Milei's Social Engineering
The new president of Argentina has caused a political stir with his ultraliberal ideas and the way he communicates them. In recent decades, we have become accustomed to leaders like Donald Trump, capable of gaining electoral advantage even from the eccentricities typical of an American tycoon, but Javier Milei seems to be in a different league. He is someone who devotes his interviews to insulting his rivals, shouting as loudly as his vocal cords allow, and who has not hesitated to appear armed with a chainsaw to explain his plans regarding public services.
The innovation is that Milei is a sincere and fervent believer. Unlike other politicians who have embraced neoliberalism, and who are only half-convinced of its virtues as a model of society, Milei is a faithful follower of the doctrine. In fact, it would be impossible to construct such a singular political figure without the person embodying it truly believing everything they convey in each message. However, his is not a traditional religion; his faith is placed in the theoretical spirit of what has come to be known as anarcho-capitalism – a package of ultraliberal ideology that, in certain socio-political contexts, can, as we have just seen, become attractive even to the working classes.
Adherence to these beliefs has led Milei to advocate for the abolition of the Central Bank, a drastic reduction in the public budget for health, education, and other basic services provided collectively, zero state intervention in commercial matters, and the deregulation of the arms market, among many other similar ideas. Any observer with a minimum of memory will see here a heightened echo of that ideological programme that inspired the Washington Consensus and led Latin America to what is now known as the lost decade of the 1980s. Let us remember that from that, the region emerged much poorer, much more unequal, and much worse prepared for the changes imposed by globalisation.
In any case, the key is that what is now emerging is the canonical version of the neoliberal theoretical model. Moreover, Milei starkly represents everything that is wrong with contemporary economic science. A discipline that was born from the entrails of what until then had been called Political Economy – to which both Adam Smith and Karl Marx belonged – and that since the late 19th century has sought to assimilate in prestige and rigour to the physical and mathematical sciences. To achieve this, the new economic science had to sacrifice the human being as a social entity while sanctifying the virtues of the market. From that pact emerged a worldview that, when taken to its logical conclusion, produces the Mileis of our time.
The great pain we economists carry is that, in our field, as in other social sciences, it is not possible to conduct controlled experiments to test our working hypotheses. While experimental physicists work with atoms in their laboratories, tinkering with electrons and other subatomic particles to produce knowledge, economists cannot isolate individuals from a society and play with them to obtain answers that provide us with something. Our knowledge is of a different nature, and this is well understood by anyone who is not an economist. However, many of our colleagues resist accepting this. And from this impotence, which is also a lack of humility, many monsters are born. Because these economists, like Milei, end up considering human beings as mere objects that can be treated and moulded at will, in an exercise of social engineering inspired by a deeply erroneous doctrine.
The construction of economic science was based on the assumption that there is an economic domain independent of the rest of the social spheres, so that the accumulation of wealth remains an objective devoid of moral connotations. The individual, embodiment of that selfish and hedonistic homo oeconomicus, intervenes through a special coordination device called the market, which in turn and by magic transforms any type of individual vice into a public virtue. Milei firmly believes, like so many economists, that our societies function exactly this way. There was never a primordial laboratory where these cardinal points of social functioning were discovered. On the contrary, it is like medieval scholasticism, where first faith in things working this way is assumed, and then it is pontificated on how social beings should behave for everything to fit according to the sacred.
The theory dictates that everything will work as long as the subjects behave well, that is, as the model and faith dictate. An orderly society is a disciplined society. And the moment there are interferences – and the main suspects are usually the state and the unions – the system fails completely. Since we are social beings and cannot be forced to behave as appendages of a cold machinery, the system always fails somewhere. Hence, the neoliberal recipe is never exhausted; it suits any situation. If something fails, it is because the market is not free enough. Faith moves mountains, but at this point, it is quite simple and predictable.
In all this, Milei is just another enforcer who will tirelessly work to discipline everyone, as his mission is to turn us into useful, upright, and undistorted beings. He is the executioner of faith, the Torquemada of neoliberal times. That is why he has eliminated the Ministry of Labour and has centralised many functions under a new ministry called Human Capital. This concept is an economic construct that assigns value to the worker based on their accumulation of skills and knowledge, that is, based on their contribution to the production process. In a symbolic way, the human being is limited and restricted to their capacity to create wealth; downgraded from the status of a citizen with rights to that of a productive resource equivalent to any other type of capital – a chainsaw, for instance.
Milei’s faith in the self-regulated market is total. So much so that he has come to defend that the buying and selling of organs is just another market, that is, a place where two human beings meet to freely transact the prices of goods. It does not matter if one is a poor person with more hunger than money and the other a rich person or a speculator, because the neoliberal economist is not concerned with moral issues and only cares about the existence of free prices. This is, in fact, an old controversy. The anthropologist Karl Polanyi told us that land, money, and labour were in fact fictitious commodities since they were never produced to be marketed. Turning them into commodities has been a feature of capitalism, a historically specific institution. Milei, like many others before him, goes much further and considers that everything that can be commodified must be commodified. Why? Because the economic domain is independent of any social consideration – including ethical considerations – and therefore expanding the scope of market logic would benefit the community.
Perhaps, reading all this, you have thought of Adam Smith and his invisible hand. Indeed, this Smithian metaphor illustrates the mechanism behind the magic of the market. But it would not be correct to blame Smith for what Milei and his companions do. Smith was an enlightened liberal thinker, not an anarcho-capitalist. In fact, in his time his ideas were progressive and raised the concerns of reactionary elements, who did not share that political liberalism and economic liberalism should go hand in hand. Smith fought against the concentration of power, including the power of big capital. It is true that his worldview opened new windows in economic thought, but at the same time, it was still embedded within the limits of Political Economy. Moreover, the Scotsman was a professor of moral philosophy and ventured to set limits on the reach of the market, of which he knew well the disadvantages as a good scholar of the division of labour. It is no wonder that in his magnum opus, more cited than read, he promoted that some mechanisms like education should be provided directly by the state. Smith was not a socialist either, an accusation that would make more sense to level against his compatriot John Stuart Mill, who not only empathised with early socialist ideas but went much further in a limited conception of the self-regulated market. These thinkers, prominent figures of classical liberalism, would be the far left of Milei today.
Milei’s economic thought is, therefore, an old acquaintance. And we know the significant costs that are to come, which will fall almost entirely on one side. In his attempt to discipline economic agents, Milei will be confronting nothing less than the very human condition. That is why the association between neoliberalism and authoritarianism is always so evident: one cannot reduce the human being to the status of a mere wealth producer without having a state on hand to repress those who simply believe that life is something else.
The enormous paradox is that at the end of so much theory, neoliberal or anarcho-capitalist, Milei’s position is strikingly similar to the old anti-democratic liberalism of the 19th century. That liberalism, supportive of fully self-regulated markets and at the same time opposed to universal suffrage and even minimal participation of the working class in politics, was precisely what liberals like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill fought against. Milei’s approach, aesthetics aside, is essentially nineteenth-century and reactionary.
And now, as then in the 19th century, this liberal utopia has only one practical purpose: to increase the power of the already sufficiently powerful. But the fight against the concentration of power, whether from the feudal lord or big capital, has always been one of the foundations of classical liberalism and the political traditions that inherited these principles, such as socialism. After all, Milei’s proposal is just a sophisticated version of the law of the jungle. Nothing more, and nothing less.