The speech Argentinian President Javier Milei delivered at this year’s World Economic Forum — which ended with a stirring “Long live Freedom, dammit!” — has produced conflicting interpretations.
One popular conservative Twitter account praised him for having “called out the Davos elites to their faces” by standing against socialism.
President Milei just went to the WEF and called out the Davos elites to their faces
His full speech (English):
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 17, 2024
Left-wing commentator Krystal Ball, on the other hand, accused him of “sucking up to elites” by assuring billionaires that they’re the good guys. (RELATED: ‘Long Live Freedom, Dammit!’: Argentinian President Milei Barnstorms Davos With Speech Blasting Socialism)
Which is it? Well, both.
There are two sides to Davos: business and government. Milei praised one and rebuked the other, calling the business leaders in attendance “heroes” and urging them to “not be intimidated either by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state.” But it’s not as simple as business-good-government-bad. Both are capable of oppression.
The absolute worst-case scenario, though, is when the two work in harmony. Social liberalism dissolves the bonds of family, faith and community, while economic liberalism (i.e. free-market capitalism) sells the now-atomized individuals treats and trinkets to distract them from despair. Big Tech oligarchs determine voters’ information diet, and the politicians those voters elect keep them comfortable enough that they don’t ask too many questions. Billionaires hire swarms of lobbyists to run cover for them while they squeeze out the smallholders and further enrich themselves, until finally — in a phrase made famous at Davos — “you’ll own nothing and be happy.”
Such a population becomes incapable of freedom and primed for tyranny.
Milei’s libertarianism isn’t totally aligned with WEF’s project, but the Davoisie can’t achieve their goals without capitalism. As Ben Smith observed at Semafor, the WEF “is fundamentally the great trade show of global capitalism, and its progressive veneer grew in response to demonization by the 1990s anti-globalist left.” In the context of Davos, the Argentinian president’s paean to free markets wasn’t nearly as heretical as right-wing cheerleaders would have you think.
“If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general wellbeing,” Milei said during his roughly 23-minute address. (RELATED: Elon Musk Posts Extremely NSFW Image Praising Milei’s Davos Speech)
The first part is true. The second part is a little murkier. “Better” could mean a mouse trap that’s better at trapping mice or a meth recipe that’s better at getting me high and hooked.
Smartphones are an excellent product — cheap enough that nearly everyone has one and highly effective at holding the user’s attention. We spend almost five hours a day staring at them, according to one study. As a result, we’ve become fatter, more distracted, more porn-addicted, more politically polarized, more mentally ill and more vulnerable to social contagions like transgenderism. Is this “contributing to general wellbeing?” (RELATED: QUAY: Give Kids Cigarettes, Not Smartphones)
Earlier in the speech, Milei rightly attacked the “bloody agenda of abortion,” but completely ignored the root cause of the problem. It’s true that, as Milei said, climate alarmists push abortion on the developing world as a means of population control. But freer markets would not end industrial-scale slaughter of the unborn. The most common reason women give for seeking abortion is to avoid interrupting their schooling or career. In other words, women primarily kill their babies in order to stay in the labor market and maximize their value within it.
To be a doctrinaire capitalist is to be a progressive. In his book “The True and Only Heaven,” the historian Christopher Lasch demonstrated that our idea of progress came into being when classically liberal thinkers “began to argue that human wants, being insatiable, required an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satisfy them.”
And what are the wants we’re seeking to satisfy with our individual freedom and ever-expanding material abundance? Look no further than Donald McClosky, who goes by “Dierdre” these days. McClosky, an influential scholar and proponent of free-market capitalism, described his transgender identity as the fruit of the liberty that system provides. For him, the cultural liberation that enabled him to abandon his wife and children to play dress-up full time is “the fulfillment of a promise” implicit in the classically liberal worldview that Milei shares. (RELATED: ‘Hatred And Violence’: Transgender Professor Reportedly Cancels Debate With Conservative Commentator Michael Knowles)
It’s an ideology that promises liberation but delivers servitude. As we gain greater power to alter, augment and disincarnate ourselves, we also face greater pressure to do so in response to marketing, social trends and market pressures. Whether it’s poor women selling their wombs, short guys getting their legs extended, confused teens having their breasts lopped off or lonely young men finding their only fulfillment in virtual reality — the libertarian worship of markets leads inevitably to transhumanism.
There was, however, one figure at Davos who spoke out in defense of humanity and of genuine liberty. That was The Heritage Foundation’s President Kevin Roberts.
Roberts rejected free-trade dogmatism and praised former President Donald Trump’s hardline trade policy on China, implying that fulfilling, productive work is more important than maximizing consumption. He called for immigration restrictions to defend “the American way of life,” implying that people are more than fungible worker drones and nations are more than economic zones. And most importantly, he defended the “basic biological reality of manhood and womanhood.”
With that last assertion, he affirmed that there ought to be limits on human desires and on the ability of markets to satisfy those desires. There is a type of flourishing proper to human beings that goes beyond the mere freedom to pursue one’s “life project.”
Freedom is an important part of that flourishing. But to treat freedom as the only human good is to make of it a false and infernal god.
Grayson Quay is an editor at the Daily Caller.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.