Posted originally on the CTH on January 18, 2024 | Sundance

Many people are heralding this speech given by Javier Milei as a confrontation to the mindset of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos.

Because so many people made a similar assertion, I had to listen to it twice, because I just didn’t get that takeaway.  I still don’t.   The first 10 minutes is an academic review of the history of free-market capitalism; the latter 10 minutes decries the failures of those economic systems who attempted socialism, including his own homeland of Argentina.

While the last half of the speech is strong, factually good pushback against the academic socialistic mindset, he never really addressed the issue that is at the core of modern, Western, economic corruption – the merge of the corporation and the state.

Capitalism vs Socialism was a debate well covered during the Soviet era and subsequent collapse of the Berlin wall.  The 2020’s challenge is entirely different, fascism.

Traditional Fascism was defined as an authoritarian government working hand-in-glove with corporations to achieve totalitarian objectives.  Essentially, a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, using severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

That governmental system didn’t work in the long-term because free people rejected government authoritarianism; so, we went to war and killed the fascist support system. Fascist governments collapsed, and the corporate beneficiaries were nulled and scorned.  Then along came a new approach to achieve the same objective.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) was created to use the same fundamental associations of government and corporations.  Only this time the corporations organized to tell the governments what to do.  The WEF was organized for multinational corporations to assemble and tell the various governments how to cooperate to achieve control.

Fascism is still the underlying premise, the WEF just flipped the internal dynamic.

The assembly of the massive multinational corporations, banks and finance offices now summon the government leaders to come to their assembly and receive their instructions.  Some have called this corporatism. However, the relationship between government and multinationals is just fascism essentially reversed with the government doing what the corporations tell them to do.

President Javier Milei is participating in the corporate control system; after all, he’s a politician attending a conference organized by corporations.  Extolling the virtues of massive multinational monopolistic corporations, while pretending some form of “free market” system still exists, just seems esoteric (borderline obtuse) to me.

Yes, socialism sucks and always fails. However, in the modern era it is corporate/government fascism that leads to naive support for socialism in a misguided effort to break that public/private partnership.

Milei also held meetings with British foreign minister David Cameron and was “set for a head-to-head with International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Kristalina Georgieva, after Argentina struck a staff level agreement last week to salvage its $44 billion loan program with the fund.”

WATCH FOR YOURSELF – “Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei praised free markets and slammed socialism at Davos on Wednesday (January 17) during the first overseas tour for the self-proclaimed ‘anarcho-capitalist,’ who is battling to fix a major economic crisis at home. During his speech, Milei focused on the role of the state across a wide range of activities, which he said amounted to levers of control rather than allowing citizens the freedom to prosper through their own efforts.”

If you are short on time, start at the 10:00 minute mark. 

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I’ll watch it again in the morning, and see if I can find this incredible economic bravery that everyone is talking about.  Maybe I just missed it because the translation is a little challenging to keep in flow.