“What do I like about Milei? First, she makes these debates fashionable. With that she does a priceless job. I never saw the word ‘anarcho-capitalist’ before, but now I see it in all the newspapers. These things end up catching on.” The person who spoke this way in August 2023 is Miguel Anxo Bastos, professor at the University of Santiago and a leading voice of anarcho-capitalism in Spain. Since then, Javier Milei, the Argentine firebrand who proclaims that “taxes are theft,” has gone from candidate to president. And with this the optimism expressed by Bastos about the possibility that the ideology anti state get out of marginality has spread and multiplied among its followers.
The groups in the ultraliberal orbit are aware that for the progress of positions so foreign to the main Spanish political traditions it is necessary to accustom our ears to new ideas. And they have found in Milei, who conceives the economy as a field for their “cultural battle”, a gift from heaven. The Argentine leader, at the center of the news since his visit last week, assures that he will return to Spain to collect on June 21 the annual prize of the Juan de Mariana Institute (IJM), a think tank ultraliberal that in 2023 fairly awarded Bastos. The director of the Institute, Manuel Llamas, maintains that Milei is “without a doubt” an opportunity for the advancement of these theses in Spain. “Milei has moved the board,” celebrates Llamas, who highlights his way of explaining the economy, “understandable” thanks to his “innate communication capacity.”
The Civismo Foundation, defender of the “limited State”, has as director Albert Guivernau, who supports Milei’s first measures and maintains that his figure “helps a lot” to promote the foundation’s agenda, which he defines bluntly as “liberal.” . The “greatness” of the Argentine leader, he adds, what he will be remembered for, is “having opened debate.” “He has made it easier for people to come out of the closet and dare to speak outside the standards of social democracy, which is the mainstream economical,” he says. Despite the progress, Guivernau believes there is still much to do. “We have a sleepy society,” he says, alluding to the — in his opinion — excessive number of workers who receive pensions, public salaries or the SMI, which he rejects because it is set by the Government. Another problem, he explains, is that in Spain “there is excessive concern with the rich.” “There are people who want to destroy the rich. No, no, what must end is poverty. “It is the change in discourse that we expect in Spain,” he concludes.
Those related to Milei’s theses are often close to the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Examples? The Civismo Foundation gave him its annual award in 2021 for turning Madrid into “a haven of freedom.” Llamas, who like Milei considers the State “a parasite”, was until less than a year ago Deputy Minister of Economy in Madrid with Javier Fernández-Lasquetty in the Ayuso Executive. In his opinion, Madrid is “the liberal benchmark of Spain.” In similar economic positions, the Friday Club, a forum against the “hegemony of social democratic ideas” and an active defender of Milei, presented the president with her annual award in 2022. The justification for the award alluded to her success in the ideological struggle, crucial for groups in this orbit: “Her mere presence [de Ayuso] “It destabilizes and calls into question the pillars of the hegemonic left.”
What was unthinkable has already arrived
The shift of the debate towards the previously unthinkable is already seen in Argentina, where José Natanson, director of the Southern Cone edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, detects greater social resignation now than before the crises of 1989 and 2001. According to the journalist and political scientist, this is a product of the particular situation of Argentine society, desperate due to the endemic crisis and inflation, but also the result of an ideological success of Milei, who has managed to apply to the economic debate a typical tactic of the so-called “cultural battle”: the concentration of all energy on an enemy, in this case “Peronism”, which he identifies with the State. “Anti-Peronism,” explains Natanson, is the position of strength from which Milei defends ideas that, observed from the outside, seem exotic to many. And in fact they were in Argentina until recently. Not so much anymore. The “effectiveness” of “preaching” is beginning to be noticed, according to Natanson. anti state” by Milei, who finds fertile ground in a “broken” society.
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An episode experienced in Uruguay by economist Germán Deagosto illustrates Milei’s influence, as well as his ability to engender fans. She lived at the start of the course. Professor Deagosto asked his students what the gross domestic product is. Silence. What is inflation? Nothing. He then asked what anarcho-capitalism is and a third of the class raised their hand. They knew it and many were excited about it. Deagosto, director of the Economics program at the Catholic University of Uruguay, rescues the memory to illustrate not only “a rise of libertarian ideas”, but something deeper: the shifting of the “axis of economic discussion.”
Milei’s discursive hammering has managed to “put on the table options that only a few years ago were inconceivable, for example that the State should be limited to minimal functions such as security and defense,” says Deagosto. But not only ideas permeate. Numerous students of the economist trace the forms, repeating that the State is “a criminal” and that “officials are parasites.” “They heard it from Milei and then they saw it on YouTube and TikTok,” observes Deagosto, whose concern about the mutation detected in his students has prompted him to write Lions and lambs. A personal history of economic thought. The title explains it like this: economic “freedom” according to Milei is the “freedom” of the lion to eat the lamb.
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