Unlike a lot of other people I didn’t get too excited about the election of Javier Milei to the presidency of Argentina, anarcho-capitalism and all. I’ve just been to disappointed by too many “Right-Wing” politicians over the decades, especially the ones who talked about cutting spending and more than that, shrinking the size of the State.

Besides that, as with many other Presidencies around the world, I figured Milei would be hemmed in by his nation’s Congress, which he and his party do not control, and where even the Right-wing parties are entangled with the Peronist system of a vast government in terms of spending, subsidies, regulations and controls.

But … wow!

He was elected because the people of Argentina were desperate, having seen their nation decline from being one of the wealthiest in the world at the start of the 20th century to where 40% of the population live in poverty – despite all that government moolah over the decades. Inflation, never low in that country, will amount to 183% for 2023.

Despite his rather wild persona, his Trumpish airs in public debate, he’s a pretty switched on cookie, having been a professor of macro and micro economics for twenty years, as well as teaching mathematics for economists. He’s written more than 50 academic papers.

More than that for me is that when he’s debating or answering questions he fluently discusses economists and philosophers that most politicians are barely aware of.

Still, he has a long way to go and Peronism is so deeply embedded into the culture of Argentina that it’s going to take decades to rip it out, if at all. To do that he’s going to need economic success, with a huge fall in inflation and solid economic growth that turns into more businesses with more jobs at higher pay, and all that for more than just a year or two.

From the wiki link above:

Anarcho-capitalism (colloquially: ancap or an-cap) is an anti-statist, libertarian political philosophy and economic theory that seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enforced by private agencies, the non-aggression principle, free markets and self-ownership, which extends the concept to include control of private property as part of the self. 

Three excellent guest posts on Milei here at Not PC, including the only economics article he’s written in English:

Note that whenever situations arise that do not match the mathematical structure [modelled by the neoclassical analysis], they are considered “market failures,” and that is where the government appears to correct those failures. However, to successfully solve this problem, it is assumed that the government knows the utility function of all individuals (preferences) for the past, the present, the future, the time preference rate and knows the state of the current technology and all future enhancements, along with their respective amortization rates.

In short, to solve the problem in question, the government should be able to master a significant amount of information that, by definition, individuals themselves ignore or are not able to handle, which exposes that the idea of the welfare state acting on the market to correct failures is a contradiction.