Javier Milei and the Libertarian Tradition
His political ascent was meteoric, but classical liberalism has a storied history in Argentina.
By now you will have heard of Argentina’s president-elect Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding anarcho-capitalist and free-market economist, whose viral denunciations of political class privilege are so easy to grasp that they have been dubbed into Japanese.
And although Milei is a political novice with no executive experience—as the sober scribes of the English-speaking financial press are quick to point out—his extraordinary political rise did not take place in an ideological vacuum.
In fact, the electoral victory of this “Thatcher-loving libertarian,” as the Financial Times calls Milei, is similar to that of the Iron Lady in 1979 in one crucial respect: it is the result of a decades-long struggle by a few individuals to promote free-market ideas and the principles of classical liberalism in a thoroughly hostile environment.
