Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum 2025
Kristoffer Mousten Hansen on “Javier Milei and the Austrian School”
Reported by Sebastian Wang

This was one of the most necessary speeches of the conference. Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, has built his public reputation by calling himself a disciple of the Austrian School. He waves Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State at rallies, boasts of having read Human Action “twenty times.” He is lionised by journalists as an “anarcho-capitalist president.” But the question posed by Kristoffer Hansen was whether Milei’s policies have anything in common with the economics of Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe. The answer, delivered with understated force, was that they do not.

Milei’s economic education was in growth theory. Here Hansen noted that he has absorbed the assumptions of the neoclassical mainstream. In that tradition, economic growth presupposes increasing returns from monopolies. Yet monopolies, we are told, are a “market failure.” The puzzle of growth becomes how to square this circle: monopoly seems both necessary and destructive. Rothbard’s chapter on monopoly in Man, Economy, and State demolishes this fallacy, showing that monopoly prices and monopoly outcomes make sense only within a framework of state privilege. A free market cannot generate the coercive monopolies of textbook legend. Milei has half-noticed this, but Hansen showed that he still frames development in essentially neoclassical terms. He looks for growth in “free-market monopolies” and technological spillovers, not in the plain Austrian logic that treats monopoly as a phantom once state coercion is stripped away.

The deeper breach comes in his monetary theory. Here Milei has been most visible. His flagship proposal is forced dollarisation: the abolition of the peso and its replacement by the U.S. dollar. On the campaign trail, this made a crude kind of sense—anything seemed better than the hyperinflating peso—but as Hansen pointed out, the dollar is not a sound currency. It is the instrument of the very empire Milei claims to resist. More fundamentally, Austrian theory does not recommend swapping one fiat for another by decree. The consistent policy would be to abolish inflation by ending central bank issue, and to allow Argentinians to use whatever currency they find most to their taste. Milei instead proposes to impose the dollar, which is not liberalisation but another state command.

His reasoning rests on a version of the “backing theory.” He believes that money derives its value from the central bank’s assets, and that inflation is caused by its purchase of “bad” securities. This, Hansen showed, is an echo of the old real-bills doctrine and is “completely un-Austrian.” For Mises and Rothbard, the value of money is determined by demand on the market, not by state bookkeeping. Milei’s scheme imports the very errors Austrians have spent a century fighting.

On fiscal and regulatory policy, Milei sounds more attractive. He speaks of deregulation, privatisation, and tax reform. But again, Hansen warned, these are framed within the Washington Consensus—the technocratic agenda of the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. The aim is not to liberate Argentinians from the state, but to make the state “financially sound, a good investment.” It is the state retooled as a firm, borrowing cheaply to satisfy foreign creditors. This is not anarcho-capitalism; it is the neoliberal playbook dressed in libertarian costume.

Meanwhile, the monetary statistics tell their own story. Even under Milei, the money supply in Argentina has been growing at five percent per month. The peso continues to depreciate, though lagging behind the domestic price level, pricing Argentina’s exports out of global markets. An IMF loan props up capital outflows, loading the country with new debt. Hansen’s verdict was brutal: “This policy is extremely destructive and leaves Argentina saddled with debt.” Whatever Milei claims to be, he is in practice the latest manager of Argentinian decline, inserting Austrian catchphrases into a framework that remains both Keynesian and dependent on Washington.

The critique matters. Milei has raised expectations among libertarians worldwide that an Austrian revival is under way in Latin America. Hansen’s dismantling of his economic foundations suggests otherwise. It is not enough for a politician to cite Mises at rallies, or to denounce socialism on television. The test is policy. By that standard, Milei’s economics are not Austrian but a pastiche of neoclassical growth theory, real-bills monetary doctrine, and IMF-style structural adjustment. He is less a Rothbardian revolutionary than another statesman promising sound money while delivering depreciation and debt.

Listening, I was reminded of Hoppe’s warning that the worst fate for radical ideas is to be co-opted by the state. If Milei is allowed to stand as the representative of Austrian economics, the failure of his policies will be taken as a failure of Mises himself. Hansen’s lecture was a timely act of intellectual hygiene, insisting that we draw a line between genuine Austrian theory and the counterfeit offered in Buenos Aires.

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