Milei just delivered his best lecture on practical economics. On Valentine’s Day, he promoted in X a dubious cryptocurrency, $LIBRA, claiming that: “This private project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy by funding small businesses and startups.” The post led thousands to invest in the currency, which after a couple of hours plummeted, revealing itself to be a fraud. After a few hours, Milei deleted his post and explained: “I was not aware of the details of the project, and after getting informed, I decided not to continue promoting it (which is why I deleted the tweet).”
But it was too late to play the Pontius Pilate card. Let’s concede he was unaware of the fraud that was going on. Well, this is precisely the point: ignorance and impotence against the market. Like many other so-called “libertarians”, i.e. defenders of an unregulated free trade-driven economy, Milei repeated throughout this campaign the same old mantra: State: bad. Market: good. State: corrupt people, draining capital and hindering abundance. Market: free, honest people fostering development and wealth. But his involuntary lesson on practical economy reminded us precisely the opposite, that markets should not be naively trusted. Milei, the guru of the free market, the wise guy telling how inflation is to be vanquished, the professor of economics, was fooled. Stupidly fooled. Paradoxically, he taught us why markets have to be regulated, why institutions should protect the money of their population from frauds, and, above all, why non-State-backed currencies are unstable and the perfect niche for sharp practices and money laundering. The dream of a good State-free market was shattered. Again. His dream of suppressing the central bank and promoting Bitcoin for the Argentinian economy seems now ludicrous.
This is the first lesson: markets can and are willing to ruin you. It is not a matter of good and rotten apples. The maxim of the market is not to be nice, take care of your workers, protect the environment, but to gain more no matter what! If actors lie to break the law, if there is uneven competition, if their products are dangerous, and if they contaminate, all these are considered externalities, elements extrinsic to markets. Why should we expect well-behaved competitors? Wasn’t this the whole point of the State, namely, to end the “war of all against all”, as Hobbes put it? Who believes anymore in God commanding the economy with his holy hand? The most recent economic crises cannot be traced back to state policy but to sheer speculation and market bubbles.
The second lesson is harder for Mieli, for he became what he claimed to be against, namely, a State interventionist. Just as his admired Austrian school of economics, he characterized all State intervention as “communism.” Sure, this assertion is historically and technically inaccurate. Capitalism took shape hand in hand with the State long before the welfare state. And even the latter was far from questioning private property as communism did. Decisive is how, according to Austrian economics and himself, Milei suddenly became a communist! But he was not acting as president, he said, but as ordinary citizen. He didn’t use an institutional X account but a personal one. And so, he erased the category of “conflict of interest,” for he can change from president to non-president by switching accounts. Just be attentive to which role he is playing while speaking…
Milei loves to talk against the State in a strikingly superfluous fashion. But the State is not only a set of institutions consuming onerous budgets. It involves the grounding and structuring of power relationships within a nation-state. The presidential figure that he represents, is grounded in the State, not in the market. Even further, private property is considered by libertarians (but not only) a right. Now, rights cannot be granted by markets but by States and their corresponding juridical apparatus. Promoting private investment as president of Argentina is a State-centered action. His publication in X stated that the meme coin was aimed at funding small businesses and ventures in Argentina. This was his message during the campaign and is still his presidential motto, captured in his public signature “Viva la Libertad, carajo.”
As a public figure, he is the head of the executive and thus the entitled incumbent of state power. The first lesson was that markets can and will deceive to secure earnings. The second was: that libertarians do use the State to shape and influence the market.
Paradoxically, the unintended lesson Milei just delivered to the world is: don’t let be fooled by the market, and don’t let be fooled by “libertarians.”
