I don't think it's that extreme of a perspective. I'm surprised that the perspective he's speaking against, which when implemented reliably causes citizen impoverishment and death should be spoken about more in those terms, I think.
Perhaps, if you have never been to the West - the object of Milei's criticism - it is possible to believe that it is a world where people are impoverished and dying through evil collectivists providing welfare states. For everyone else, that's a perspective as extreme as his chainsaw stunts.
Milei's bark is likely to prove more extreme than his bite, of course. He's already pointedly not abolishing the central bank and quietly mending relations with China.
> where people are impoverished and dying through evil collectivists providing welfare states
Your perspective is too non-collectivism skewed. The West is a mish-mash, but it's the bastion of economic liberalism and capitalism. Those are so effective that they can pay for all sorts of social policies without affecting the productivity too much of the people making the money.
You should be thinking about the millions starved and killed in China or Russia or now Argentina when you think of the problems of collectivism. Thinking of somewhere like Sweden as a collectivist paradise is wrong - there are plenty of billionaires there. It's easy to pay for "free" stuff when there's plenty to go round, and the plenty is generally not provided by a collectivist state.
There are plenty of people who think that eating the rich would pay for everything. They think billionaires actually have yearly billions in cash to pay for social entitlements, rather than one-off ownership of valuable companies. That's the worry that's being discussed.
No, my perspective is based on actually reading the actual words of his actual speech which includes lines like "the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism".
He explicitly isn't saying anything about the Holodomor or the Great Leap Forward, and he is criticising the leaders of the United States, the EU, the UK and Sweden for being too "collectivist" (and suggesting
that neoclassical economics is insufficiently supportive of capitalism because it concedes market distribution might not always be perfect!)
The world doesn't lack defences of capitalism or criticisms of the USSR and Latin American socialism, nuanced and otherwise. But the perspective of equating the policy stance of the Biden or Macron or Sunak administration on welfare and regulation with Stalinism or Maoism or even Chavismo is the definition of extremism, and not even high-quality, evidence-based extremism.
We are driving our future off a cliff by allowing collectivism to return over libertarianism.
For example his perspective would be very consistent with the perspectives of the founding fathers of the United States. The Founding Fathers would have widely agreed with the speech’s support for free-market capitalism and its critique of collectivism, socialism, and excessive state intervention. Advocating principles that promote economic freedom and prosperity would resonate with them as a reflection of their own efforts to create a government that promotes individual liberty and economic opportunity. celebration of the entrepreneur as a hero of prosperity and its warning against state overreach would likely find broad support among the Founding Fathers. They were, after all, establishing a new nation built on principles of liberty, property rights, and opposition to tyranny. The speech’s call for economic freedom and limited government intervention mirrors the Founding Fathers’ debates on the proper role and size of government. Many of the Founding Fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, would likely support the speech’s endorsement of free-market capitalism. The emphasis on economic freedom and the role of free enterprise in lifting people out of poverty would resonate with his and similar Founders’ views on economic development.
Yet somehow this is generally considered the majority opinion today of his speech:
> has pretty strong and "out of the ordinary" opinions and ideas
That whole debate wouldn't have made sense to the founding fathers. Yes they were liberals, but "capitalism" wasn't coined until the 19th century.
Milei is quite extreme when he claims that markets can't fail. He's trying to move Argentina in the right direction. I would have voted for him. But that's an extreme claim and is rejected by most economists.
I respectfully disagree in that perhaps some vocabulary would need altering to use words they were more familiar with, but free markets and free enterprise, along with property rights and low taxation was exactly their founding perspective.
Regarding “most economists” it would depend on how broad you allow the claim of being an economist is a valid one. We have literal socialist and marxists claiming to be economists. That’s as absurd as creationists claiming to be evolutionarily biologists. Those are perspectives that are empirically proven to be rubbish yet due to human instinctual biases persist for long periods of time. Eventually collectivism, socialism, and marxism should be banished to the gutters of history, the only question is how much more pain and suffering will it take before human civilization decides to include proper social and economic science as part of core education curriculum, like evolution is taught in most places today.
You're ranting about marxists...but the question is whether markets can fail. Milei says no. But there are plenty of examples of markets failing so, if we take that idea seriously, it reduces to something like "free markets have never been tried". What does that remind you of?
The speed with which you moved from dissenters-from-economic-orthodoxy-are-creationists to rejecting the possibility of imperfect information, transaction costs or natural monopolies for not confirming to the dogma that the market is always right is truly impressive...
Monopolies are legitimately debatable topic for government intervention.
However what is the reason governments should be involved in imperfect information or transaction costs?
Please provide specific market failures.
Additionally creationists is the perfect analogy for collectivists, socialist and marxists, their ideas require magic fairy dust to have any chance of working.
Government isn't involved in imperfect information or transaction costs: responsibility for those failures of the market delivering suboptimal results lie entirely with the market participants. Obvious examples include the highly profitable sale of products that avoid the R&D overhead and additional manufacturing expense to actually do what they claim to do, and the inability of various disparate individuals each receiving small negative side effects to their health to coordinate to stop a local polluter even if a tort system for restitution (a government intervention!) actually exists.
Creationism is also the perfect analogy for people who either are ignorant of or deny basically anything past the first page of an economics textbook in favour of the dogma that if markets fail to deliver optimal results it must be the fault of state intervention. Much like Marxism, the economics of Mises needs a lot of fairy dust
It’s always so confusing when anti-markets debaters bring up pollution and product safety, because it’s like the only thing libertarians actually agree with them on. We absolutely believe the primary role of the government is to protect shared rights like the environment and health of products sold. What libertarian capitalist don’t want is redistribution and confiscation.
It's even more confusing when libertarians decide a few days after insisting that there was no such thing as a market failure that the canonical examples of market failures are actually something they strongly believe the government must step in to regulate because the market can't do it...
(I imagine the libertarians campaigning to abolish government involvement in product and environmental regulation would also be confused by the insistence they absolutely believe that the role of the government is to protect the environment and regulate products. Next minute you'll be telling me poor people deserve medical treatment!)
Everything depends on infrastructure that releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere: oil, cars, beef farming, etc. This is despite the fact that climate change is exacerbated by releasing carbon. No individual or company wants to be at a disadvantage by not using these things, so no one stops. It's a tragedy of the commons situation. It's only through government regulation and investment into cleaner energy that allowed the alternatives to become viable in the market.
There's no need for this. Marxism seems to be a re-growing school of thought, taking various angles in modern society and culture. No ranting has happened, and your mischaracterisation of things is revealing.
I’d like to mention an interesting phenomenon on HN as you might notice it as well.
When I make a pro-libertarian comment I’ll initially get many upvotes, I know this because I refresh HN periodically and so I notice my points go up.
Then many hours or even days later I’ll be downvoted heavily and even go negative. I’m not sure what to make of it tbh.
Wanted to mention it because now your comment is faded which I think means negative feedback.
How this is relevant in general is that I find it disappointing that the tech community in general somehow has a very poor education in economic history and in particular seems to not be aware of the tragic consequences of collectivist and socialist policies. Which is clearly an indicator of problem within the education system.
That's interesting. It's only at -1 at time of writing this comment.
But yes, I think there is a set of people - who you can spot by their vocabulary - who think that sawing off the root of the branch that causes us to even be able to develop the advances that we have.
