NewsRescue
One month after assuming office as Argentina’s new president, self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei has advised Western leaders to avoid the socialist route that he claims led to the country’s economic catastrophe and rising poverty.
Milei, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, warned that “the Western world is in danger” due to its shift towards collectivism. “It is endangered because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty,” he went on to say.
Argentinians know well the consequences of socialist policies because decades of left-wing rule created the deepest economic disaster in the country’s history, Milei said. Around 40% of the South American nation’s citizens live in poverty, while the inflation rate exceeds 200% annually. The new president has vowed to restore prosperity through reforms and austerity measures that will make the economic pain even worse in the near term.
“We’ve been through this,” Milei told the Davos audience. “We have been through this because ever since we decided to abandon the model of freedom that had made us rich, we have been caught up in a downward spiral, as part of which we are poorer and poorer day by day.”
Western leaders are also abandoning the model of freedom “for different versions of what we call collectivism,” Milei alleged. “We’re here to inform you that collectivist experiments will never solve the world’s problems. Rather, they are the underlying cause.
Argentina, with its immense natural resources, was one of the world’s richest nations in the first part of the twentieth century, giving rise to the then-common statement, ‘rich as an Argentine’. Milei said the country’s subsequent economic downfall demonstrated the inevitable result of socialism.
“No matter how rich you may be, or how much you may have in terms of natural resources, or how skilled your population may be or educated, or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank, if measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets – free competition, free price systems – if you hinder trade, if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty,” he said.
Most Western countries today have chosen “collectivist variants,” all of which are in opposition to the model that “led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history,” Milei claimed. He warned entrepreneurs against being frightened by “the political caste or parasites who live off the state.”
Milei stated that he came to Davos to “get back on the path of prosperity, economic freedom, limited government, and unlimited respect for private property.” He also stated that private-sector wealth creators must not submit to statism. “The state is the problem in itself.” You are the genuine heroes of this story, and you can be confident that Argentina will be your firm, unflinching ally beginning now.”
