Javier Milei Is an Economic Rockstar | Axel Kaiser

Maybe we could turn our attention to developments that are arguably somewhat positive. Chile is somewhat positive. What do you think about what's happening in Argentina with Milei? We also have the example of El Salvador under Bukele, with its turning to both Bitcoin, interestingly enough, and to the US dollar.

So, let’s start with Argentina. So, yeah, what are your views on what is happening in Argentina? Like, is what Milei is doing producing any success on economic grounds? Because it’s very difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff in terms of anything approximating legacy media coverage of Argentina.

Well, I have to disclose here that I’m a good friend of Milei, and we have been working for the Cost of Freedom in Latin America for 10 years together. So, what is happening in Argentina is the most fascinating, interesting thing that I’ve seen, of course in my lifetime, but also I think in the last half a century.

What is really taking place is a cultural revolution in a positive sense. Not the Chinese type of Mao-type cultural revolution, but Argentina was the wealthiest country in the world in 1896, with the highest per capita income in the world. We had a constitution in place, the 1853 Constitution, that was designed by Juan Bautista Alberdi, who was an admirer of the founding fathers of the United States. He was a classical liberal, conservative classical liberal; he believed that government had to be limited.

He saw in the French Revolutionary tradition of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau one of the main reasons why Latin America was not prosperous enough—because we expected everything from an omnipotent government. He actually has an article called "Omnipotent Government," and he said the Americans, on the other hand, they expect from government nothing; they fix things for themselves.

Okay, so he created the 1853 Constitution, and after that, Argentina became the most successful country in the world in terms of per capita income. If you went to 1914, you had half of the population in Buenos Aires born not in Buenos Aires; they were foreigners coming from Europe. So, it was a legitimate question to ask yourself, are we immigrating to the United States or to Argentina in the late 19th century? This is what happened back then, and this is why also the Argentinian population looks so European in general.

In the last World Cup, all these nonsensical articles were saying why there are no black people in the soccer team in Argentina, and so on. This is a very European population, but in the 20s and 30s, and then especially in the 40s with Juan Domingo Perón, who was a fascist general, a collectivist fascist general, admirer of Mussolini—he had met Mussolini, actually, in Italy. But he was anti-communist at the same time; he didn’t want a centrally planned economy for the whole thing, but he wanted the corporatist type of a very corrupt economy.

Then they changed dramatically the institutions, and Argentina became a declining nation and a poor nation compared to the rest of the world, at least the developed world. What did Milei do? Milei managed, and the free market movement, the classical liberal movement, and conservative movement in Argentina played a role there.

We managed to transform dramatically the mindset, especially of young people in Argentina. You're allowed to vote with 16, so between 16 and 24, Milei got 70% of the votes—70%! These young people forced the change towards a very hardcore, radical free market regime. But not because people were upset because inflation was so high and so on—no, that was not the reason.

There is a structural change in Argentina. All of these people would have been Peronists 20 or 30 years ago; now they are libertarians. How did we achieve that? Well, a lot of going to the media, giving interviews, and especially social media—TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube were crucial to change the mentality of millions of people.

Of course, the style Milei has is charismatic, a style that is very, you know, eccentric, let’s put it that way. He is irreverent; he has the rhetoric of a revolutionary, which is very Argentinian, by the way. It’s not really strange in that country; he’s very theatrical, but he’s also intellectually very solid.

So he came to power, and he’s doing exactly what he said he was going to do. He didn’t lie. He said, you know, all over the— I mean, the last years that he’s been on television over the last five, six years, he has been saying what was going to happen and what it takes to fix it. Everything came as he predicted, and now he's in government.

He has brought down inflation from over 25% a month to less than 4%. You know, the inflation in terms of goods, to food—it’s not—it’s 0%. So, 0% food inflation. Then you have a fiscal surplus; since January, since he came to power, you have had a fiscal surplus every month, a consecutive way.

Then you are starting to see a little bit of a reactivation of the economy. Because you first had to deal with inflation. They were on the verge of hyperinflation. If Milei had not come to power, you would have had inflation at over 15,000 percent in Argentina right now—15,000 percent! It would have been a complete catastrophe.

And he has been a very skillful politician because he doesn’t have a majority in Congress, but even so, Congress has passed, after several negotiations and failed attempts to pass, the Bases Law, which is a law that dramatically changes the structure of the Argentinian economy, which is really a rent-seeking society—it's really, you know, corporate interests embedded with the politicians, exploiting everyone else for their own benefit.