Javier Milei Should Take His Attack on Davos to CPAC

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 15, 2024

 

On Thursday, the head of the American Conservative Union, Matt Schlapp, announced that Argentinian president Javier Milei was slated to address this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference — a revelation to which the Latin American press beat him by nearly a week.

 

In its report on Milei’s forthcoming presentation to the preeminent gathering of right-of-center activists, La Nacion devotes most of its time to speculating on the prospects for a meeting between the Argentinian head of state and Donald Trump — an outcome that seems unlikely given their respective schedules. Nevertheless, even the Buenos Aires–based publication is aware of CPAC’s reputation. “For years now, even with Trump out of power, the conservative conference became a Trumpfest,” the report read. The conference’s participants, speakers, and even the states where it occurs “idolize Trump.” Therein lies Milei’s challenge.

 

His brand of unreconstructed free marketeering stands in stark contrast with the populism that has overtaken the Republican Party in the age of Trump. The GOP’s sudden friendliness toward progressive intervention into private economic affairs has occurred alongside the evolution of movement conservatism from a hyper-individualist cause into an enterprise that emphasizes communitarianism and the cult of unity. That is precisely what Milei descended upon Davos to criticize, much to the discomfort of his effete audience at the World Economic Forum. Milei would be well served by issuing precisely the same condemnation of CPAC’s attendees.

 

In Switzerland, Milei opened with a blistering critique of the world’s ruling caste. Motivated as much by altruistic intentions as their personal desire for influence and power, they had “abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of collectivism,” Milei declared. He proceeded to itemize the virtues of “free-enterprise capitalism,” which remains the only proven pathway toward the universal betterment of the human condition.

 

“Far from being the cause of our problems, free-enterprise capitalism as an economic system is the only tool we have to end hunger, poverty, and destitution throughout the planet,” he noted. Milei outlined a theory of human organization he called “neoclassical economic theory,” but it goes by another name: classical liberalism. “The market is a mechanism of social cooperation where there is voluntary exchange,” the Argentinian president added before noting that this therefore precludes the very idea of “market failure.”

 

Efforts to intervene in the marketplace often fail to produce the ends desired by the regulators, Milei continued, and that condition fosters resentment among the regulators toward their publics. “The solution that collectivists will propose is not more freedom but more regulation, generating a downward spiral of regulations until we are all poorer.”

 

With these remarks, Milei opens himself up to the charge that he is beholden to an outmoded species of laissez-faire capitalist economics — what the kids call “zombie Reaganism.” Untrammeled globalized capitalism has imposed drug addiction and economic stagnation on so many American communities, the road-worn right-wing indictment of market economics maintains. CPAC has recklessly courted this sort of thing.

 

The conference has recently restyled itself as an outlet for anti-market politicians like former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, and radical environmentalist presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. CPAC has solicited speakers hostile toward big business, free trade, and fiscal policies that provide more liberty to entrepreneurs than the bureaucrats who would constrain them. With the conference’s drift into monomaniacal cultural criticism, its speakers and attendees rail against the incentives that produced “woke corporations” and conclude that the heavy hand of government is the only remedy. They overlook the market mechanisms busily breaking down social-justice activism in corporate America — a result of the threat represented to their respective bottom lines amid the exodus of their customer bases. The conference and its attendees are nominally free marketeers, but all the marketplace’s manifestations seem to vex them nonetheless.

 

Much of this evolution is attributable to Donald Trump’s ascension to become the American Right’s one and only power center. Those individuals and organizations who covet their influence in Washington sidle up to him, mimic his affectations, and flatter his pretensions. This is the same observance of “ambition to power” Milei criticized — an ambition that leads those who seek power to rationalize the sacrifice of free markets and private enterprise. If Argentina’s president was bold enough to attack the ethical and intellectual compromises to which the Davos crowd has committed themselves to their faces, he’s surely brave enough to say the same to the activists in the audience at CPAC.

 

“If you adopt measures that hinder the free functioning of markets, free competition, free price systems,” Milei concluded, “if you hinder trade, if you attack private property, the only possible destiny is poverty.” Do not “surrender to a political class that only wants to perpetuate itself in power and maintain its privileges,” he thundered. “The state is not the solution. The state is the problem.”