Episode Details

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

There is a video version of this article here, if you prefer.

Here is the world I think we are heading into over the next couple of years.

On one side of the Atlantic, we have Argentina and its new president, Javier Milei, taking a chainsaw to the state in every conceivable way. I was there last month and I fell head over heels in love with the place. Every day it seems another state body is having its budget cut.

It’s like everything I argued for all those years ago in Life After the State - Why We Don’t Need Government is suddenly happening in the real world, and it is wonderful.

The result of all this is an economic boom that is starting to take everyone’s breath away – even free market acolytes are surprised.

You must invest in Argentina. You must have a position. What is happening there is equivalent to Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, China at the turn of the 21st century, or the UK and US at the beginning of the Reagan-Thatcher era.

With libertarianism being the dominant belief system of the Internet, and Milei, the poster boy for anarcho-capitalism, an internet sensation, you can rest assured that Argentina’s success story is not going to be kept a secret. The Internet is going to let everyone know about it.

Then to the north, we have the USA. Who was the first foreign leader to be invited to meet President-elect Donald Trump? You betcha. It was Javier Milei. That tells us where things are going.

We have passionate libertarians Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy taking the knife to government and the deep state – I cannot emphasise enough how gripping a belief system libertarianism is once it takes hold - look what it’s done to me - and it has clearly taken hold of these two.

We also have a Trump administration that is much more organised and wiser than the previous incarnation, as well as more state shrinking. It knows who its enemies are and it seems ready for them.

The US may be “minarchist-light” compared to Argentina, but even so, an economic boom is coming to this most entrepreneurial of countries. A lot of people are going make a lot of money.

So you must also have a position in the US. It is already the world’s biggest economy. How much is it going to grow with so many bureaucratic barriers of state removed?

The Stagnant Side of the Street

Then we turn to the other side of the Atlantic. “The stagnant side of the street” to misquote the song.

Here in the UK, we have gone the other way. We are increasing taxes. We are increasing state spending. We are growing government, and, in doing so, creating more barriers to innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship. Most of Western Europe is the same. These are countries run by blobs, by regulators and planners for regulators and planners, by technocrats who know bette