Anarcho-Capitalism in Argentina? (w/ David Adler)
Added 2023-11-22 16:43:05 +0000 UTCKnow Your Enemy Latin America correspondent David Adler returns to breakdown the (terrible) election results from Argentina, where Javier Milei, a deranged disciple of Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Austrian economics, who consults his cloned dogs for political advice and promises to tear down the Peronist state with a chainsaw, has won the presidency.
David is the General Coordinator of the Progressive International, and despite what he tells people at parties, unrelated to Sam.
Further Reading
Quinn Slobodian, "Monster of the Mainstream," New Statesman, Nov 20, 2023
Murray Rothbard, "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement," Rothbard-Rockwell Report, Jan 1992.
John Ganz, "Murray Rothbard's America," Unpopular Front, May 30, 2022.
Manuel García Gojon “Will Argentina’s Next President Be a Rothbardian?” The Mises Institute, Jul 4, 2022.
Philipp Bagus, "Javier's Milei's Populist Strategy in Argentina Is Working," The Mises Institute, Sept 14, 2023.
Eamon Whalen, "Javier Milei Says He’s the Future of Argentina. He Looks a Lot Like Its Past," Mother Jones, Aug 21, 2023.
Comments
This is an excellent comment.
natesicles
2023-12-01 01:14:58 +0000 UTCJust one quibble with this episode. The US indisputably dominates this hemisphere economically and politically. That said, contrary to some comments during the podcast, it is not omnipotent, free to determine what countries can and cannot do as it wills. The people in those countries have agency and interests of their own. They have both resisted and aided US attempts to dominate their countries. Milei is as likely, if not more so, to be empowered or constrained by his fellow countrymen as he is to be empowered or constrained by the US. Pursuing Chicago-style economics does not mean he has fallen under the thumb of the US government. (I'm not even sure why his experiment with magical thinking would serve US interests.) Years of US domination throughout the hemisphere and the world demonstrates that the US often gets it way but not always, and even when it does so, more often than not, there immediate or long-term unintended consequences. Those consequences are frequently disastrous not just for the countries where the US has meddled, but for the US as well. The problem isn't that the US is all powerful, effortlessly bending countries to its will, the problem is that it is not all powerful but behaves as if it were to the detriment of everyone, particularly the people who bear the brunt of that power.
Paul Smolinsky
2023-11-28 21:49:22 +0000 UTCAfter your comment at the end I was curious and looked up Darryl Perry of the infamous "toaster license" line: seems like he broke with the more edgelord faction of the Libertarian party, went back to school, and is mainly into criminal justice reform and voting rights. I guess people can always surprise you!
Nik
2023-11-28 18:10:37 +0000 UTCLook, I like Chainsaw Man, the manga written by Tatsuki Fujimoto. It's a pretty solid piece of shonen/seinen that interrogates sex, violence, and learning through loss. It's a solid piece of fiction... for children. I remember Jamelle Bouie observing the phenomenon in fan culture, especially in anime, of a sort "self shedding" that allows the fan to abandon reality in favor of one which satisfies fantasies of power. There's likely some rich reading out there about the "nerd"-culture (Sci-fi, videogames, fantasy) to reactionary pipeline. But again, I like Chainsaw Man. It's funny, gory, and has a genuinely touching story about the joys of caregiving. Bums me out that this freak is giving latine fans like me a bad name.
Leonardo Restrepo
2023-11-23 11:49:34 +0000 UTCI think their ideological parameters often make necessary ahistorical analysis, but their level of wrongheadedness (how ahistorical they need to be) is certainly contingent on tangible things!
Benjamin Pletcher
2023-11-23 02:54:41 +0000 UTCThe double movement don't stop
DC
2023-11-23 01:31:53 +0000 UTCIt's always a little weird and discomfiting to me to hear that kind of Rothbardian trash because I was one of those too-precocious-for-their-own-good kids who thought they could stare at their bedroom ceiling and essentially puzzle out the secrets of human ends from new first principles uncontaminated by the backward, obsolete assumptions adults have failed to unlearn, and through around ages 8~14 I developed & elaborated something that sounded almost exactly like Rothbard's speil at 12:35. It's like the societal version of one of those cutesy little canards like "it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end" that would blow the mind of a clever child but not anyone with any actual experience or understanding of the nuts & bolts of the world. It's like saying those lethal falls are purely the result of indulging the temptations of vertical speed and large potential energy gradients, and anyone who talks about human ballistic choices being constrained by gravity, mass, inertia, and the compression strength of mammal tissues is just talking about invisible and unreal fantasies to justify the imposition of emasculating sentimentality—I mean, try to point to "gravity." Hah, that's what I thought. Thus all the more for "society" and its own invisible curvatures along which we orbit. Then I got a little older and slowly understood that this was nothing more than an elaborate adolescent power fantasy built atop what I'd later learn is called the Just World Fallacy. There was no single moment where I ditched it, but I just gradually learned that, as our delightful co-host Matt Sitman so wonderfully put it years ago in describing his own sociopolitical satori, we are bound in ways we do not choose and which no amount of striving or personal virtue might be able to overcome. And so, to my own parents' great relief after their many arguments trying to convince me I was talking nonsense and that the cosmos doesn't care to make things "come out right," these beliefs soon cross-faded into your typical World Citizen's tacit social democracy (one factor among many was no doubt the slow accumulation of lessons from both history class and my parents about the many horrors and outrages the US has perpetrated at home and abroad in the name of that very kind of self-interested aggrandizement, so I get why reactionaries are so keen on bowdlerized "patriotic education" to make it harder for students to put the pieces together). But having experienced an ideological pit like this with an intimacy that comes from digging it yourself, it's so easy for me to recognize its growth from the sulky power fantasy of unlimited competence and actualization "if only they wouldn't stop me" and the self-praise of being insightful and realistic enough to recognize the futility of sentimental human interventions instead of accepting the bracing final optimality and cosmic elegance of self-organization embodied in individual action—Along with the existential fear of what it means if human life is a chaotic tumble through an indifferent universe and you're not the perfectly sovereign and unquestioned little captain of the starship "Me." If that's true, then all we have is each other, and it's too painful to accept a disenchanted world that seems to imply such humiliatingly, unromantically bovine management of human flourishing, clawing back down into the crab bucket the economic demigods we need to thrill and ennoble us by showing how at least *some* unshackled paragon out there is able to work their singular human will upon the world to stoke our admiration without anything working on them back. But you can only hold onto that if you also still believe some other people are just destined to become fodder, and the way they come into the world is ultimately one more "bad choice" evincing their defectiveness, their failure to discover & perform whatever sacrifice would free them from their unique Saw Trap of deprivation merely another proof of their inadequacy—If I hadn't always from the very beginning been passionately anti-nationalist, anti-racist, and pro-women's/LGBT rights (admittedly at first as an insistence on but-that's-what-got-us-INTO-this-mess colorblindness so dogged I briefly gave myself a kind of agnosia like something out of Oliver Sacks) I wonder if I might still believe that garbage. No wonder they're aghast at those convictions, too.
Jon Lyons
2023-11-23 00:33:27 +0000 UTCBorn in 1970; he’s a Gen-Xer.
erik w bjorke
2023-11-22 23:21:25 +0000 UTCIs that distinction purely historical? Or is it contingent on more tangible things, like circulation or subscriptions? My hunch is the former, but I’ve never stopped to actually consider it!
Vincent
2023-11-22 23:09:48 +0000 UTCAmazing how often the NYT is wrong and yet it remains the paper of record.
Benjamin Pletcher
2023-11-22 22:33:38 +0000 UTCI have a bizarre connection to the Argentine election—my cousin, who is a big shot in weirdo libertarian/conservative circles, directed those Hayek vs. Keynes rap battles that went viral circa 2009. Allegedly those became a big TikTok meme among pro-Millei Argentine youth.
William Fedullo
2023-11-22 20:52:33 +0000 UTCMaybe some kind of line about how the culture war has gone too far if we can’t criticize Israel etc.
Peter Trigg
2023-11-22 19:55:52 +0000 UTCInteresting to hear that Argentina’s leadership is majority in agreement with a Zionist project. I’ve been wondering recently if there might be a shift from some conservatives toward pro-Palestinian arguments on the grounds of anti-culture war stuff— as in, “you can’t say anything nowadays if it offends someone, even if the group you’re criticizing is killing thousands of innocents.” Which I think might actually gain some purchase in a lot of circles. I haven’t seen anyone say anything like that, but I’m kind of surprised honestly.
Peter Trigg
2023-11-22 19:54:50 +0000 UTCAgreed. It was clarifying to hear David Adler consistently connect the (abused and misunderstood) term "neoliberal" to its virulently anti-collectivist interwar Vienna origins, in the persons of Ludwig von Mises and and Friedrich Hayek, through to Thatcher and Reagan (by way of Mont Pelerin). Hayek smiled.
David Richard Holmquist
2023-11-22 19:49:39 +0000 UTCIt's very surreal to see a country declare the free market as a central guiding philosophy when that's the exact same philosophy that other countries have used to justify walking off with all of their stuff. If someone tells you that free market capitalism will be good for you, look around. If you don't see any rich neighbors within a dozen miles, the free market will do you no favors.
Brian Pemberton
2023-11-22 18:25:56 +0000 UTCSuch a marvelously clear presentation. Polanyi wept.
Rick Perlstein
2023-11-22 18:13:18 +0000 UTCI haven’t seen much MSM coverage of this election. In fact, the last thing I read about it was a NY Times piece that doubted a Milei win. Latin American politics are fascinating, especially when analyzed alongside KYE stalwarts. For those interested in Cold War Latin America, I highly recommend the film Chile '76!
Vincent
2023-11-22 17:05:18 +0000 UTC
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