Episode 259: The Virtues and Beauties of Freedom with Jeffrey Tucker

When Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina in November, Argentinians empowered the first self-proclaimed “anarcho capitalist” as a head of state in modern history.

It’s a wild, even dangerous sounding term and almost no one knows what it means. So in this episode, Jeffrey Tucker and I dig into what Javier Milei and the philosophy of anarcho capitalism are all about.

Jeffrey, a brilliant and prolific author and founder of the Brownstone Institute was a protege of Murray Rothbard, the economist who developed the ideas and coined the term.

Javier Milei campaigned by bluntly declaring the failures of socialism, communism, fascism, central planning, and political despotism over society. His push for free-market reforms was backed up by his 20 years as a university professor of economics, with two master’s degrees in economics and author of more than 50 academic papers and myriad books on the matter.

He celebrates the virtues and beauties of freedom itself, how business needs to be free of regulations, the critical interrelationship between private property and freedom and the enforcement of property rights at all levels of society.

He believes that society doesn't require an entrenched entity of legalized compulsion and coercion called the State in order to provide these things. An astonishing and bold claim.

Yet he won convincingly with almost 56% of the vote and his victory has sent shock waves through the political establishment, not only in Argentina, but throughout Latin America.

Milei now faces the daunting task of taming out of control inflation (Argentina’s year-on-year inflation rate hit a staggering 142 percent during election week), a bloated self dealing administrative state, a corrupted court system and an entrenched elite opposition that's determined to preserve its power and prerogatives. 

“How does one man take all this on?”asks Jeffrey. “We don’t really know the answer to this question. No leader of a Western democratic developed nation has ever attempted a full-scale routing of a corrupted establishment on this level.”

Milei’s wasting no time. Forty-eight hours after taking office on December 10th he unveiled measures to cut public spending by 3% of GDP. He devalued the peso, pledged to slash subsidies, and eliminated nine of 18 government ministries. One week later he decreed that state-owned companies would be privatized, price controls would be eliminated, and labour laws reformed.

Of course we’re now seeing headlines like this one in The Economist: The fightback against Javier Milei’s radical reforms has begun. Argentina’s powerful trade unions are preparing to strike on January 24th

Our hope is that Mr. Milei is just the beginning of a movement that could spread throughout the world. People are fed up and are ready for a radical new agenda to stop the relentless march of the forces of tyranny in Western nations.