Argentina’s Son-of-Sam Presidential Election
Javier Milei was on his best behavior. Speaking before the Council
of the Americas at the opulent Alvear Palace Hotel in August, the
far-right congressman and sudden favorite in the Argentine presidential
election scheduled for October 22 laid out his vision for a society rooted
in private property, the invisible hand of the market, and an amorphous
notion of libertad (freedom), the latter of which he used almost
interchangeably with the former.
By his accounting, the government (or “ungovernment,” as he called it)
had robbed the people of $25 billion, while saddling future generations
of Argentines with taxes in the form of debt. Attendees at the conference,
whose sponsors included such multinationals as Amazon Web Services,
Bayer, and Chevron, sat obediently as he argued that social justice was
simply a form of “robbing from one person to give to another.”
The libertarian candidate for the coalition La Libertad Avanza (Freedom
Advances, LLA) invoked the neoclassical economist Milton Friedman,
arguing that it was the moral responsibility of business owners to earn
as much as they could. He also said that his country would become
a world power in the next 35 to 50 years by embracing the principles
of “freedom”—a statement he would reiterate weeks later when he
told The Economist that it was his aim to make Argentina “great again.”
