Argentine President Javier Milei visited the Hoover Institution at Stanford and spoke about his approach to addressing Argentina’s many economic issues during his first six-months in office:
Milei recalled his years as an economist with HSBC Argentina and work advising a large pension fund. He explained how he had to remain adaptable to changing market conditions and new ideas and not make assumptions based on static economic models.
“Reality is complex, but when the model doesn’t match reality, you get rid of it,” he said. “You don’t get angry with reality.”
Milei argued that many twenty-first-century leaders see every failure of an economic model as proof of a market failure warranting government intervention.
He added that the state interventions are slowly strangling our ability to generate economic growth.
“Let us not allow the fatally conceited to destroy our lives with regulations.”
Throughout his speech of more than one hour, Milei brought up luminaries who’ve shaped his worldview, including Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, and Murray N. Rothbard. He described how they influenced his view that everything should flow from the promotion of private enterprise and maximum possible growth, and that state intervention often only exacerbates the problem it was intended to solve.
Milei described himself as a libertarian and a minarchist who believes the role of the state is only to protect individuals and their property from aggression.
While talking about the challenges of governing and the Austrian school of economists who influenced his worldview, he suggested that it may have been his love of conflict that brought him away from work as an economist and television commentator and into the position he finds himself today.
“That’s probably why I got into politics. I love conflict.”
Milei said that his government is working to tame inflation and get public spending under control, and he applauded his economy minister, Luis Caputo, sitting in the audience.
“He’s in charge of the chainsaw operation,” Milei said, alluding to the chainsaw he brought with him to campaign rallies to symbolize his anti-spending agenda. “We are getting rid of a whole lot of things.”
“I am very happy when my economy minister gets applause. He’s making the greatest adjustment not only in the history of Argentina but in the whole history of humanity. We have already adjusted by 13 percent of GDP.”
He then turned to confront those he called “statists” and “regulators” who oppose his efforts in Argentina.
“They’re sitting in an office, and they create regulation just to justify their own existence,” he said. “This has a direct impact on innovation … They regulate just out of ignorance or just to justify the chair [they sit on], and they’re ruining our lives.”
He argued that most people in economics can’t even articulate where the state ends and the market begins.
“The market is ourselves,” he said. “When there’s talk of the market, we are the market.”
He described the market as a “social cooperation process” where “property rights are voluntarily exchanged”. He contrasted this with interaction with the state, where participants are compelled to act in a certain way.
“State intervention is always bad, because it’s based on coercion, on force, and nothing based on coercion can be good.”
