Javier Milei, the recently elected libertarian president of Argentina, condemned all forms of socialism and collectivism in a speech at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
“The Western world is in danger … because those [who] are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty,” he proclaimed via a live translator on Wednesday.
“Socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it has been tried out … a failure economically, socially, culturally, and it also murdered over a hundred million human beings,” he continued.
Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, claimed that leaders in the West have “abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism” – a practice that he referred to as a root cause of “the problems that afflict the citizens of the world.”
He added: “Do believe me, no one is in a better place than us, Argentines, to testify to [this]. … This is something we have lived through, and we are here to warn you about what can happen if the countries in the western world that became rich through the model of freedom stay on this path of servitude.” President of Argentina Javier Milei SLAMS the globalists at the World Economic Forum, calling them then root of the problems in society. Based.
— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) January 17, 2024
Milei explained that the exponential growth in global per capita gross domestic product (GDP) after the Industrial Revolution lifted 90 percent of the global population out of poverty.
“We should remember that by the year 1800, about 95 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty and that figure dropped to five percent by the year 2020, prior to the pandemic,” he said. “The conclusion is obvious: far from being the cause of our problems, free trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we have to end hunger, poverty, and extreme poverty across our planet. The empirical evidence is unquestionable.”
Milei then took aim at “the left-wing doxa” that attacks capitalism on moral grounds, claiming “it’s evil because it’s individualistic and that collectivism is good because it’s altruistic – of course, with the money of others. So, they therefore advocate for social justice.”
Milei countered that social justice is an “intrinsically unfair” and “violent” idea.
He continued:Those who promote social justice, the advocates, start with the idea that the whole economy is a pie that can be shared ... But that pie is not a given, it’s wealth that is generated … in a market discovery process [in] which the capitalist will find the right path as they move forward. But if the state punishes capitalists when they’re successful, gets in the way of the discovery process, they will destroy their incentives and the consequences [is] that they will produce less, the pie will be smaller, and this will harm society as a whole.
The solution to be proposed by collectivists is not greater freedom, but rather greater regulation which creates a downward spiral of regulations until we are all poorer and the life of all of us depends on a bureaucrat sitting in a luxury office. Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were forced to change their agenda. They left behind the class struggle-based ... economic system and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts which are just as harmful to life as a community and to economic growth.
For examples of these conflicts, Milei cited “the ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman” and feminism, which he argued has led to “greater state intervention” and given jobs to “bureaucrats who have not contributed anything to society.
The president of Argentina also suggested updating the definition of socialism, which is classically defined as “an economic system where the state owns the means of production.”
“This definition, in my view, should be updated in the light of current circumstances,” Milei said. “Today, states don’t need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct the so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.”
“Do not be intimidated either by the political class or by parasites who live off the state,” he concluded. “Do not surrender to [a] political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution, the state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonist of this story, and rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch, unconditional ally. Long live freedom, damn it!”
Since taking office last month, Milei has pledged to take drastic measures to revive his country’s economy.
“He has put forward more than 1,000 rule changes via a sweeping emergency decree issued last month and a proposed ‘omnibus law,’” Financial Times reports. “These aim to deregulate industries, expand presidential powers, reduce the right to protest, and deliver spending cuts and tax increases central to Milei’s plan to eliminate the fiscal deficit this year.”
Milei took a commercial flight to the event in order to “save what he calculated as over $300,000,” said the president’s spokesman, Manuel Adorni, per Reuters.
“Milei traveled with a small delegation including his foreign minister Diana Mondino, Cabinet chief Nicolás Posse, Minister of Economy Luis Caputo and his sister Karina Milei, who is also the Secretary General of the Presidency,” the outler reports. “In addition to Davos, the delegation will meet International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Kristalina Georgieva, a week after reaching an agreement with IMF staff over the latest review of the country's troubled $44 billion program.”
