According to the United Nations Hunger Project, of the 150,000 people who die daily from all causes in the world, 16 percent, 24,000 people, die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes.
Modern capitalism of the 20th century – thanks to the neoclassical economists that Milei criticizes – eradicated famines in the West while they did occur at the beginning of communism, both in Mao’s China and in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
But in the 19th century, the last great famine in the West not caused by wars was that of Ireland in 1845, when half of the 8 million inhabitants of that country ate potatoes and a fungus rendered part of a crop unusable, causing only one year Ireland lost 25% of its population. And it was never able to recover: even today the total population of both the Republic of Ireland and the northern part of Ireland, which is integrated into Great Britain, is still one million fewer than in 1845.
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But at the same time Ireland is the example of economic success that Javier Milei considers because, while in 2008 it was one of the unviable countries in Europe and its euro, when the acronym Piigs was coined in English, for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, all countries with deficit and balance of payments problems, since then, in just 16 years their gross product multiplied by ten by drastically modifying their income tax: from 50% to only 12.5%, making Several multinationals will set up their European headquarters in that country, especially the same technology companies (Gafam: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) that Milei went to seduce on his trip to San Francisco.
Two stones in the shoe of Javier Milei’s theories: monopolies and starvation
Ireland is almost a tax haven, it competes in Europe with Luxembourg by attracting investments with low taxes, similar to Uruguay in South America. Which might be a strategy for small countries, but Scandinavian countries are also small in both population and geography and are successful with the reverse tax system: the highest tax rate in the world. And for an anarcho-capitalist like Milei, although tax havens are still States, the lower tax rate brings them closer to their sub-ideal: the minarchism of the smallest possible State.
The European Union is litigating against Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft – the Gafam – for “undue tax advantages” while Germany, Italy, France and Spain demand a minimum tax floor for the digital giants, accused of practicing unfair tax competition ( tax dumping). And in September 2023, the European Union approved the Digital Markets Law, which regulates monopolistic practices and the diversion of profits to countries with lower taxes. There Javier Milei finds an opportunity, going to offer Argentina with the RIGI as the Ireland of the southern hemisphere and, in his conference at Stanford University, he once again defended the “usefulness” of monopolies (he repeats like a mantra: there are no failures market, the State is never needed to intervene because even monopolies are “useful” to the market).
Another of Milei’s repeated catchphrases that clashes with common sense is his reference to “starving.” He did so on this trip to San Francisco when he said: “There is going to come a time when people are going to die of hunger. Somehow he is going to decide something so as not to die. I don’t need (the State) to intervene. “Someone is going to solve it.”
He had already said the previous week, when responding to a journalist at the exit of the Rural, that it was false that people were not making ends meet: “If people were not making ends meet, they would be dying in the streets.” ; and before, in the debate with Grabois that I moderated, the following dialogue occurred:
GRABOIS: It’s not a capacity problem. If you have to choose between not eating and being exploited for 18 hours, or 14 hours or ten hours, I would choose to be exploited. But that is not my will.
MILEI: Why not? You can also choose to starve and die.
FONTEVECCHIA: Javier, do you sincerely defend the right to die of hunger?
M: Everyone can do whatever they want with their life.
F: But honestly in that situation a person is not only made to work 18 hours…
M: If you have the possibility of working and someone chose it, they preferred not to work and have their children die of hunger.
F: Does this seem like an ethical choice to you?
M: I earn my living working.
But the opinions in that debate, when the possibilities of Milei becoming president were remote, could well be framed in an academic discussion, therefore theoretical, and the “function” of dying of hunger is a counterfactual conditional, as when the classical economist Thomas Maltus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1798 wrongly predicted that the population would grow geometrically as long as food production arithmetically, making – simplified – that it was necessary for more people to die because “the population is necessarily limited by the Livelihoods”. Academic disquisitions that outside that area sound insensitive, lacking humanity and minimal empathy, much more so when the person who verbalizes them has the responsibility of ensuring that this does not happen and that no one dies of hunger.
To make matters worse, it was Milei’s turn to refer twice to dying of hunger the same week in which, after Grabois’s denunciation (as if the debate between them in 2022 continued), made publicly by the president of the Episcopal Conference, Monsignor Oscar Look, about the fact that the Ministry of Human Capital had retained 5 thousand tons of food without distributing it concluded with Justice forcing the Executive to report the contents of that deposit after Patricia Bullrich first (what would the Minister of Security have to do? getting into issues of another ministry?) and the spokesperson Manuel Adorni were later exposed as lying when saying that they were non-perishable foods intended for emergency stock, when it was finally verified that there were 339,867 kilos of powdered milk that expired in July, for example.
This time Ariadne’s Thread woven together hunger and technology, Ireland and Argentina, which leads – metaphorically – to the mythical minotaur of libertarian theories.
