The images coming out of Latin America are hard to ignore. Tens of thousands of gang members in Bukele’s El Salvador lined up, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting to be placed in prison, their rights suspended as a result of a crackdown on gang activity. Hundreds of government workers for AFIP—Argentina’s version of the IRS—standing in a multi-level gallery, papers drifting down to the bottom floor as they learn the agency has been shuttered. While the two presidents have radically different politics—Bukele a totalitarian, and Milei an anarcho-capitalist influenced by Professor Jesús Huerta de Soto—they are parallels in their willingness to act, something that is noticeably lacking in Europe and the United States.
Most of the developed West finds itself mired in some form of bureaucracy-dominant, lotus-eating, right-liberal politics. Europe is as far away from Hans Herman Hoppe’s dream of “1,000 Lichtensteins” as seems humanly possible, with ten more countries hoping to gain entrance to the European Union as of October 2024. The United States is driven by general elections that largely ignore down-ticket candidates, ensuring the political machines on both sides of the aisle maintain control. As Ron Paul has notably remarked, the result is that most politicians were purchased by outside interests long before they ever began a campaign for office and are, therefore, likely to be propelled predominately by financial interests.
This creates homogeneity that is far from the upheaval that was required to install a Bukele or Milei into office. Despite the forecasting of calamity by political pundits—as noted by Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia—a soft decline in the West is far more likely (and preferable to the aspirations of libertarian idealogues) than an open revolution.
As Hayek repeatedly warned in The Road to Serfdom, extreme political ideologies will typically find gaining control of a country to be a Herculean task. However, where totalitarianism can seize power with a “might makes right” style of coup, anarcho-capitalists will find this method to be distasteful, and, as Murray Rothbard noted in his book For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, the means must align with the ends. Therefore, one might believe that the anarcho-capitalist must argue his position to illustrate to a country’s general population that this is the only reasonable way forward. This would, unfortunately, presume the populace to be perfectly reasonable, a mistake which Hayek advised against making in his book The Sensory Order.
Instead, hopeful anarcho-capitalists must utilize Argentina as a sort of “show home” for other countries. Without the creation of a sales campaign, the anarcho-capitalist project—limited to Argentina—is too heavily-leveraged to spread abroad. Therefore, every positive achievement in Milei’s government must be pared down into talking points, slogans, and advertising operations. This will allow stable Western democracies to get a taste at a safe distance of what an anarcho-capitalist government could offer them. Only then will hopeful European and American anarcho-capitalists have an opportunity to begin their crusade at home.
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