Freedom without rights: Milei's libertarian utopia

Refounding is not the same as governing. Thinkers such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Jean-Jacques Rousseau have argued that the political actions established by a Government differ from those required for its stability and survival. What do the first acts of Government tell us about how President Javier Milei tries to refound and govern?

The decree of necessity and urgency 70/2023 (DNU) and the project Law of Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines They are refounding strategies. They are attempting, in the words of one of its members, a “regime change.” The country's most renowned jurists have spoken out against the decree, among other things, because it is difficult to identify the emergency condition that the constitution establishes. For its defenders, there is, however, an inescapable moral urgency: abandon the current social order, tainted with reform mechanisms that sink us deeper and deeper into the dense tangle of regulations and laws that curtail our freedom. The current political order constitutes a social trap that prevents change from within. The moral urgency consists of recognizing that the solution can only come from above: from the “forces of heaven”, yes, but also from the technical knowledge of a few.

From anarchy to epistocracy

in his book Anarchy, state and utopia, Robert Nozick, perhaps the most brilliant philosopher in libertarian thought, postulates anarchy as an initial condition to demonstrate that only the minimal State is morally acceptable. The DNU also sows legal anarchy, generating a legal vacuum, regulatory gaps, and administrative and procedural disorder. Inject enough chaos to detonate the matrix of suffocating regulations and facilitate the possession and consumption of hitherto prohibited goods and services. The Base Law, however, should be approved in the settings of the old regime: Congress, the streets, Justice and civil society. If so, we would fall once again into the democratic trap. The shortcut they propose to us, to finally consecrate the Nozickean minimum State outlined in the founding document, is epistocracy, the Government of those who know.

Already in the electoral campaign, Milei reviled democracy from the pulpit of abstract knowledge: a theorem. Unaware of the profuse and valuable literature that refutes the validity of Arrow's theorem applied to democratic dynamics, Milei maintains that democracy contains an insurmountable epistemic defect: it produces errors and bad results. Democracy does not know and cannot aggregate individual preferences in such a way that the collective result is consistent with the initial demands of its citizens. The democratic procedure—elections and parliamentary deliberations—does not allow citizens' preferences to be known or grouped into public policies that satisfy them. The collective product is always and necessarily suboptimal. A repeated game that has lasted a hundred years, and magnifies, tragically, the past errors on which it acts and decides. Democracy is, therefore, poor decision-making engineering that prevents exit from within.

If not from within, from where? The so-called Bases Law, immediately downgraded in omnibus law, would remedy the democratic epistemic deficit. Poorly drafted by the best and the brightest, the new social contract proposes that we be governed by those who actually know how to project the conditions to generate Paretian results in a deregulated market. The legislative task that, from a democratic perspective, produces political knowledge and legitimacy, constitutes for the president and his technicians a sphere of action plagued by errors, laziness and entrenched interests. Corruption and leisure in Congress; efficiency and transparency in the market. The Bases constitute the founding document not of democracy but of epistocracy that inaugurates a new rift between those who recognize the moral urgency by delegating the plenipotentiary powers of Congress to the technicians and the “orcs” who oppose the Government. From the Nozickean minimal state, to Milei's state of exception.

The genesis of a morally good political order poses a circular and inescapable challenge: who is qualified to write a virtuous founding document without having been socialized in the virtues they want to impart? Lycurgus, Numa, Solon or Moses are some historical examples of legislators who overcome the impossible dilemma by being so exceptionally gifted that one should suspect their existence. Neither “The boss” is Moses, nor the hubris epistocratic could draw the guidelines of the new regime from the outside. Monumental daring of planning and social engineering for a Government that defends the ideal of society as a “spontaneous order.” As a counterpart, “gray democracy,” thus characterized by Senator Miguel Pichetto, offers a lackluster and cumbersome solution, but one that produces legitimate political knowledge so that the “new regime,” in addition to being founded, endures.

Utopia

In the last part of his work, Nozick proposes a utopia. Once the minimum State is established, the richest, inspired by the free society, will spontaneously and privately redistribute their wealth. A non-coercive philanthropic network that helps the poorest by voluntarily generating a common good. Milei's utopia is another.

In the debate on democratic erosion, a broken promise is often mentioned that undermines its normative premises, that is, the breakdown of the intergenerational commitment that children will enjoy greater material well-being than their parents. There is, in my opinion, another broken promise of liberal democracy of even greater magnitude. I am referring to the association, now dissolved, between individual freedom and individual rights. Liberal democracy has been based on the idea that rights protect us and make us freer. However, part of the citizens do not ensure in their daily lives that their rights make their freedom effective. In part, the resistance of digital platform workers to being unionized lies in the perception that rights weaken us. They don't give me freedom, they take it away from me. Thus, the State as guarantor of rights is part of the social trap, not the solution. That the ethical dimension of the State has been pierced is a significant break in Argentine political culture. Result of a way of governing that distorted the collective dimension of democracy to the point of undermining it—a social fact that Milei clearly perceived.

In this context, Milei proposes a new utopia: recovering freedom with fewer rights. This also implies a reconceptualization of the notion of freedom and its relationship with other democratic values ​​such as equality, reciprocity, solidarity, and the existence of the public as a collective citizen experience. Freedom, in Milei's quasi-archist ideology, consists of individual action practically without ethical restriction—freedom as a drive. A highly stimulating and vindictive conception of libidinal freedom after years of anger, frustration, confinement and material deprivation accumulated to what they called freedom. Milei's utopia is the revenge of freedom without rights. What is there to vindicate? Everyone chooses their own grievances, there are many, too many, to choose from in the aisle of our democracy's unfulfilled promises.

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