…Disaster “Anarcho”-Capitalism Comes to Argentina
Argentina’s self-described “anarcho-capitalist” President, Javier Milei, has — to put it mildly — generated considerable enthusiasm on the libertarian right in the United States. Shortly after Milei’s election in December 2023, Reason’s Katarina Hall praised an omnibus bill successfully pushed through by “the libertarian president” for policies that would transition Argentina to a “deregulated, free market economy.” More recently, Marcos Falcone at Reason described “Javier Milei’s Buenos Aires” as “the city where libertarian history is happening,” although it “wasn’t obviously destined to become a beacon of liberty.” The treatment of Milei at other venues like Cato and Students for Liberty is consistently adulatory, focusing on his “libertarian” and “free market” accomplishments since entering office.
But even Hall’s laudatory piece mentioned, in passing, that the omnibus bill empowering Milei — the one with all those “libertarian” provisions — included a measure calling for
the declaration of “a public emergency in economic, financial, fiscal, pensions, defense, tariff, energy, health, administrative, and social matters until December 31, 2025.” If approved, this would mean that Milei would have both the executive and legislative powers and would be able to decide on issues that are currently only regulated by Congress.
The bill also extends the government’s new anti-protest measures, increasing penalties to… up to five years for those who “direct, organize, or coordinate a meeting or demonstration that impedes, hinders or obstructs circulation.”
Let’s see… an executive with emergency powers ruling by decree. And draconian prison sentences for protestors who block streets. Sounds libertarian to me! I’m sure all the libertarians who consider the latter a reasonable response felt the same about the Open Up protesters in May 2020 who created a public disruption over their right to free refills at Cracker Barrel, or traffic shutdowns by the “Freedom Convoy” in 2022.
Leaving aside issues of due process, the substance of “free market” measures in the emergency decree, according to Hall, includes railroading through “privatization” of over twenty state industries —which will be free from the corruption that characterized virtually every previous “privatization” scheme, I’m sure.
Another economic provision in the decree is a restriction on the right to strike in the case of “important services” (in which workers must continue to perform at least half the normal amount of labor) or “critical services” (for which the required level is 75%). The former category includes “hospital suppliers; maritime, air, river, land, and underground transportation companies, continuous industrial activities (including steel and aluminum, chemical, and cement industries); the food industry; construction material providers; banking, hotel, and restaurant services.” The latter includes “public utilities, telecommunications, fuel transportation, and public primary schools.” It’s hard to think of anything that’s not covered.
In addition to unionized workers, another group whose economic liberties don’t count is the owners of worker cooperatives.
…the National Institute of Associativism and Social Economy (INAES) – the agency responsible for registering co-ops – had voted to suspend 11,000 co-ops for lack of documentation and other alleged non-compliance.
At the press conference [presidential spokesperson] Adorni called the worker cooperatives a “political black box” that was being eliminated, and implied large scale illegality in co-op registrations.
So stringent regulation, including “registration” of economic enterprises, is presumably consistent with a “free market” — so long as the enterprises are owned and controlled by workers rather than absentee shareholders.
Yet another freedom denied by this “anarcho-capitalist” is freedom of movement across borders:
Argentina’s right-wing President Javier Milei issued a decree on Wednesday curbing immigration to the South American nation, a move coinciding with the immigration restrictions put in place by the Trump administration….
Wednesday’s executive order tightens restrictions on citizenship, requiring immigrants to spend two uninterrupted years in Argentina or make a significant financial investment in the country to secure an Argentine passport.
Immigrants seeking permanent residency must show proof of income or “sufficient means” and have clean criminal records in their home countries.
The decree makes it much easier for the government to deport migrants who enter the country illegally, falsify their immigration documents or commit minor crimes in Argentina. Previously, authorities could only expel or deny entry to a foreigner with a conviction of more than three years.
The substance of his economic policy aside — such as it is — the “libertarian” Milei is also resorting to drastically authoritarian forms of governance, including crackdowns on critical media that will ring all too familiar to Americans living under the Trump administration. According to Discourse magazine:
[Decree 780/2024] grants the government sweeping oversight over media content under the guise of protecting public order and national security. It empowers authorities to monitor and penalize journalists for reporting that is deemed “subversive,” an ambiguously defined term that leaves ample room for subjective interpretation. Under the decree, headlines critical of the administration can be flagged as destabilizing or harmful, leading to fines, forced retractions or even criminal charges against journalists and media outlets….
From the outset, his government has vilified journalists, labeling them “enemies of the people” and subjecting them to relentless verbal and digital harassment. As Reporters Without Borders — a global organization dedicated to defending press freedom — recently highlighted, Milei and his officials have been involved in at least 52 documented instances of stigmatizing rhetoric in 2024 alone. These incidents range from verbal intimidation and public shaming to outright threats on social media.
These attacks are more than symbolic; they have created a climate of fear that inhibits critical reporting. For instance, journalists have faced physical violence, with 12 documented cases in 2024, some of which were carried out by police under a new security protocol designed to suppress public protests….
The decree, further, has “considerably restricted access to public information by expanding the exceptions under which the government can refrain from disseminating information and by requiring those requesting official information to register and identify themselves….”
Milei is also ramping up the surveillance state; consider his recent initiative, the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit. Ostensibly designed to enhance public safety, this program employs AI to predict and prevent crime. In practice, it’s a blueprint for mass surveillance. Social media posts, private conversations and routine online activity now fall under the watchful eye of a state eager to label dissent as “potential threats.”
But it goes further, pursuing the goal — straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia — of predicting “future crimes”: the Unit
will use “machine-learning algorithms to analyse historical crime data to predict future crimes”. It is also expected to deploy facial recognition software to identify “wanted persons”, patrol social media, and analyse real-time security camera footage to detect suspicious activities.
As if that’s not bad enough, Milei’s ultra-authoritarian Security Minister Patricia Bullrich — Argentina’s Kristi Noem — has
visited El Salvador’s controversial Confinement Center for Terrorism (CECOT), probably seeking to replicate the model in her country, it was reported. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had told her he was open to giving Argentina any assistance it might need regarding security issues.
Milei also shares strong cultural affinities with right-wing authoritarians and ethnonationalists like Trump, Orban, and Bolsonaro — a fact which, along with his immigration controls, no doubt contributes to his popularity among paleos, Hoppeans, and the assorted racists and authoritarians of the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus. For example, he “suggests he’s an integral part of the ‘right-wing’ family by aligning himself politically with leaders like Trump and Bukele.” Echoing the most rancid circles of the alt-right, he rails against “woke” and “gender ideology,” has conducted mass-firings of transgender public sector workers, and is vocally anti-abortion. At Davos, he charged that “Neo-Marxists” — a term coined by paleocon William Lind, which is popular on the far right — “have managed to co-opt the common sense of the Western world and this they have achieved by appropriating the media, culture, universities, and also International organisations.” I guess we should take some comfort in the fact that he didn’t quite accuse them of “poisoning our blood.”
His affinities go beyond cultural, they are personal. His praise for Trump is quite enthusiastic; he and neo-fascist Italian Prime Minister Meloni were the only two foreign leaders on-stage at Trump’s inauguration. He also famously presented ambulatory dumpster fire Elon Musk with a chainsaw. And, nauseatingly, he compared his relationship with Trump and Musk to “touching heaven.”
Milei and his cronies are also apologists or denialists for the crimes against humanity committed during the Dirty War under the military junta.
Milei and some of his closest officials have sparked controversies by denying the crimes of the last dictatorship—the aftermath of which is still very much present in the society. During the campaign, the president denied that 30,000 people were disappeared during the dictatorship and referred to the crimes against humanity carried out by the military junta as “excesses” in the context of “a war.” Far from a conflict between warring sides, the dictatorship is referred to in Argentina as a period of state terror.
Milei’s vice president, Victoria Villarruel, has openly advocated for the rights of those who committed genocide.
So let’s look back and take stock. In substance, Milei’s “reforms” are only “libertarian” or “free market” in the neoliberal sense of pro-corporate. They reduce state restrictions on the economic power and freedom of large-scale capital owners, and strengthen their hand against labor. Labor — theoretically the owner of a co-equal “factor of production” — is in fact subject to onerous restrictions of its freedom to associate or withhold its service from the market, and to own business enterprises. If a government regulated corporate monopolies as stringently as Milei regulates labor’s right to organize, or imposed requirements for recognition of a corporation under traditional shareholder capitalist ownership as he has for cooperatives, the right-libertarian howls of outrage could be heard from the moon.
His privatizations, likewise, are typical of previous Disaster Capitalist measures in Pinochet’s Chile, Yeltsin’s Russia, and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. The typical pattern, according to Nicholas Hildyard, is for a country to invest enormous amounts of money developing a nationalized enterprise, at taxpayer expense, and spend even more to make it saleable, before it auctions it off at pennies on the dollar in a rigged bidding process by politically connected global investors. The first order of business of the newly “privatized” entity, of course, is asset stripping. And the “private” enterprise typically exists within a web of state protections to ensure it runs a profit.
The only “liberties” Milei is interested in expanding are those of billionaire investors, landlords, and white 20-something channers and cryptobros. To quote Cool Hand Luke: “Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.”
As for the authoritarian means by which Milei has railroaded these “libertarian” measures through, they’re also par for the course under Disaster Capitalism. Both Pinochet and Yeltsin assumed dictatorial power before implementing their “free market reforms,” and the CPA’s Paul Bremer imposed them on a defeated and occupied enemy. Unfortunately, the “libertarian” right’s love affair with Milei is part of a long tradition in some right-libertarian circles which Jesse Walker notes, of imposing “free markets” and “liberty” through an ideologically friendly dictatorship — in this trope, Milei is a sort of libertarian Prester John. Walker points out the bullshit entailed in the cliché that Pinochet was “politically authoritarian but economically liberal”:
The general wasn’t even consistent in his commitment to economic freedom: He helped bring on a recession by fixing the peso’s exchange rates; his regime’s record is littered with bailouts, corruption, and other forms of crony capitalism; and he regulated labor tightly. (Pinochet initially banned unions altogether, and after they were legalized he still outlawed sympathy strikes, prohibited voluntary closed-shop contracts, and restricted what issues could be covered when unions negotiated with employers. And then there was his tendency to lock up labor leaders.) Hayek didn’t defend those incursions on freedom, but there’s no sign he expressed any concern about them either.
In short, Javier Milei is a brutal authoritarian thug, comparable to other right-wing dictators and would-be dictators like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, Putin, Erdogan, Netanyahu, and Modi. Anyone shameless enough to hail him as a “libertarian” should choke on the words.
