“The Bad Thing Is Not Being Free,” Argentina’s Milei Tells Stanford Audience
Plus, the money behind anti-Israel protests; Hong Kong verdicts; NRA v. Vullo
The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, was in Silicon Valley yesterday, bringing his message of freedom to a state—California—and a place—an elite university campus—that could benefit from it.
Martin Varsavsky has posted a 4 minute video clip on X from one meeting that gives you a flavor of Milei’s themes: “I’ve also been quite explicit as far as our foreign policy. I openly clearly stated my alignment with the United States and Israel….One of the things I used to do before going into politics was demonstrating how capitalism was superior to socialism, not only in terms of economic performance but in terms of the values that it embraced. In fact, when you take the discussion to that level, you can see that socialism is based on envy, on hatred, on resentment, on inequality before the law, and that it can even go as far as murder.”
Milei also spoke at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
In the Stanford speech, Milei mentioned Ludwig von Mises. “Mises pointed out that there were only two economic systems, in polar forms, right? That is, on the one hand, free enterprise capitalism, and on the other end, real socialism,” Milei said.
“The presence of socialism — what it does is to abort the process of discovery. And that is not a minor issue. In fact, Hayek pointed out that the market is a process of discovery,” Milei said. “This is very important, because the interference of the state, what it ends up doing is breaking the process of discovery.”
Milei defined the idea of a market: “the market is a process of social cooperation where rights of property are exchanged voluntarily.”
“The bad thing is not being free,” he said. “In defense of the right to life, freedom, property and based on the principle of non aggression. What is the problem with that? Who is against that? God, only you could be successful serving others with better quality, a better price.”
“So let’s not be afraid. Let’s move forward and be optimistic,” he said. “We don’t know what the future will be like. The only thing we know is that it will be much better if we remove the state from our lives.”
An ETF that tracks Argentina, ARGT, is up about 45 percent since Milei was elected November 19, 2023.
Recent work: “Trump’s First Big Second-Term Foreign Policy Decision Is Between Senators Vance and Cotton” is the headline over my latest column in the New York Sun. “The two potential running mates offer diametrically opposed views on America’s role in the world,” the subheadline says. Please check the column out over at the New York Sun if the future of Republican foreign policy is among your interests.
The money behind the anti-Israel protests: The standard line from the left-leaning media is that the big money is on the pro-Israel side of the campus protest wars.
The more you dig into it, though, the more big money becomes apparent on the other side of the anti-israel side of it. This is coming out in bits and pieces but is worth putting together.
In NH Journal, Damien Fisher reports on James “Fergie” Chambers, who put up bail for three people linked to a group called Palestine Action US and charged with attacking an Elbit Systems of America facility in Merrimack, N.H.
Chambers is a member of the Cox family, worth about $34 billion, according to reports. Chambers essentially negotiated an early inheritance with the family trust, allowing him to walk away with a reported $250 million which he used to start a Marxist commune in the Berkshires, as well as a “People’s Gym” in the Upper Valley. He also supports left-wing protests and funds bail for activists like Walsh.
Chambers denied being a Palestine Action US leader, though he’s often described as a co-founder.
“PAL Action is not now and never was an ‘org,’” Chambers wrote NHJournal. “It is a social media platform that shares news of direct actions people have taken against Elbit or other weapons companies. We’ve shared things in Cali, VA, TX, MA, NH, etc. If someone sends us [something], we share it. Bears zero connection to who did it.”
When it comes to Palestine Action USA, Chambers is just another member of the organization that isn’t an organization, he said. Chambers got attention in recent months for his outspoken opposition to Israel, America and capitalism, among others.
“Israel does not deserve to exist,” Chambers told LA Magazine. “It is a false state propped up by the West.” (Vanity Fair also has a big piece about Chambers in its May issue.)
In the Daily Beast, William Bredderman and Noah Kirsch report on the Bafrayung Fund, “among the most consistent supporters of the Palestinian Youth Movement, which played a major role in the rash of encampments that spread through U.S. colleges this year.”:
Behind the Bafrayung Fund is a 33-year-old Bay Area resident, Rachel Gelman, scion of the family behind the Levi Strauss company and cousin to Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY). The money for the Bafrayung Fund comes from just two sources: Gelman herself, and the Morningstar Philanthropic Foundation—the personal charity of her parents, a pair of major Democratic Party donors.
I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in April (“Some Anti-Israel Protesters Are Paid”) about the role that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Soros Open Society is playing in backing Education for Just Peace in the Middle East, which is paying some of the key anti-Israel activists as fellows.
One of the ringleaders of the anti-Israel forces at Harvard has been Josh Willcox, son of Dubai-based perfume mogul Jo Malone, who sold a company to Estee Lauder in 1999.
Anyway, The Editors have nothing against wealth and nothing against intergenerational wealth transfer. It’s not any of these people’s fault that their parents or earlier generations in their family amassed fortunes or passed along some of the money to them. (Though it is a cautionary tale about the importance of trying to pass along values along with the money.) But it all does tend to support the Washington Monthly analysis that these anti-Israel protests are more prevalent on campuses with fewer Pell Grant recipients, or, as I put it, that anti-Israel activism is a luxury belief.
Hong Kong 47 verdicts: Fourteen of 16 activists and former politicians charged in Hong Kong under the Beijing-imposed National Security Law for their alleged participation in a conspiracy to subvert state power were found guilty today in a ruling that confirmed Hong Kong’s status as part of the Chinese Communist dictatorship. Thirty-one others of the 47 had pleaded guilty.
“Today’s verdict will only further tarnish Hong Kong’s international reputation. It sends a message that Hong Kongers can no longer safely and meaningfully participate in peaceful political debate,” the United Kingdom’s Minister for the Indo-Pacific, Rt Hon. Anne Marie Trevelyan, said.
Even the two acquitted defendants will need to report to the police every month, Radio Free Asia reported.
The chairs of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey and Senator Merkley of Oregon, said, “The Hong Kong government is again bulldozing the freedoms and rule of law that once made it so vital and prosperous. These verdicts are yet another sign that the Chinese Communist Party is pulling the strings, as its extreme efforts to restrict democracy and human rights now dictate Hong Kong’s political and judicial institutions.”
Smith and Merkley said, “We will continue to speak up and defend the Hong Kong people against the Chinese Communist Party’s blatant oppression and authoritarianism.” The members of Congress are certainly speaking up, but how much actual defending they are doing is debatable, as the verdicts indicate. Needed is an alternative approach that might put the Chinese Communist Party itself on defense.
National Rifle Association v. Vullo: That Supreme Court that the left keeps inaccurately insisting is split on a partisan basis today delivered a unanimous opinion, written by Justice Sotomayor, finding that New York’s superintendent of the Department of Financial Services, Maria Vullo, would violate the First Amendment if she in fact used her regulatory powers to force insurance companies not to do business with the NRA.
“The complaint, assessed as a whole, plausibly alleges that Vullo threatened to wield her power against those refusing to aid her campaign to punish the NRA’s gun-promotion advocacy. If true, that violates the First Amendment,” the opinion says.
There have been barrels full of ink spilled on the supposed First Amendment threat posed by colleges refusing to allow anti-Israel demonstrators to camp out overnight in the middle of campus. Yet here a top New York State official was threatening business partners of an advocacy group in way that a unanimous Supreme Court says is unconstitutional, and the campus free-speech-absolutist-industrial complex didn’t exactly make it a high priority issue.
The justices were reversing a Second Circuit panel of Judges Pooler, Chin, and Carney, who had found Vullo was within her authority in her dealings with the insurance companies, simply carrying out her regulatory responsibilities, “doing her job in good faith.”
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