You should listen to the incredible speech that Javier Milei recently gave at Davos, the annual gathering of the great and the good in a snowy corner of Switzerland where our overlords debate what they will do to us next.
The new president of Argentina said they should stop it. Deregulate. Shut down the central bank. Stop “protecting” one group of people at the expense of another group. It is a liberalism that will save Argentines from themselves if they let it. Pray for Argentina. And for Brazil.
The speech is in Spanish on YouTube. As a monoglot idiot i.e. a “gringa” I had to listen to him in English. I hope there is a Portuguese translation.
Cautious. Short excerpts can be heard in English, filtered through the prejudices of the leftwing British newspaper The Guardian, for example, in which Milei and his proposals are described as “conservative”. Watch the full speech and judge for yourself.
He says what I said and what liberals like the incredible Freedom Forum in Porto Alegre and the various Students for Freedom branches across Brazil say. It's simple: give people the same permission. Remove obstacles.
But many things are simple. Socialism is simple: take from Peter and give it to Paul and call it “social justice.” Fascism is simple: the same formula. But liberalism has the unique advantage over these two modern delusions in that it is sound and true from a historical and economic perspective. As Milei reports, liberalism enriched the world and made us adults. We must want to be adults, not the eternal children or slaves of other political philosophies.
Milei's understanding of economics and politics is very good. In particular, he understands that the discussion among economists about “imperfections” in markets is largely fairy tales with no scientific basis. None.
Nobody is perfect. Milei thinks “capitalism” is new. In fact, it started in the caves. What is new is liberalism, which began among the Anglos in the 17th century and had precedents in Salamanca, Spain. He believes it was “economies of scale” that made us rich, rather than innovations inspired by liberalism’s egalitarianism.
But it's incredible. Hear.