Javier Milei warns Davos: Social justice puts the West ‘in danger’

Argentine President Javier Milei warned a forum of international economic elites that their growing embrace of “collectivist” ideology in the name of social justice has endangered Western society.

“I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger,” Milei told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, many leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.”

It was a debut on the international diplomatic circuit befitting Milei’s background as a libertarian populist who admires Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. The newly-elected leader, who rose to power last year as Argentine voters rejected a center-left government that presided over a 143% inflation rate, used his address to spread the gospel of libertarianism and denounce the vision of “social justice” that he regards as a threat to justice and prosperity.

President of Argentina Javier Milei delivers a speech at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is taking place in Davos from Jan. 15 until Jan. 19, 2024. (AP)

“The problem is that social justice is not just and it doesn’t contribute, either, to the general well-being,” he said through an interpreter. “Those who promote social justice, the advocates, start with the idea that the whole economy is a pie that can be shared differently. But that pie is not a given.”

His line of argument ran contrary to the organizing themes of the forum. The Davos planners set the stage by affirming the need for “government, business, and civil society [to] come together around a new economic framework to avoid a decade of low growth and put people at the center of a more prosperous trajectory.” They emphasized the necessity of “a long-term systemic approach to achieve the objectives of a carbon-neutral and nature-positive world by 2050.”

Yet Milei, armed with a litany of statistics about the exponential economic growth that has unfolded since the Industrial Revolution, denounced such aspirations as a dream that can only empower “the bureaucrat in a luxury office” at the expense of the rest of society.

“Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were forced to change their agenda,” Milei said. “They left behind the class struggles based on the economic system, and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts, which are just as harmful to life as a community and to economic growth.”

Those substitutes, he said, include “the ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman,” the supposed struggle of “humans against nature,” and the “bloody abortion agenda,” which he implied has a link to environmentalist desires for population control. He proposed an update to the definition of socialism — “an economic system where the state owns the means of production” — to encompass a variety of contemporary government activity.

“Today’s states don’t have to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals,” he said. “With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct the so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.”

If Milei took aim mostly at left-wing policy priorities, he made clear his belief that the fundamental “collectivist” era is a widespread phenomenon in contemporary politics.  

“A good deal of the generally accepted political offers in most Western countries, our collectivist variants — whether they proclaim to be openly communist, fascist, Nazis, socialists, social democrats, National Socialists, Democrat Christians, and Christian Democrats, Neo-Keynesians, progressive, populists, nationalists, or globalists,” he said. “At bottom, there are no major differences.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The new president ended with an adulatory message for “all the business people” in the room and around the world.

“Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges,” he said. “You are heroes. You’re the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen. … And rest assured that, as from today, Argentina is your staunch, unconditional ally. Thank you very much. And long live freedom, damn it!”