Is Javier Milei, the "libertarian" president of Argentina, a complete fraud? \ stacker news ~econ

pull down to refresh

Is Javier Milei, the "libertarian" president of Argentina, a complete fraud?

808 sats \ 25 comments \ @Signal312 8 Nov econ

I was excited when Javier Milei became president of Argentina. Wow, I thought. Amazing! An anarcho-capitalist president who promises to shut down the central bank. The world is getting better!

Then I saw that Saifedean Ammous, the author of the famous Bitcoin classic The Bitcoin Standard, was posting some very sharp critiques of Javier Milei, after being on his side for some time. I respect Saifedean Ammous very much, so I pay attention to what he says.

Hmm, I thought. That's strange. I chalked it up to "the world is a complicated place". And "maybe Ammous should give him some grace, things take time", etc.

Then I did some more research. Saifedean Ammous is not the only one who has some very negative things to say about Milei and his policies.

https://mises.org/power-market/resignation-scientific-advisory-board-ludwig-von-mises-institute-germany

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/even-senior-austrian-economists-are-beginning-to-distance-themselves-from-javier-milei.html

And here's another thing. I had zero knowledge about this - most people don't - but for an Argentinian president, Javier Milei is, very oddly, extremely strongly aligned to Israel. Dig for yourself if you want, but here's some articles on this odd link.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/argentinian-presidents-surprising-devotion-to-judaism-and-israel-provokes-tension/

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2024-10-15/ty-article-magazine/.premium/moses-of-argentina-inside-javier-mileis-strange-obsession-with-judaism-and-israel/00000192-8abe-d222-ab9a-cfff79900000 (archive link: https://archive.is/slu8R)

https://buenosairesherald.com/politics/milei-has-claimed-the-mantle-of-judaism-it-makes-some-argentine-jews-uneasy

And then I did a little more research. Saifedean Ammous is Palestinian, and of course opposed to the genocide in Gaza. So no wonder he looks a little more closely, when it turns out that Milei is so oddly aligned to Israel, and specifically the war criminal Bibi Netanyahu.

Here's Ammous on Javier Milei (summary from Grok):

Saifedean Ammous, a prominent Austrian economist and Bitcoin advocate, has evolved from early praise for Milei's 2023 election as a libertarian breakthrough to vehement criticism by 2025. He accuses Milei of betraying core principles by failing to shut down the Banco Central de la República Argentina (BCRA), instead quadrupling money supply (e.g., M0 up 344% since Dec 2023) to sustain a "carry trade Ponzi scheme." This involves printing pesos to roll over high-interest bonds (up to 88%), enriching bankers and speculators while fueling inflation, devaluing the peso (down 10%+ recently), and deepening debt reliance on IMF/U.S. bailouts. Ammous calls it "fiat fraud," "Keynesian nonsense," and a "nationwide gambling scam" that diverts capital from productive uses, discredits Austrian economics, and ensures future crises. He urges Bitcoin adoption over peso tinkering, framing Milei's inaction as deliberate corruption tied to cronies like Luis Caputo.

Here's a very detailed post from Saifedean Ammous on Milei's money printing https://x.com/saifedean/status/1965101959259771303

Also Milei just got 40 billion USD from the United States. Just a few days before the elections in Argentina, which he won. https://x.com/saifedean/status/1979193041505202215

@didiplaywell

view all related items

1 reply \ @Signal312 OP 8 Nov

And oh yeah I forgot - he promoted not one, but TWO shitcoins.

https://x.com/saifedean/status/1890724929168912636 This is about the $Libra coin. Viral takedown calling Milei's promotion a deliberate scam: He hyped $LIBRA for "economic growth," cashed out millions, then dumped it. Ammous shares screenshots of Milei's deleted tweet and wallet dumps, shocking even "shitcoiners." Ties to Milei's pattern of enriching cronies.

https://x.com/saifedean/status/1890863314269351970 This is about his 2021 support for CoinX.

In this old interview, when asked whether he had been paid for the promotion in 2021, Milei himself recognized, “I charge for my opinions, of course I charge for my opinions.”

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture 8 Nov

Yup follow the signal. Publicity stunt with bitcoin

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @didiplaywell 9 Nov

Well. No. Not even close. I have thoroughly debunked all of Saifedean's slander on Milei. I was startled at the fact he didn't got anything right, not even by accident. I have distrusted Saifedean takes on anything ever since. It would have been ok had him been slightly wrong, or understandably mislead. But no, he went full dunning-kruger.

Thank you @k00b for linking my articles. There's no more to it, all answers are there.

1164 sats \ 6 replies \ @Undisciplined 8 Nov

The right question isn't whether Milei is doing exactly what Rothbard would do. It's whether he is making Argentina a significantly less centrally planned society.

I don't have a strong feeling about the answer to that question, yet, but it's the standard by which we should judge him.

42 sats \ 5 replies \ @Signal312 OP 8 Nov

Apparently not. Strong police state vibes.

Javier Milei’s government will monitor social media with AI to ‘predict future crimes’

Will Milei's AI Policing Plan Become a Tool for Social Control?

51 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 8 Nov

I'm still reserving judgement. I don't expect what's written about him or his intentions to be any more accurate than what we saw during Trump's first term.

42 sats \ 2 replies \ @Signal312 OP 8 Nov

Milei has had a LOT of support, initially, around the world from libertarian oriented folks. And a lot of that has evaporated as he's exposed himself as a fraud.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @didiplaywell 9 Nov

Well, this is simply not true. He won the last election by landslide, garnering massive support not only politically to keep pushing his agenda forward, but also in terms of the congressional weight needed to pass it. You are being misled by Saifedean uninformed (or purposely ill-intentioned) slander. The cure? Look at the facts, it's all there.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 8 Nov

He might be

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @didiplaywell 9 Nov

Well, like you said. "Apparently". That appearance is, indeed, wrong. You can follow Milei's minister of deregulation on twitter to see the actual progress on making people more free by the day (literally, there's so much socialist crap that must be undone that updates on deregulation are made on a daily basis).

345 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 8 Nov

@didiplaywell has been debunking/providing context to some of Ammous' criticisms. I don't know what to think. In general, we all tend to think other people's jobs are easy and straightforward, and when they don't do what we think they should, we assume they're up to something.

I don't trust Ammous' analysis of Milei. I don't trust the media's. I don't trust Milei's. And I haven't spent time looking very closely at what he's done myself.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Signal312 OP 8 Nov

Ammous' was previously in favor of Milei. A little skeptical, a little like "show me", but overall positive.

He had a podcast on Milei in January 2024, generally hopeful: https://saifedean.com/podcast/204-mileis-argentina-with-philip-bagus

Ammous later became more skeptical, and is now a full fledged Milei hater.

Here's one of his later articles on Milei, and the scams that are being perpetuated by him in Argentina right now: https://ronpaulinstitute.org/javier-milei-unraveled-no-crying-in-the-casino/

Here's a quote from that article:

When the ponzi collapses, as it always does, Argentines will have lost their cash savings, and most suckers who invest in bonds will have been ruined, but the fiat cartel banks will walk away well-fed, as they always do.

Milei will discredit Austrian and libertarian ideas for decades to come by associating them with their diametrical opposites: inflation, indebtedness, bond market pump-and-dumps, and genocide. It is only his constant invocation of the Austrians that makes me take time from my busy schedule to discuss this con artist and his unfortunate country.

Socialists of the world, you can now laugh at us libertarians for stealing from you the same line for which we have mocked you for decades: but it wasn’t real libertarianism!

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 8 Nov

I agree that if Milei fails his association with libertarianism might have consequences for the movement in general.

Assuming he isn't pretending to be libertarian (I don't think he is), and is merely not a perfect libertarian in practice, I'd guess his tenure will help Argentina and help the movement learn something about switching a country away from socialism under libertarian goal posts.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 8 Nov

Yeah I imagine there's pretty important path dependence and you can't just switch systems from one to another and have it work. The transition itself is a process and if not handled right will simply result in failure

The tricky part is that when things are unbearable, people may not politically accept slow transitions and they may demand instantaneous change, even if not actually possible.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @didiplaywell 9 Nov

Thank you k00b! All that must be said is there already

22 sats \ 0 replies \ @88b0c423eb 8 Nov

just another politician. A real libertarian can never be a politician, but he destroyed the term now

130 sats \ 5 replies \ @flat24 21h

Forgive me, but I can't help thinking... What the hell are people who support Gaza thinking? Have they forgotten that the people living there are terrorists who cut off babies' heads and kidnap people to maintain their terrorist regime? After what they did on October 7, they obviously deserve total eradication.

On the other hand, Milei obviously sides with Israel. In a world where you're either with Israel or Palestine, you obviously can't be in favor of terrorists (Palestine = Hamas).

With regard to the central bank, Milei calmed the rampant, uncontrolled inflation that the previous party (the disgusting communists) had.

Closing the bank is illogical. If they do that, they should adopt another country's currency, and losing sovereignty and control of their money is the worst thing a country can do. (It would be like selling your car and relying on your neighbor to drive you to work and everywhere else you need to go.) It's too complex an issue. And in Argentina, the only ones complaining about Milei are the leftist parasites who lived off the state, and now their source of income has been cut off.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @zapsammy 20h

user is confused by the Hegelian dialectic of state propaganda; doesn't matter which side the user picks in this case - both are managed by evil corporations, so that's why the issue appears "complex;"

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @flat24 16h

Obviously, it's a pretty complex issue, and there are many things going on that aren't open to the general public like us.

We are the common people, and the common people are never really aware of how things work in the world around them.

Gaza and Palestine are not states that seek stability or progress for their inhabitants. Gaza is a training ground for terrorists and a place designed for that purpose, to spread terror (there are innocent people there who have nothing to do with the terrorists), yes, that is very true, no one chooses where they are born. But most of the people who are there today are the same ones who in the past supported Hamas taking over and ruling the area. So what can they complain about today? I think absolutely nothing.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @zapsammy 15h

States are businesses; the most profitable business in this day and age is that of destruction & distraction; the very people who follow orders and get paid to follow orders are responsible for the effects of the business; politicians merely scribble some spells on paper;

so who is sick enough to follow destructive orders? u are correct, terror-ists: people who hate themselves, brought up in suffering and not raised properly by the community from which they come; their rationale is roughly as follows: "i have suffered, therefore i will cause suffering;"

there is also an occult meaning behind the practice of terrorism: if u listen closely to politicians like Bush, he says "terra-ists" and "war on terra:" literally a war on people of earth; the average conscious mind does not perceive this spell, but the subconscious does;

more thots here: #1278219

thank for being open to discussing this issue

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @didiplaywell 11h

Exactly.

Only detail I have to add is that closing the central bank is planned. The idiocy of those who remark that he didn't on day zero (which Miley always remarked he wouldn't do) lies in their will to ignore the entire world and everything prior and everything after: the previous communist regimes used the central bank to incur in massive debt to support their populist schemes. Debts that have to be repaid prior to closing it. Being something so blatantly obvious and simple, it speaks volumes of those who can't grasp it, like Saifedean. Above all, state debt is not only to foreign creditors, but to creditors in the country itself, who bought state emitted bonds. Imagine closing the central bank before paying back to locals, stealing from millions on day one, what a great start.

Another important detail is that the central bank being closed do not means loss of sovereignty, since the intent is not to depend on a foreign central bank, but simply allow people to commerce in whatever currency they want. That is, as Milei always made clear, the intent is to advance to an open-banking system. People will choose the currency that suits them for their needs. A first step towards that is having in place a currency that's not the peso, since there should be no central bank to emit it, and thus there's a first need to have a new first reference, for which the dollar is the clear option. Dollarizing is the plan, to allow the complete dissolution of the central bank, to then proceed to an open-banking system, in which people will chose the currency they want freely. This also means, as it's Milei's wish, that even private currency mints could arise.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @snakedye 20h

Good goy slop.

431 sats \ 0 replies \ @sirstackalot 8 Nov

His support for Israel has nothing to do with him being an alleged fraud for violating libertarian principles...

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @rootmachine 23h

Hmm. This is indeed something really interesting. Milei is very well seen by politics journalists in my country and I had some support for him when I read the news. I want to keep hoping is not a fraud and that there is hope. And even if he proves to be a fraud (it would be a creepy and probably the worst scenario) let's hope it will not hurt things too much and that people will learn quickly out of this.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 8 Nov

All 'Libertarian' politicians are by definition frauds. Jewish bankers own the US government. And all who are in debt to the IMF.