Thanks for joining Cicher and giving your perspective.
that is why there are so many people terrified back there in Argentina about the fact that he could come to power (among them, my family).
What are they terrified of exactly?
That he'll abolish welfare? Get rid of government jobs? How are they going handling hyperinflation ATM?
The interview may sound good to fans, but at this point to reach a more massive audience he must moderate himself a little and focus on his reasonable and well-founded proposals (which he has), and not contribute to sowing more panic or the classic populist appeal of "finding an enemy" (in this case "the socialism").
I disagree completely.
The pattern repeats itself so often that it almost seems to be a law of history: the radicals who change history must do so over the resistance of the moderates, who claim to be friendly to the same cause, but somehow always end up on the side of established interests.
In one sense, the adoption of libertarian values and institutions would be a return; in another, it would be a profound and radical advance. For while the older libertarians were essentially revolutionary, they allowed partial successes to turn themselves strategically and tactically into seeming defenders of the status quo, mere resisters of change. In taking this stance, the earlier libertarians lost their radical perspective; for libertarianism has never come fully into being.
What they must do is become “radicals” once again, as Jefferson and Price and Cobden and Thoreau were before them. To do this they must hold aloft the banner of their ultimate goal, the ultimate triumph of the age-old logic of the concepts of free market, liberty, and private property rights. That ultimate goal is the dissolution of the State into the social organism, the privatizing of the public sector.
If anything I think he can remain radical and abolitionist, but more Dr. Ron Paul style - where it's bringing folks together vs. the enemy of the state, which is the proper class analysis - not tactically inept commentary against "leftists" (implying he is 'right wing') (if that is the proper translation being used).
Milei's extremism can be seen in parts of the interview where they talk about "the right to starve" (
3:38:50), where Miley argues that if you have the possibility of working an 18-hour day or being enslaved, you still have "freedom" to not accept that and then starve to death... he takes his argument to the absurd, basically.
Unfortunately not able to get English translation happening. No such thing as a "right to starve". I would suggest
understanding:
Number 7: Charity and Poverty
A common complaint is that the free market would not insure the elimination of poverty, that it would "leave people free to starve," and that it is far better to be "kindhearted" and give "charity" free rein by taxing the rest of the populace in order to subsidize the poor and the substandard.
In the first place, the "freedom-to-starve" argument confuses the "war against nature," which we all conduct, with the problem of freedom from interference by other persons. We are always "free to starve" unless we pursue our conquest of nature, for that is our natural condition. But "freedom" refers to absence of molestation by other persons; it is purely an interpersonal problem.
Secondly, it should also be clear that it is precisely voluntary exchange and free capitalism that have led to an enormous improvement in living standards. Capitalist production is the only method by which poverty can be wiped out. As we stressed above, production must come first, and only freedom allows people to produce in the best and most efficient way possible. Force and violence may "distribute," but it cannot produce. Intervention hampers production, and socialism cannot calculate. Since production of consumer satisfactions is maximized on the free market, the free market is the only way to abolish poverty. Dictates and legislation cannot do so; in fact, they can only make matters worse...
More from Ben O'Neill (has spoken at every
Mises Seminar) ->
Is the Starving Man Free?
Or pollution (
3:13:00), where Milei says that everything is because "property rights are badly assigned". They give an example of a company polluting a river, Milei says that we should "privatize the river", then the owner of the river would protect it from the polluting company because it would be in its own interest because they can obtain more profit that way.
This example is clearly unrealistic, the polluting company could "buy the river" if that is more profitable for them than treating the waste.
He's more or less right. The principles are laid out best here in Rothbard's
canonical work. Further:
The Friedmanites concede the existence of air pollution but propose to meet it, not by a defense of property rights, but rather by a supposedly utilitarian “cost-benefit” calculation by government, which will then make and enforce a “social decision” on how much pollution to allow. This decision would then be enforced either by licensing a given amount of pollution (the granting of “pollution rights”), by a graded scale of taxes against it, or by the taxpayers paying firms not to pollute. Not only would these proposals grant an enormous amount of bureaucratic power to government in the name of safeguarding the “free market”; they would continue to override property rights in the name of a collective decision enforced by the State. This is far from any genuine “free market,” and reveals that, as in many other economic areas, it is impossible to really defend freedom and the free market without insisting on defending the rights of private property.
Easement rights are important; if you have a better claim to getting X water at a certain quality prior to the new polluter - could simply get an injunction, seek damages etc. Not understanding this results in coming to the conclusion you do.
What's completely unrealistic is your hypothetical complaint vs. the literal current
status quo:
... First, the rivers. The rivers, and the oceans too, are generally owned by the government; private property, certainly complete private property, has not been permitted in the water. In essence, then, government owns the rivers. But government ownership is not true ownership, because the government officials, while able to control the resource cannot themselves reap their capital value on the market. Government officials cannot sell the rivers or sell stock in them. Hence, they have no economic incentive to preserve the purity and value of the rivers. Rivers are, then, in the economic sense, "unowned"; therefore government officials have permitted their corruption and pollution...
It reminds me of this:
Perhaps the most flagrant testimony to the intellectual shallowness of statism is that the typical statist believes that the fantastically hypothetical threat of a corporation monopolizing the supply of water is a devastating objection to libertarianism, but the painfully real threat of a state methodically exterminating tens of millions of individuals is not a devastating objection to statism.
— Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
This is what many call "savage capitalism", and when you see that kind of argument, you can understand the reasons.
Bourgeois socialism is the far more apt term.
Just because we have a bulldozer and a chainsaw doesn't mean we can go out and cut down the entire forest because it is profitable to sell the wood... what would be the solution? privatize the forest?... it is simply unrealistic to think that everything can work by somehow aligning the incentives to obtain economic profits... there are things that simply cannot be fixed that way.
What's completely unrealistic is thinking that maintaining the tragedy of the commons and the inability of states to rationally allocate resources (economic calculation) is a better more justifiable alternative than allowing for the
principles of conservation in the free market.
The "law of the jungle" may work for the species of the jungle... but for a technological species that has the capacity to destroy the planet or completely exhaust its resources, things are different.
To apply the principle of the “survival of the fittest” to both the jungle and the market is to ignore the basic question: Fitness for what? The “fit” in the jungle are those most adept at the exercise of brute force. The “fit” on the market are those most adept in the service of society. The jungle is a brutish place where some seize from others and all live at the starvation level; the market is a peaceful and productive place where all serve themselves and others at the same time and live at infinitely higher levels of consumption. On the market, the charitable can provide aid, a luxury that cannot exist in the jungle.
— Murray Rothbard, Power & Market - Chapter 6
I think the radicalized extremes are not good, not this, nor the followers of Modern Monetary Theory who believe that we can achieve healthcare for all, education, etc, etc by simply printing money out of thin air.
The so-called interventionism/“third way”/“mixed economy”, etc. is not a golden mean between “absolute freedom” and absolute slavery, just as beating someone unconscious is not a golden mean between leaving someone in peace and beating him to death. Interventionism—as shown by Mises—is always absolute slavery in the making, that is, an extreme position in an unambiguously negative sense of the term.
On the other hand, “absolute freedom"—or simply consistent and principled freedom, limited exclusively by the equal freedom of others—is a golden mean between enslaving others and allowing others to enslave you. In other words, in the context of the principle of the golden mean, the libertarian attitude towards individual liberty is a perfect example of a moderate position, an ethical optimum between the extremes of various forms of slave relations.
— Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
