is a journalist with a master's degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, where he also graduated from the Institute of Political Science. He regularly writes for Philonomist.
Picture: © DR
The new Argentine president’s combination of libertarianism and reactionary authoritarianism is intriguing. A delve into the thinking of Murray Rothbard, the theorist and economist who formed the political ideology that guides Javier Milei sheds light on the apparent contradiction in terms.
How on earth can Javier Milei call himself a libertarian and at the same time make no secret of his desire to restrict swathes of fundamental rights and liberties? This has been the question on many lips ever since the singular character crashed into the political arena. It’s not easy to grasp unless you are familiar with the concept of paleolibertarianism and the thinking of its founder, American economist Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) whose ideology inspired Argentina’s new frontman.
He who pulled Milei out of his dogmatic stupor
Rothbard is such an inspiration for Milei that the president even named one of his dogs Murray after him. The ideologist sparked Milei’s metamorphosis. Initially a relatively conventional economist, circa 2013 the politician had a total rethink on reading Rothbard’s text entitled Monopoly and Competition, part of his treatise Man, Economy and State (1962). It reportedly blew his mind.
‘I’ve been deluding students for over twenty years. Everything I taught them about market structures is wrong’
–Javier Milei
On reading the text, Milei apparently declared he had been deluding students for over twenty years and that everything he had taught them about market structures was wrong. Totally wrong. So, he devoured the American’s work and delved into the anarcho-capitalism of the Austrian school of economics to which Rothbard belonged. Argentinian journalist Pablo Stefanoni who was one of Milei’s students at the University of Buenos Aires gathered the facts in a 2022 essay: La Rébellion est-elle passée à droite ? (in French only).
From John Locke to the Austrian masters of thought
The very liberal Austrian school of economics, founded in the 19th century, which inspired many libertarians, opposes socialism, Keynesianism, and neoclassical economics. It rejects state interventionism as well as the idea that there is such a thing as Homo œconomicus – a rational agent pursuing subjectively defined ends. Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) influenced the young Murray Rothbard, who attended his seminars in New York City in the early fifties.
Rothbard was interested in using Mises’ praxeology – the science of purposeful behaviour – to establish the laws of commercial exchange. The result was Man, Economy and State, the essay in which Rothbard describes the working of a market free from intervention, in the aim of proving that in the absence of state interference a market will self-regulate in a process of spontaneous order. In line with the theory of natural law and the philosophy of John Locke exposed in the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689), Rothbard stipulates that property is a natural right that stems from a person’s ability to transform resources through their labour. Preventing people from benefiting from their property as they see fit – fructifying, donating or exchanging – is seen as an assault on fundamental rights.
‘No man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else’
–Murray Rothbard
The radical principle of nonaggression
In an effort to establish general principles, Rothbard formed his nonaggression axiom in his 1973 work https://mises.or…
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