There is an anarcho-capitalist lurking in the shadows of the Argentine presidency. We're talking about the person responsible for occupying the first positions in the different opinion polls, Javier Milei.
The 51-year-old self-declared anarcho-capitalist economist has said repeatedly that he would break up the ruling class, decrease government spending, and close down the central bank that has a bad monetary policy. He added that this policy is stealing money from Argentines by way of inflation. Doesn't that sound similar to what Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned in the Bitcoin whitepaper?
Of the current other presidents, they've delivered an economy with low growth, job creation rates, and rampant inflation. But there is hope in Milei because he's seen to represent a different third option for beleaguered Argentines.
It’s True
Milei has said in multiple interviews that he is a minarchist, but if given the right technological conditions in the world, he would be an anarchist. He has said that the only reason that up until now it was not possible to have an anarchist society was due to technological limitations. That being said, we now know that we have Bitcoin and its underlying technology, blockchain, and consensus mechanisms that can be seen as enabling technologies for this new social order that the candidate for president dreams of.
Milei is among the most radical members of a libertarian group that saw widespread success in the last election, achieving a seat in Congress. Long ruled by a single party, people reacted with surprise to such a drastic change in ideology and cultural shift.
Until now, economists and the crypto community have been working on the same problems without realizing it. Neither of them has realized that their own work is essentially the same as the other. Yet, it turns out that one can't trust communication in society without solving how to manage a society too. It's just one question (of many) posed in a different way. This problem, and many others that have plagued the economist community, is perhaps what Javier Milei is referring to when he speaks of the impossibility of living true anarchism due to technological limitations.
Just as the crypto community predicted, the future of the world is on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and Milei seems to have realized this. The crypto ecosystem is the biggest promise and hope for dreamers like Javier Milei and Satoshi Nakamoto, who dream of a world without coercion and individual freedoms.
Right now, the state is in charge of the identification, enforcement, and verification of property rights. Basically, what the modern state does is endorse, manage, and verify ledgers of social relations. The state manages the property titles registered. They manage ledgers of social security entitlements. It manages the ledgers of who is a citizen and who can therefore participate in political bargaining, the same thing that blockchain does, but in a transparent, decentralized way, eliminating the need for the state and giving us the best ways to do it, free of coercion and corruption.
Milei has been vocal about the need for decentralization and giving power to the people. Free markets, individual freedoms, decentralization, and other values are shared by the crypto community with economists like Milei. Last year, in the middle of his successful campaign, to be a congressman, Javier used NFTs as a method of funding his campaign, demonstrating once again his sympathy for the whole web3 ecosystem.
Conclusion
The truth is that we don't know if Javier will be able to achieve his goal of becoming president, but what we do know is that if he is successful, he will pave the way for the adoption of these technologies for a reason even more powerful and transcendental than the ones other politicians have seen.