Niall Ferguson Talks to Javier Milei

At the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s president explains his radical plan to make Argentina ‘the world’s freest country.’

“BUILDING IS VERY HARD. DESTROYING IS VERY EASY,” ARGENTINE PRESIDENT JAVIER MILEI TOLD NIALL FERGUSON.

The prerequisite for an economic miracle is an economic disaster. As I wrote in these pages late last month, Argentine president Javier Milei inherited just such a disaster from his Peronist predecessor in December 2023: a currency on the brink of hyperinflation, a contracting economy, a government reliant on the International Monetary Fund.

What he has achieved in the subsequent year and a half is one of the wonders of the world economy today. (Read here; it really is a miracle.)

But—as he himself acknowledged during our conversation last week at the presidential palace in Buenos Aires—it is too early to celebrate an Argentine economic miracle. Political obstacles remain, not just sustaining his achievement thus far, but also launching the next and crucial phase of his radical plan to make Argentina “the world’s freest country.”

The Milei I met was not what I had expected. On social media, he presents himself as a rock star, cavorting onstage, yelling into the mic, tossing his mop of dark hair. Most profiles emphasize his eccentricities, most famously the pack of cloned dogs he has named after his favorite economists.

In the crepuscular light of the presidential office in the Casa Rosada (the Pink House), where the shutters are kept closed as he dislikes bright light, he cuts a very different figure. He is soberly dressed in a dark suit and blue tie. He has a smooth routine for greeting visitors, pointing out the chainsaw that has become the symbol of his drastic cuts in government spending—as if it were time-honored presidential regalia. Photographs are taken and we sit down at a large, glass-topped table.

Only when Milei begins to answer my questions does it become clear that he is no ordinary president.

To call Milei professorial would be an insult. He has always been too much of a dissident—too libertarian on economics, too conservative on social questions—to have played any part in modern academic life. But he is, first and foremost, an intellectual, a man so in love with ideas that nothing excites him as much—certainly not the formal trappings of presidential authority. Yet he is also a man of the people, who relishes his occasional lapses into profane language. And he is learning, late in life, the realities of South American politics.

I spent an hour and a half talking to President Milei. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:

Niall Ferguson: What have you learned since becoming president that you didn’t know before?

Javier Milei: I always thought that politicians were truly horrid and despicable beings. When I took office after several months as a member of Congress, a journalist interviewed me and asked me what I thought about politicians. I replied that I had been wrong. And the journalist launched into a strong defense of journalists, interrupting my answer. What I wanted to say was that I had been wrong because I had fallen short of stating the full truth, which is that politicians are far worse than I could have imagined.

One of the things that bugs me about this job is that I need to spend about 50 percent of my time fighting those who lie, defame, and slander just for the sake of destroying. You know, building is very hard. Destroying is very easy. So it’s not just that you need to build and move forward. As you move forward, you also need to defend what you’re doing. And that is a great waste of energy.

NF: And do you think that the biggest threat to your reforms comes from that political opposition—principally the Partido Justicialista, the heirs of President Juan Perón’s nationalist-populist movement, which has dominated Argentine politics for most of the postwar period?

JM: It’s not just the political opposition that is destructive. We call them the party of the state, the party of government. What one needs to understand is we are fighting to change the direction Argentina was going in for the past 80 or 90 years, almost 100 years, I would even say. Basically, that means breaking up the status quo. There are many groups that benefit from the old system. This includes not only thieving politicians; it also involves crony businesspeople and corrupt media. It also involves trade union leaders. And it also involves a whole bunch of professionals who try to set the agenda, and who are also subservient to that party of the state. So obviously, whoever tries to disrupt a status quo that benefits these guys so much will always be fought by them.

Politicians are far worse than I could have imagined. —Javier Milei

If you allow me, I will now be a little crude in my manner of speaking. There’s a very famous book on economic policy in Argentina by Richard Mallon and Juan Sourrouille. It’s called Economic Policymaking in a Conflict Society. I said to Professor Juan Carlos de Pablo, when we got together on Sunday, “We need to write a new book, along the same topic line, but the title would now be Economic Policymaking in a Society of Sons of Bitches.” Fortunately, the foundations of the economy are very strong, which allows us to face these kinds of attack very confidently. But they’re desperate, it being an election year, and they’re capable of anything.

NF: Is it true to say that your response to this “society of sons of bitches” is to establish rules? A balanced budget rule, for example? But these rules are very much associated with you as president. They’re not constitutional rules. So in addition to your rules, and your extraordinary personality, what are the other sources of strength on your side, on the side of reform?

JM: Our government is working on three paths. One is actual government business, administration. When they say to us, “We’ve seen this before,” we say, “You’ve never seen this in your entire life. Because never in your life have you seen fiscal equilibrium, a stricter control on the amount of money, and a healthy central bank balance sheet with a free-floating exchange rate.” So that’s the part linked to actual government administration.

The second path has to do with politics and policies, specifically, to develop tools in order to be competitive. And you need to have your own tools or instruments in order not to be subject to blackmail. Today, our party has a presence in the country, and we can take part in elections with our own tickets and ballots throughout the country. So we are not currently in a position of weakness that would subject us to constant blackmail.

Now, our economic achievements are truly impressive. We had a fiscal deficit [including central bank liabilities] of 15 percentage points of GDP in a country which, in the previous 123 years, had always suffered from fiscal deficits. Inflation was running at 1.5 percent daily. We made the largest fiscal adjustment in history. We caused public spending to drop by 30 percent. So when we undertook that adjustment, they said to us that we would be plunging the economy into a recession that would be even worse than during the Great Depression.

That’s not what happened. In the first quarter of 2025, the economy grew by 5.7 percent, and in the second quarter, it’s been close to 8 percent. And the poverty rate went down by over 22 percentage points, which means we have lifted some 11 million people out of poverty. And 2 million children are no longer poor. So when you see such achievements, it becomes clear why there’s talk around the world about the Argentine economic miracle.

But even that alone is not enough. These achievements are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. They have to be coupled with the culture war, which is our third path. Otherwise, when the government and the administration is over, it all vanishes into thin air. The only way to ensure the sustainability of these reforms is by fighting the culture war.

NF: You have combined radical libertarian economic reforms with the kind of social media presence that very few politicians have been able to match. Is this your secret weapon for getting young people to support the reform program?

JM: One virtue I do recognize that I have is that I’m a great disseminator. The first ones to boost the liberal-libertarian movement in Argentina were actually young people. Why? First, because young people rebel against the status quo. Argentina was hyper-contaminated by socialist ideas—a sort of reloaded wokeism. And so naturally, the rebellion had to be libertarian. Secondly, youth has been exposed for less time to brainwashing in public education. (Regardless of whether the schools are managed by the state itself or managed privately, the syllabi, the curricula are set by the state.)

The other factor has been social media, because young people no longer watch TV. They communicate through social media. This phenomenon was supercharged because of the Covid pandemic. First, with the onset of the pandemic, the use of social media got a great boost. Then there was a rebellion against the health dictatorship, the infectocracy, one of the most brutal experiments in history. At the same time, the fact of being locked up meant that parents and children were basically confined in the same place. And they started to talk to their parents about Milei. And the parents would say to them, “We know all about this liberalism, or even worse, neoliberalism.” You don’t like what’s on TV? You can channel-hop. But you can’t channel-hop with your kids. And, at some point, something clicked in the heads of parents.

NF: Is this story unique to Argentina because Argentina’s economic experience was so bad and the pathologies of the state were so extreme? Or can Mileismo be exported to other countries?

JM: I think it can be exported, because basically what we have proven is that mainstream economic analysis is subservient to those thieving politicians. There are the really obscene cases, such as Keynesianism. But even neoclassical economics also has a window that allows state interventionism. And I think about The Road to Serfdom of [Friedrich] Hayek, and the path that leads to increasing doses of socialism. In fact, neoclassical economists consider that taxes need to be levied in order to finance public goods and that state intervention exists because market failures exist. And here my view—which has to do with the Austrian school of economics—is key. To me, the market is a social cooperation process in which property rights are voluntarily exchanged. Consequently, by definition, there’s no such thing as a market failure. And therefore, there’s no reason for state intervention.

NF: So your vision is of a radically reduced economic role for the government. That implies that you’re just beginning the process of reform. And that if you were to be very successful in the midterm elections and then to secure a second term as president, there would be much more radical reform to come.

JM: Have no doubt.

NF: Can you give me a sense of what those radical reforms would be that would take Argentina closer to your ideal of anarcho-capitalism?

JM: From my vantage point, the existence of the state is due to a combination of the technology problem—the fact that information technology has not yet fully been applied to the things the public sector does—and the fact that the insurance market is incomplete. The way I see it, the work of the state is a form of insurance. That’s what makes it exist in the short term. But as technology advances, and as insurance markets become complete, there should be a trend toward the disappearance of the state. And that is my ambition.

Our goal is to become the world’s freest country, and the second-generation reforms are the tax reform, the labor reform, and greater opening up to the world in terms of trade. And here the sequence is also very important. First, I will lower taxes, as that will make us more competitive and foster growth. Then, I will make the labor market more competitive in line with the tax reform, which allows for the creation of new jobs with better wages, which in turn allows me to open up the economy without creating unemployment. That virtuous circle leads to more growth, bringing down public spending relative to GDP. So I can again lower tax, and again move toward a better labor reform. And I can open the economy even further, and I can generate growth. And so I enter this loop of ongoing continuous reform that you can sustain with political muscle and with success.

NF: There is a puzzle for me. Because the world as a whole is going in a different direction, away from market solutions. How does your relationship with President Donald Trump survive, when you are a libertarian committed to economic openness and he pursues tariff policies and industrial policy? You seem to be going in fundamentally different directions. And yet your relationship is very close.

JM: Well, there are two dimensions to this issue. The first one is that we both face the same enemy, which is socialism of different stripes, either communists or wokeism. So, those are our enemies, and that’s clear. Now, the second matter has to do with the fact that you can’t pursue economic theory in the void. You also need to understand geopolitics.

I could just open up trade and go truly radical, à la Adam Smith. But would you be indifferent to who is left in charge of the world’s whole uranium production? Would you have peace of mind if all uranium production was in the hands of North Korea or Iran? And so [economists’ trade] models are not just very rudimentary in terms of incorporating preferences, but also they fail to consider risk, they fail to consider intertemporality, and they fail to consider geopolitics.

NF: Clearly an Adam Smith regime makes no sense if China plays by its own rules of mercantilism. China is pursuing a global strategy. And South America is part of that strategy.

JM: I’d say that is a great mitigating circumstance for what Donald Trump is doing. My own experience ex ante is that I would not consider someone who’s made it to the presidency of the United States stupid. Even less so a giant like that Viking, my dear Donald Trump.

NF: Do you see the world as being in a new cold war between China and the United States?

JM: What I see is a world that will continue to group into regional segments. The U.S. will have leadership in the Americas region, China will lead Asia, and Russia will have its own path. But the situation in Europe, in view of wokeism’s intellectual contamination, is quite complex.

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-talks-to-javier-milei