milei has made this point many times in the context of her strong intellectual sympathies for the Austrian School spearheaded by Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Israel Kirzner, and Murray Rothbard.

For a long time now our country has been devoured by statism, after having been the applause of the world from the liberal Constitution of 1853/60 to the fascism of 1930 and the Peronism of 1943 arising from two military coups, a situation from which we have not been able to free ourselves until now, consumed by a alarming monotony in the permanent nonsense that includes the horizontal guillotine of egalitarianism.

In this situation, there are those who criticize Milei for her hairstyle and for having used sometimes in haughty ways, but it seems that the critics are not aware of the danger we run of falling into the clutches of indigenous Chavismo, which is why they have apparently lost their sense of proportion and elemental balance. More: in some reports, Javier Milei demonstrates admirable patience when interrupted on topics that require careful reasoning and concatenation. In other cases, the vein of the show appears in certain public acts. Everyone has their style. But again we must place ourselves in what has been happening to us for a whopping almost century. It is the first time in Argentine history that a discourse of the nature and depth that we have been commenting on appears on the political scene.

What it is public knowledge I participated in three zoom meetings with Milei and Mauricio Macri with the intention of bringing distant positions closer together in the electoral contest, which took place on December 23 of last year, on January 28 and on June 1 of the current year. Three cordial meetings but regardless of the outcome of the elections and the multiple efforts to unite similar principles, the testimony left by Javier Milei is appreciated by all the genuine supporters of a free society. Before the viral rampage in which we are still immersed, I had an academic meeting with Milei at the University of Belgrano, full of young people. But before the immense tide of people in that act, I especially highlight the quality of questions that were revealed, which were not to show off and get out of trouble, but there was a lot of library behind those substantial questions. Then, the Broadway theater, academic presentations in which we participate with colleagues at the invitation of Milei, with proposals that aim to turn off the taps of inflation.

The author has completed two doctorates, teaches, and is a member of three National Academies.