On 11 February, 2025, I attended a lecture by argentinian professor Gerardo della Paolera titled Argentina’s Political Economy and the Javier Milei Phenomenon at Rijeka’s Faculty of Economics (EFRI)-
I hadn’t googled the lecturer beforehand, wanting to get his theories straight from the horses mouth, to be able to analyze them as such and trying to avoid prejudice.
EFRI’s dean Saša Drezgić, in his opening speech before a full auditorium pointed out to the professor that „the Croatian government recently introduced anti-inflation measures which did work… for a while“. I confess this made me chuckle and think – would Javier Milei call the dean a fiscal degenerate or would he conclude that the dean is simply kissing the hand that appointed him?
The introductory speech may well be „the rudder of our day“ but I again chose to ignore the signs and focus on the professor’s statements only.
In order to give the audience an idea of who Javier Milei is, he opened with a photo of The Economist front page showing Milei and the quote „My contempt for the state is infinite.“ This seemed an attempt at leading the audience to believe that the statement is obviously problematic without actually identifing or clarifying what the problem is in any way.
Introducing the argentinian president the professor did not give any information relevant to Milei’s competence or education in the field of economics. Instead, he thought it more relevant to relate to the students that Milei had shouted that John Maynard Keynes was „an animal“ in front of hundreds of people. He thereby insinuated that the president dehumanizes those he disagrees with and assumed a place of moral superiority, asking the audience rhetorically if we could imagine a polite man communicating in this way, all the while praising Keynes and his contributions to economic thought.
I immediately searched Google for „Javier Milei Keynes animal“ and got no results confirming this had happened. I went over the results in more detail later on and still couldn’t find anything. My results showed Milei had called Keynes a criminal, which sounds as similar to animal in Spanish as it does in English. To be criminal is however a human characteristic and the only mention of animals I could find was Milei referring to „animal spirits“ (espiritus animales), which is a phrase Keynes uses in his book „The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money“ published 1936, and which Milei calls rubbish (basura). Here’s the video:
I’m pretty sure the professor of economics is very familiar with the Keynes quote, just as I am pretty sure that it would be easy to find proof of Milei calling Keynes an animal had he actually done that.
So. Professor Della Paolera had barely begun his lecture when he served us up a lie, and a malicious one at that. It is possible, I thought, that he got the wrong end of the stick as the words do sound similar or he might have taken someone else’s word for it without checking. It’s happened to all of us. Probably not, though, in a lecture hall full of young people who had no reason to mistrust the intellectual honesty of a „distinguished“ Argentinian lecturer describing his homeland’s excentric president.
He was very fluent and even witty on the topic of historical graphs of inflation, as when he compared the economies of Switzerland and Argentina by drawing a straight line in the air, and then an impredictible, chaotic curve. The fluency disappeared when he spoke about Milei, though. He chose his words carefully when describing Milei’s successes, as though trying to diminish their significance but failing against the strength of the numbers. He pointed out a few times that Milei is „not stupid,“ as if we should expect him to be given the professor’s initial remarks.
Saying someone is not stupid is not the same as saying he is clever. It suggests a tendency to denigrate and clearly shows the professor’s bias. All the more if we know that Milei has been called an economic genius and his results in the short time since he took over the Argentinian presidency show his competence.
He stressed that Milei was a pragmatist as though that were a bad thing per se and tendenciously suggested that he was a protectionist inconsistent with his own principles of liberty.
He presented uncertanty as a negative and pesimism inducing thing in the context of Milei’s reforms, but only moments later we were told that economic models cannot really be predictive, which suddenly makes uncertanty sound neutral or acceptable. Just not when Milei does it.
He tried to portray Milei as ideologically identical to Donald Trump by claiming that Milei copied Trump’s campaigning style thus implying that he had just „put on a show“ and misled people. He thereby suggested that if we were pro-Milei that meant we had allowed ourselves to be seduced by the show (mustn’t allow that!), which is a pretentious ploy to present a false dichotomy as the only choice.
He pointed out that Milei had abolished the Ministry for Women, Gender and Diversity (Ministerio de las Mujeres, Genero y Diversidad) and had given a, I quote: „very poor talk on diversity and inclusion“ at Davos in order to ingratiate himself with Trump and Musk. This purposefully omits the fact that another nine ministeries had also been abolished, dropping their number from 18 to just 8. Of course, had the professor mentioned the rest of the ministerial cuts his political spin would not have worked.
There was a Q&A section after the lecture, with the first question being – how does Milei mean to win another term without a political party behind him? A tragic question from a young, well educated person, as it shows their focus on the inability of achieving anything in this country without belonging to a political party. The professor replied that Milei’s voters come from varied social and political strata, but failed to mention the scale of popular support for Milei in Argentina and abroad which I’m sure he is familiar with.
The second question came from a young alumnus of EFRI: can bitcoin become legal tender in Argentina? Professor Della Paolera responded that this was not possible and that the alumnus had asked the question only because this was a topic of his particular interest. However, it is possible to pay using bitcoin in certain places in Argentina, same as in Croatia. The professor simply cannot know that bitcoin will absolutely never be legal tender alongside pesos and dollars, and it is not reasonable to claim that it’s not and never will be.
The following question had to do with Milei’s abolishing of the tax agency APIF (Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos) to which the professor replied with some cinicism that the agency had not been abolished, but simply renamed to ARCA (Agencia de Recaudación y Control Aduanero). He did not further elaborate on which services had been abolished and which kept, again implying to the audience that Milei is a man of inconsistent principles, who does not keep promises and turns everything into a PR stunt.
The dean then put a sudden stop to the proceedings which prevented me from asking how were Milei’s actions in office similar to what the Austrian school of economics teaches – and in what ways exactly.
I believe the professor’s narrative could make those not familiar with the topic think that Milei was a dangerous madman performing some kind of shock experiment, and wanted to put the question to him in order to show that the experiment was very much based in valid economic theories and practices.
Sadly, the professor failed to give a single fact-based answer to any of the questions. Combined with the opening remarks about our government’s (temporarily) „successful curbing of inflation“ and the fact that the students’ participation was logged by the Faculty, that might suggest his lecture was more of an attempt at indoctrination.
Indoctrination at universities is precisely the reason Milei gives for wanting to wean them off the public teat; and I got to see in person why that is last Tuesday. What was served up to these students was not science or the truth but keyneseyan political propaganda.
Naturally, leaving the hall I shouted „Viva la libertad, carajo!“
An unexpected message, as their faces showed. Wait till they read this review.
One thing I can be sure of is that Milei would react by saying: Ay Gerardo, Gerardo… para eso te pagamos, inutil? With cursing like he does here: