All government agencies intervene in people’s lives and liberty. The entire government bureaucracy exists precisely to do that. These agencies have an impact on social life and facilitate government spending. Whoever holds these positions, with matching differences in power and relevance levels, will serve at least a minimally statist agenda. In consequence, unless an agency and everything to do with its inner workings is completely abolished, the impact of the agencies can only increase, maintain or decrease. And all the good that these agencies supposedly do will always remain a means by which the government benefits some people over others—inside and outside the government—and takes money away from productive people to give it to non-productive people.During his run for the presidency

In Murray Rothbard’s thinking, the state is a criminal organization of aggression and depredation against the just rights of private property of its subjects. The state acquires its revenue by physical coercion (taxation) and achieves a compulsory monopoly of force and ultimate decision-making power over a given territory. Hence, there is no just state in Rothbard’s libertarianism.The State of IsraelIn 1948, within the boundaries of what was then known as Palestine, David Ben-Gurion announced the independence of the State of Israel. There, by 1949, as Rothbard recounted, “600,000 Jews had created a state which had originally housed 850,000 Arabs.” Three-quarters of a million of Arabs “had been driven out from their lands and homes, and the remaining remnant was subject to a harsh military

“I’m the one who destroys the state from within.” “The state is a criminal organization.” “Taxation is theft.” “The state does everything wrong.” These are just a few of the many anti-statist (or anarcho-capitalist) lines uttered by Javier Milei, who—after breaking the barriers of respectable political discourse and becoming a congressman in 2021—won the presidency of Argentina in 2023.And while statism continues to advance or is protected when statists are in power, whether left or right, many people had pinned their hopes on Milei to radically fight statism. However, his political adventure, beyond the changes on the right track, has proven to be not much more than a political game in favor of statism.InconsistenciesIn a May 2024 interview, Milei outlined some general ideas about his

Ludwig von Mises was a champion of an ideal of liberty in an age of central planning and socialism. In his book Liberalism, the state is “the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion that induces people to abide by the rules of life in society,” and the function that Mises assigns to the state in the liberal doctrine is the protection of property, liberty, and peace. Then there is the law, which consists of the rules according to which the state proceeds. And last but not least, there is the government, which consists of the organs charged with the responsibility of administering the state.For Mises, the government by a handful of people depends on the consent of the governed, so that no government can maintain itself—its form, regime and personnel—if the majority of the governed are

The monetary route in Argentina appears to be entering a new phase, and some form of currency competition was implied in the July 2024 statements of Minister of Economy Luis Caputo. The route is akin to a regime where transactions are legal in multiple currencies, but only the peso holds legal tender status.

In his treatise A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, Hans-Hermann Hoppe lays the theoretical foundations for understanding and identifying the phenomenon of socialism, not as a mere invention of the Marxists of the nineteenth century, but as a much older idea of the institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims. Then, Hoppe holds the institution of the State “as the very incorporation of socialist ideas on property,” and expresses the idea that the State is, indeed, “the very institution that puts socialism into action.” And as socialism “rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims,” aggression is the nature of any State.The opposite of socialism is the recognition and defense of private property rights, or, as

Inflation from the government and the banking system is usually aided unconsciously by the people, who generally believe that some moderate periodic rise in prices is normal. If prices could decrease due to economic growth (price deflation as an outcome of increased productivity), people would be able to keep more of their income to plan further ahead and save more without having to worry about decreases in its value. And if the social demand for money increases, any increase in prices could be proportionally less than the increase in the quantity of money. However, in Argentina, as the government was constantly and significantly spending more than it collects in taxes, and printing money to finance the overspending, inflation beyond the “normal” became the new normal.Yet, as Ludwig von

Immediately after taking office, the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, signed a decree and reduced the number of ministries from twenty-two to nine. Although tens of thousands of public employees have been disposed of since then, the celebrated reduction is still symbolic, because it only ordered some ministries to absorb others and did not reduce public employment significantly. Milei has managed to achieve five budget surpluses so far. Public works have ceased to be financed to an important degree. Milei closed some government agencies, cut some subsidies, and almost completely stopped discretionary money transfers to provinces. However, Milei expanded the welfare state—including the multiplied pesos (in real terms) for various welfare programs.Likewise, right from the start, and

In his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe talks about the neoconservative movement in the U.S. emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the left became increasingly involved with Black Power, affirmative action, pro-Arabism, and the counterculture of those times. In opposition to all this,many traditional left-wing (frequently former Trotskyite) intellectuals and cold war “liberals,” led by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, broke ranks with their old allies, frequently crossing over from the long-time haven of left-wing politics, the Democratic party, to the Republicans. Since then the neoconservatives… have gained unrivaled influence in American politics, promoting typically a “moderate” welfare state (“democratic capitalism”), “cultural conservatism” and

Read part I here.Milei and the Chances of PrivatizationThough privatizations have not yet arrived, the state-owned airline is on the agenda. The company was renationalized in 2008, forcing taxpayers to prop up an airline that has been directly bailed out by the government since 2021. For true privatization, all regulation prohibiting competition and all taxation in the industry should be abolished—falling short of this, it should come with deregulation and less taxation. Milei has proposed to give the company’s shares to its employees and thereby transfer ownership to them. They would either bear responsibility for the company or sell their shares. While this may be the most expedient method toward privatization in a country where unions have so much influence and power to negotiate, it is

Do you hate the State? Javier Milei, the current president of Argentina, seems to. “The State is a killing machine.” “The State is a criminal organization.” “Taxation is theft.” “Philosophically, I am an anarcho-capitalist.” These are quotes from Milei, a man who offered Argentina a “true liberal option”—classical liberalism. He claims to be a “liberal-libertarian” and an admirer of Murray Rothbard (1, 2, 3). He has said he is a minarchist in the short run, but willing to embrace anarcho-capitalism in the long run.Rothbard asked why there should be any significant political disputes between anarcho-capitalists and minarchists in our statist world. “We could and would march hand-in-hand in this way if the minarchists were radicals, as they were from the birth of classical liberalism down to