On the bright, hot summer day of 10 December 2023, Argentine President Javier Milei cruised down Avenida de Mayo in a 1960s-era Chrysler Valiant III convertible surrounded by a phalanx of black-suited security guards on foot. As he waved to scattered crowds of supporters speckled with vibrant yellow and light blue flags, one could almost feel the cautious optimism in the air. Milei was travelling to La Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential residence, from the steps of Congress where he had just made history after giving his inaugural speech as Argentina’s first-ever libertarian president.
On his political journey to the heart of power in Argentina, Milei laid out a radical free-market vision for the country. He called for dramatic slashes to public spending, the shuttering of the country’s central bank, and the replacement of the peso with the U.S. dollar as the country’s official currency. He railed against the political establishment with gusto, referring to politicians as a “caste” that plundered the Argentine public.
Milei has described himself as an adherent of anarcho-capitalism, a fringe branch of libertarianism that calls for the abolition of the state and the privatization of all government provisions. The ideology builds itself upon a philosophical foundation that all individuals should be free from the threat of coercion, where the worst offender is the government through involuntary taxation. Milei, whose eccentricity knows little bounds, has presented himself at public events as a colourful alter ego named General Ancap, the fictional leader of ‘Liberland,’ tasked with the goal of ‘kicking Keynesians and collectivists in the ass.’
Milei brings these radical ideas into the presidency amidst Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades. The annual rate of inflation is expected to reach a punishing 200 per cent, poverty is on the rise, and critical foreign currency reserves are dwindling. Argentina’s rapidly deteriorating economic situation serves as a backdrop to the resonance that Milei’s anarcho-capitalist-inspired campaign found among the electorate. Understanding the intellectual tenets of this extreme political ideology, how they have shaped Milei’s thinking, and the extent that he will govern according to these libertarian ideals will have critical implications for the future of South America’s second largest economy.
‘I think Milei is a person who seems to have strong personal and moral convictions,’ Marcelo Garcia, the communications director at BICE, an Argentine development bank, said in an interview shortly after Milei’s inauguration. ‘He seems to be a person that thinks he has a calling. He’s on a mission. We’ll see how that mission plays out in office.’
Milei’s Intersection with Anarcho-Capitalist Thought
In reconstructing Milei’s awakening to anarcho-capitalism, the writings of one academic, Murray Rothbard, seemed to have had a particularly important influence. A pivotal moment came in 2008 when Milei first encountered anarcho-capitalist ideas after a colleague shared an article written by Rothbard. Milei, who is a trained economist and at the time was 38, said that this article provoked an intellectual U-turn that made him question all of his prior economic training and knowledge.
Rothbard – an American academic who coined the term ‘anarcho-capitalism’ in 1971 and studied under Ludwig von Mises, the leading thinker of the Austrian School of economic thought – is the central intellectual figure of anarcho-capitalist theory. Rothbard lays out his core beliefs in the 1973 tome For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, which was neatly summed up in the introduction by Llewellyn H. Rockwell as ‘not just a case for cutting government but eliminating it altogether, not just an argument for assigning property rights but for deferring to the market even on questions of contract enforcement, and not just a case for cutting welfare but for banishing the entire welfare-warfare state.’ To give a more politically practical feel to the extremity of Rothbard’s thinking, he wrote prior to the 1980 U.S. presidential election, ‘The No.1 threat…to the liberty of Americans in this campaign is Ronald Reagan,’ suggesting Rothbard’s proclivity for freedom even outflanked Reagan.
According to an associate, another anarcho-capitalist text that influenced Milei was The Market for Liberty written in 1971 by Linda and Morris Tannehill, an American couple. In 2014, Jorge Trucco, an Argentine translator and professional fly-fishing guide, translated the bookinto Spanish for the first time, increasing the accessibility of the text within South America. Trucco first met Milei in 2014 at a presentation for the newly translated book and claims The Market for Liberty had an effect on Milei’s thinking. ‘He saw us talking in the same terms and concepts from The Market for Liberty. It was sort of incredible because [Milei] started saying certain things [on television] that were written in The Market for Liberty,’ Trucco said in an interview.
The Market for Liberty paints a radical vision of a stateless society free from any form of coercion or threat of force. The book is part philosophical musing on the sanctity of individual rights (‘there is no such thing as minority rights or any other form of collective rights’); part defence of the self-regulating nature of the market (‘without freedom of the market, no other freedom is meaningful’); and part anti-government screed (‘in a complex society with a complex technology and nuclear weapons, [government] is suicidal idiocy’). Questioning why others do not similarly view government as an unnecessary evil, the authors posit that people simply do not yet have the ‘ability to generate or even to accept new ideas.’
Libertarian Utopias in Political Practice
Anarcho-capitalist thought is typically expressed in sweeping, dogmatic absolutes that can have a seductive simplicity. True believers seem to have a habit of referring to those with the slightest intellectual disagreement as ‘socialists,’ ‘communists,’ or ‘collectivists’ – or sometimes all three in the same breath. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is very little evidence that any adherents of anarcho-capitalist doctrine have successfully translated this utopian vision into political practice.
Attempts have varied in grandeur and design, ranging from micro-nations to small enclaves. Take for instance the previously mentioned Liberland, which is in fact a real place. Founded by a former Czech member of Parliament, Vit Jedličkan, in 2015, the micro-nation resides on a tiny sliver of disputed land between Croatia and Serbia. Jedličkan has said Liberland is his attempt to build ‘the freest country on the planet’ where taxation is voluntary and democratic processes are powered by blockchain. As of now, the nascent micro-nation has no diplomatic recognition nor a single inhabitant.
Another unfortunate ultra-libertarian experiment was the Free Town Project, a libertarian scheme founded in 2001 by a Yale PhD student to ‘take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals – part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful,’ writes author Patrick Blanchfield. At its height, the Free Town Project drew over 6,000 eccentric free-marketeers, united in their belief in the infallibility of the market, radical freedom, and rejection of statism in any form. New residents engaged in an enthusiastic campaign to cut public spending and resist government authority. ‘Despite several promising efforts, a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services,’ Blanchfield wrote, quoting from A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, a journalist who chronicled the Free Town Project. This utopian endeavour began falling apart when bears started descending upon the town and mauling residents. Hongotlz-Hetling hypothesized that these attacks in part stemmed from a failure of the town’s residents to properly secure their garbage.
There are other projects similarly fuelled by a pure impulse for an anti-government, free-market society – from the Peter Theil-funded ‘seasteading’ venture of floating cities beyond national sovereignties to the Jeff Berwich-backed ‘Galt’s Gulch Chile’ of a self-sustaining, libertarian paradise in the Chilean Andes. What seems to unite these cases is often a quixotic quest to draw reality closer to libertarian, utopian ideals.
Libertarianism Rising in Argentina
Argentina is a curious place for a libertarian movement to take root. Peronism, a working-class movement premised on considerable state intervention in the economy and generous welfare programs, has dominated Argentine politics for decades. ‘There isn’t a clear precedent for libertarianism,’ Daniel Landsberg-Rodriguez, a founding partner of Aurora Macro Strategies, a geopolitical risk firm, said in an interview. ‘Argentina has the most bloated public sector, impatient voters, and the most permeable ideologies. So it is a tricky choice if you have to pick a country that is going to be at the vanguard of a social shift.’ Despite these inhospitable conditions, libertarian ideas appeared to gain some traction in Argentina between 10 and 15 years ago.
Around the time that The Market for Liberty was translated in 2014, a fringe anarcho-capitalist movement seemed to be bubbling to the surface in Argentina. Café Ancap, an informal gathering place of libertarian enthusiasts, was formed with the goal of spreading the gospel of anarcho-capitalism and deliberating the practical details for what a truly stateless society would look like. Conversations would range from the theoretical, such as should the role of the state be limited to defence or completely eradicated, to the mundane, such as how to address river pollution in an anarcho-capitalist society. The group grew over the years, beginning with four or five members and expanding to 40 or 50 attendees, meeting every Saturday from 4pm to 8pm at a big restaurant on Vincente Lopez Street in the posh Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Recoleta. Trucco told me that Milei attended two or three of these meetings around 2017, even speaking at one of them.
One day in December, I travelled to San Isidro, a leafy suburb of Buenos Aires, to visit Union Editorial, the first Argentine book publishing house dedicated exclusively to printing libertarian and free market ideas in Spanish, including many anarcho-capitalist texts. I met Rodolfo Distel, the firm’s owner who began publishing books in 2011, at his bookshop. He began pulling books off the shelves to show me them with the zeal of a missionary, proselytizing about the sins of the state. Hayek. Von Mises. Friedman. Rothbard. Rand. Benegas Lynch. Milei.
Mr Distel, who was the first person to publish Milei’s books, told me that there has been a surge in libertarian activity over the past ten years. Union Editorial began with 20 titles and has grown to publish over 500 titles. The publishing house also participates in a network of Argentine libertarian entities called Red Por La Libertad, or Network for Liberty – a loose coalition of think tanks, academic institutions, and political parties that meet once a year to exchange information and organise.
It is hard to say how popular these libertarian ideas are among the wider Argentine population, and whether they catapulted Milei into power. One hypothesis is that there isn’t anything intrinsically attractive about libertarian ideas to wide swaths of the Argentine public. Rather, it is simply an ideology that many people can latch on to as a way to express their anger at a political class that they feel has failed them time and time again. ‘I think libertarianism has become somewhat fashionable among a subset of youth voters who feel it answers Argentina’s permanent level of crisis,’ Jordana Timerman, an independent consultant based in Buenos Aires, said in an interview. ‘They haven’t seen any good answers, so it feels like the way a lot of us once felt walking around carrying Marx, like “oh, here is somebody with an answer. Maybe it is in here.”’
True Believer or Political Pragmatist?
Perhaps the more important question for Argentina moving forward is the extent to which Milei actually believes in anarcho-capitalist ideas and, if so, whether he will govern accordingly. Thus far, Milei has governed much closer to a traditional centre-right Argentine politician rather than a radical free-market fundamentalist. His first presidential decrees ushered in punishing austerity by means of shock therapy, including a 50 per cent devaluation of the peso, cuts to energy and transportation subsidies, and reductions in government ministries. He has not shuttered the doors to the central bank nor has dollarization been seriously considered as a policy option. Milei has formed a cabinet that is filled with establishment politicians and economists, including Luis Caputo as Minister of Economy – who previously served as President of Argentina’s Central Bank from 2017 to 2018. ‘The team he has assembled is not a libertarian team. He might still have those ideas…[but] it is not libertarian at all,’ Mr Garcia, the communications director at BICE, told me.
Milei is in a deeply constrained position. He must navigate an Argentina economy that is on a knife’s edge with extremely minimal political support. His party, La Libertad Avanza, has only a handful of representatives in the Legislature and not a single governor, which are traditionally powerful players in Argentine politics. ‘On paper, he is the weakest president Argentina has ever had in their democracy,’ Mr Landsberg-Rodriguez told me. Milei has had to ally with traditional political parties because ‘there is no way he can govern beyond changing the flower arrangements in La Casa Rosada’ unless he pacts with someone, he added.
When I asked Mr Trucco whether he believes Milei remains true to anarcho-capitalist ideals, he responded, ‘Yes. He is honest and sincere. He won’t change his principles…he will install a new concept of government, the individual, and the self-regulating market.’ Mr Distel agreed. ‘Javier could be a moral revolution. He is very strict. He doesn’t like lying.’
Alejandro Bonvecchi, a professor of public policy at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, is less convinced. Pointing to the policy steps Milei laid out during his inaugural speech, Mr Bonvecchi told me, ‘I think that speech is actually quite statist…He has his ideas. That’s clear but I don’t think he is terribly committed to them…They are showing themselves to be pragmatic, to have a foot on the ground, and not trapped in a cloud of their own rhetoric.’
When assessing Milei’s anarcho-capitalist bona fides and their implications for Argentina’s future, one must eventually confront the inherent tension of an ideology that envisions a stateless society rising to the presidency. ‘Libertarianism is inherently weakening of government which is something when you are in charge of a government you usually don’t want,’ Mr Landsberg Rodriguez said. Yet, some remain hopeful that a truly stateless society can eventually materialise. ‘You cannot dream of turning any country in the world today into an anarcho-capitalist society,’ according to Mr Trucco. ‘But I think that in the future, humanity will reach that point. I don’t know how long it will take. Maybe 500 years. But it has to happen.’
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 12: Utopia.
Michael Wakin is an MPhil student in International Relations at Mansfield College, Oxford. Before attending Oxford, Michael graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Kenyon College and worked as a research analyst for the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C. Michael has reported from South Africa, Lebanon, and Argentina, as well as interviewed former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and former Secretary of State George Shultz. He was awarded the 2024 Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar Award.