You have to admire the guy’s pure cojones.
I am sitting in Buenos Aires, in the curiously dark office of the President of Argentina. He is Javier Milei, 53, the bushy-whiskered, chainsaw-wielding wild man of free-market Hayekian thinking, who is finally giving this beautiful country the economic medicine it needs.
It has been almost ten months since his election and he has been maniacally attacking the excrescences of the State, extracting a whopping five percent of GDP from public spending. You may remember those images of him, before the elections, standing in front of a huge board displaying the Argentine government.
Thumbs up for freedom: Boris and his wife Carrie with the radical president of Argentina, Javier Milei
He shouted ‘Get out! Outside!’ or ‘Get out! Outside!’ – and ripping entire departments off the diagram. Well he has done it.
Of the 23 ministries he inherited, eight have been brutally amputated by his roaring circular saw and their officials dismissed to seek private sector jobs. He has eliminated crazy state fuel subsidies. He is abolishing the deranged Peronist taxes on exports.
He faces unions at the state airline and is at war with academics at state-funded universities. Despite his orgy of calculated fiscal chaos, his popularity remains surprisingly high, and rightly so.
Little by little he is achieving it. Inflation had been at 58 percent monthly, that is, monthly. If you buy a beer in one of the charming cafes in this city, you will notice that the prices are continually changed in chalk, to allow for reels of extra zeros. Thanks to Milei, those price increases have slowed dramatically: down to 2 percent per month, and he is absolutely determined to reduce them even further.
He knows the damage that inflation has done to Argentina: the destruction of the livelihoods of the lowest paid, the erosion of confidence and investment. He looks at us with his bright blue eyes and elaborates on his plans.
Now poverty is decreasing, he says; growth will return; and as he speaks, I find myself wanting him to keep going, wanting him to succeed for the sake of Argentina and the world. I think he will do it, because he is capable of saying and doing things that no Argentine president has done before.
We are here in Evita Perón’s palace, and just outside is the balcony from where she harangued the masses. We are in the same building where President Galtieri and his gold-braided generals planned the invasion of the Falklands, and yet here we have an Argentine president with the guts to say that he is an admirer of the woman who ruthlessly defeated that meeting and recovered the islands.
Yes, folks, he is a Margaret Thatcher fan, and he says so. That is courage; Those are balls.
When an opponent questioned him about this admission and asked him how he could praise the woman who sank the Belgrano, he responded simply. It was absurd to despise Thatcher, he said; It was like despising Kylian Mbappé for scoring goals against Argentina.
“We were involved in a war and we lost it,” he said. He admires Thatcher for the same reason he admires Churchill: because she fought for what he believes matters most in economics, politics and life: freedom.
It supports the freedom of the individual to live their life as they wish, as long as it does not harm others. He supports your right to smoke whatever you want, to love and marry whoever you choose.
Support the cause of freedom around the world, vigorously supporting Volodomyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians in their fight against Putin’s neo-imperialist aggression. He vehemently supports the Israelis against Hamas and Hezbollah. In fact, he is so passionate about the subject that he is actually converting to Judaism.
He is in favor of scientific freedom to clone animals and has four cloned English bull mastiffs whom he calls his ‘children’ and whose privacy he jealously protects.
He seems to be the living embodiment of the libertarianism he defends, and with every speech and tweet he reinforces his message with a slogan that all Argentine voters have heard: ‘Long live freedom, damn it!’ – which roughly translates to ‘Long live freedom, bastard!’
Of course, one might think that this is simply the kind of fanaticism born of the crisis. You might think that Milei’s libertarianism is a response to Argentina’s unique economic situation, because it has been chronically terrible at controlling the political debt and spending that fuels inflation.
So you might think that Milei’s mission has no relevance to us in Britain, and I’m not so sure about that. Can we really say that we are striking the right balance, here in the UK, between the powers of the State and those of the individual?
Can we say that the flame of freedom burns as brightly as before? Look at us under this new Labor government: the entire population, cowering in fear for months as we wait for this punishing budget. We are all sitting blindfolded as we prepare to be beaten by Rachel Reeves, not knowing what instrument she will use.
Will he impose a capital gains tax or an inheritance tax on us? Or will he break Labour’s manifesto promise and hit us with more national insurance? We have global investors staying put or abandoning their plans; More and more rich people are fleeing the country, so emigration is now becoming an economic problem for this country, for the first time since the 1970s.
We have a bunch of new and totally useless labor laws, which plan to give workers the right to “disconnect” on weekends, and other nonsense; And can we say that the Starmer regime is doing anything to protect the freedom of the individual?
Javier Milei waving a circular saw at a political rally last year. He seems to be the living embodiment of the libertarianism he defends.
On the contrary, they have ruled out the conservative measure to protect freedom of expression at the university; and look at the case of nanny Lucy Connolly, 41, who has been jailed for almost three years, just for something she put on X/Twitter after the Southport murders.
What he said was vile; Truly horrible. He called for migrant shelters to be burned down. She certainly deserved to be punished, perhaps with a fine or community service. But she is the mother of a young child, with no criminal record, and I see no evidence that her disgusting comment – which she deleted after three hours – was intended to lead to serious action.
Was it really right to beat her for almost three years? In the jingle? When the Starmer government is releasing all sorts of serious sexual and violent offenders because there is no room in prisons? You have to ask yourself.
Milei is right about freedom. It is precious and can erode. Under this Labor government, the State is taking more and more people’s money to spend on our behalf, while the State prescribes in ever greater detail what we should do and say, even what we should think.
There will come a point where one day we will slap the table and cry, enough! Long live freedom, damn it!
