Today’s most dangerous social experiment begins in Argentina: Holcim divests companies in Uganda and Tanzania

In the NZZ, Gerhard Schwarz, the former economic director of this newspaper and later director of Avenir Suisse, has already given the signal. Fears about Javier Milei, Argentina’s newly elected president, are misplaced, he notes. The man is not an anarchist monster as he is usually portrayed in the media; and his beliefs about the free market are not “right-wing, but rather the result of liberal reason and the failure of previous policies.”

Milei is an outspoken libertarian, and in fact this worldview does not have to be fundamentally right-wing and certainly not conservative. The spiritual father of the libertarians is Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian who flirted with socialism in his youth and later emigrated to the US as a Jew via Geneva.

Von Mises argued for the pure form of a night watchman state, a state in which the police and army guarantee the safety of the citizens and which actually stays out of everything, especially the market. This means: no laws that limit the market mechanism, no central bank and certainly no welfare state.

Von Mises’s writings are ill-suited for bedtime reading. The writer Ayn Rand was the main person who brought his ideas to the people. The daughter of a pharmacist from St. Petersburg also fled with her parents to the US from the communists in 1921. There she and her novels quickly became a cult. The best known of these are called “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead”.

Reading these books borders on torture, because they are a clumsy literary implementation of the same old thing: competent entrepreneurs being bullied by lazy unions, corrupt officials and decadent intellectuals. But Rand’s influence cannot be overestimated. ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was published in 1957, but is still one of the 30 best-selling books on Amazon today.

No wonder, then, that libertarians commonly cite Rand as their inspiration, often along with JRR Tolkien and his “Lord of the Rings.”

Libertarian ideas found fertile ground, especially in California, on both the right and the left. For example, civil terror Frank Zappa can be described as a libertarian. These ideas were also widespread among the hippies, as libertarians often advocated free drug use and the tolerance of all forms of bodily fluid exchange. Some are even declared pacifists.

Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel also have a penchant for libertarian ideas. In general, Ayn Rand is especially popular in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra – ‘move fast and break things’ – could come straight from one of her novels.

The Cypherpunks, the inventors of Bitcoin, are also inspired by libertarian ideas. Von Mises is one of the most important opinion leaders. With cryptocurrency, these anarchist capitalists want to help a decentralized economy without a central bank and fiat money achieve a breakthrough – or at least that’s what they claim to do.

Javier Milei has many of these qualities. His messy hair and unkempt appearance fit perfectly with the image of the cypherpunks. In his youth he was a singer in a rock band and deeply despises marital status. He even describes the Pope as a “diabolical leftist”.

Economically, it is on the classic libertarian line. He admires not only von Mises, but also Murray Rothbard, an American economist who further developed and refined his theories. He also literally implements the theory of “creative destruction” of Joseph Schumpeter – another Austrian economist admired by libertarians. He often uses a chainsaw to accompany his speeches at his campaign events.

The destruction of the marital state is Milei’s stated goal. He wants to do this by going to the roots of what he believes is the greatest evil: the central bank. This should be abolished and the Argentine peso replaced by the US dollar as the currency. Milei is not impressed by the fact that a similar exercise led to misery in Argentina in the 1990s under then-president Carlos Menem.

Whether, like Gerhard Schwarz Mileis, you can actually describe economic policy as an “outflow of liberal reason” is at least doubtful. However, it is devastating to simply ignore, or at least try to soften, Milei’s dark side, as the former NZZ economics director does.

There’s a reason why Tucker Carlson praised Milei in a sycophantic interview about the shamrock in the run-up to the election, just as it’s no coincidence that Donald Trump warmly congratulated him on his victory. Milei not only wants to dismantle the state into its individual parts, he wants to ban abortion, minimize taxes and cancel all measures against global warming, because he believes this is a conspiracy of the left. The fact that he also downplays the serious crimes against humanity committed by the Argentine army in the 1980s fits the picture.

Here too, Milei repeats a pattern that can be observed among many libertarians. They superficially portray themselves as the ultimate fighters for individual freedom. But for most there is a dark, authoritarian side. You see this, for example, with Elon Musk, but also with Peter Thiel, his former business partner at PayPal.

Argentina has a tragic history. Milei’s election is therefore an expression of the deep despair of a population that has witnessed for decades how a country rich in resources and blessed with raw materials is sinking deeper into misery.

But unfortunately the Argentinians are no exception. The sociologist Oliver Nachtwey wrote in his book ‘Affronted Freedom. Aspects of libertarian authoritarianism’ examines the scene of lateral thinkers. Libertarians are particularly well represented in this scene.

Nachtwey, who works at the University of Basel, comes to a sobering conclusion in his analysis. In an interview with “NZZ am Sonntag” he explains the reasons for the current rise of libertarian ideas.

Because the promises of progress have not been fulfilled for many people, says Nachtwey, “an openness to radical alternatives is emerging. An openness to decadently fanatical right-wing libertarian forces whose motto is: let’s destroy the institutions. An openness to figures such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina.”