“Because it must never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that failed in all the countries where it was tried,” Milei said. “It was an economic failure. It was a social failure. It was a cultural failure.

Argentine President Javier Milei delivered an address fiercely condemning socialism at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, rejecting the “radical feminist” and “environmental”  agendas fueled by socialism as well.

Milei urged world leaders to embrace capitalism as an alternative.

Milei, a libertarian economist, explained in a roughly 20-minute speech how socialism ultimately leads to poverty, how the state “is not the solution,” but rather “the problem itself,” and how leftism has co-opted Western government institutions to further its agendas.

Wednesday’s speech was Milei’s first international address since taking office in December.

“I am here today to tell you that the West is in danger. It is in danger because those who are supposed to uphold the values of the West find themselves co-opted by a worldview that inexorably leads to socialism, and consequently, to poverty,” Milei said in the opening of his speech.

The Argentine president lamented that world leaders have abandoned the ideas of freedom, embracing instead several versions of leftism which he categorized as being versions of the same ideology of “collectivism.”

Without naming specific cases, Milei explained that some had embraced such leftist ideas out of a desire to help others while others had done so to try to “belong” to a privileged caste.”SUBSCRIBE

“We are here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world but, on the contrary, they are their cause,” Milei said. “Believe me, there is no one better than us Argentines to bear witness to these two issues.”

Milei continued by recounting how Argentina, after having become a world power in 1860, had seen itself become impoverished over the past 100 years by embracing collectivist ideas.

“They say that capitalism is bad because it is individualistic and that collectivism is good because it is altruistic, and consequently they strive for ‘social justice.’ Milei said. “But this concept, which in the first world has become fashionable in the last decade, has been a constant in my country’s political discourse for more than 80 years.”

He continued:

The problem is that social justice is not only not fair, but also does not contribute to the general welfare.

On the contrary, it is an intrinsically unjust idea, because it is violent. It is unjust because the state is financed by taxes and taxes are levied coercively — or can any of us choose not to pay taxes?

Which means that the state is financed through coercion, and the greater the tax burden, the greater the coercion.”

Milei continued his address by stating that the world is at its best today thanks to capitalism. 

“There has never been, in all of human history, a time of greater prosperity than the one we live in today,” Milei said. “The world today is freer, richer, more peaceful, and more prosperous than at any other time in our history.”

Milei reiterated his opening warning that the West is in danger, asserting that the political and economic establishments in countries that are supposed to defend free market values, private property, and other libertarian ideas are instead “opening the doors to socialism” and potentially condemning their peoples to “poverty, misery, and stagnation.”

“It also took the lives of 150 million human beings.” ##

By Christian Caruzo | Breitbart News – January 17, 2024