By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org.

[This article is a republication of a Substack post that was originally published in January 2024.]

Buckle in, this is a speech for the history books. Summary quotes and the transcript are below the video.

Note that "Libertarianism" as used here by Milei is synonymous with the classical liberalism of the US Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson. Life, liberty, property. The term "classical liberalism," while sometimes used to describe libertarianism, is actually a modern invention. There is a school of political and economic thought which advocates that we should be using the word liberalism (which is very different from what in the US are called "liberals" or left wing) to describe the true philosophy of individualism. Also keep in mind that Javier Milei self identifies as an anarcho-capitalist in the mold of Murray Rothbard, and you can hear echos of Rothbard's arguments in this speech by economist/president Milei.

Summary of Javier Milei's speech in Davos 2024 (in 20 quotes)

1. "Today I am here to tell you that the Western world is in danger, and it's in danger 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."

2. "Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the desire to belong to a privileged class, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism."

3. "We are here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world, rather they are the root cause."

4. "The problem with neoclassical (economists) is the model they love so much does not match reality, so they attribute their own mistakes to the supposed market failure, rather than reviewing the premises of their model."

5. "On the pretext of the supposed market failures, regulations are introduced, which only create distortions in the price system, preventing economic calculation, and therefore, also prevent savings, investment, and growth.".

6. "Not even supposedly libertarian economists understand what the market is, because if they did understand it, they would quickly see that it's impossible for something along the lines of market failure to exist."

7. "Talking about market failure is an oxymoron, there are no market failures, if transactions are voluntary the only context where it can be a market failure is coercion, and the only one that is able to coerce is the state."

8. "Faced with the theoretical demonstration that state intervention is harmful, and the empirical evidence that it has failed, the solution proposed by the collectivists is not greater freedom but rather greater regulation. Greater regulation which creates a downwards spiral until we are all poor, and the life of all of us depend on a bureaucrat sitting somewhere in a luxury office."

9. "Given the dismal failure of collectivist models, and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were led to change their agenda. They left behind the class struggle based on the economic system, and replaced it with other supposed social conflicts, which are just as harmful to life as a community, and to economic growth."

10. "Today's states don't need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the life of individuals. With tools like printing money, debt, subsidies, control of the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct the so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals."

11. "They say that capitalism is evil because it's individualistic and that collectivism is good because it's altruistic, of course with the money of others."

12. "Those who promote social justice, they advocate the idea that the whole economy is a pie that can be shared ...