Milei's full 2026 Davos Speech [ENGLISH DUB]

Good afternoon everyone. I am here before you standing before you today to tell you in the most unequivocal and categorical terms that Makaveli is dead. For years our thinking was distorted presenting us with a false dilemma when designing public policies where one had to choose between political efficiency as opposed to respect for the ethical and moral values of the West. As Professor Jesús Huerta de Soto points out in his work on dynamic efficiency, from this point of view efficiency is not compatible with various schemes of equity or justice but rather arises solely and exclusively from one of them which is based on respect for private property and the entrepreneurial function. Therefore the opposition between the dimensions of efficiency and justice is false and erroneous. That is what is just cannot be inefficient. Nor can what be just and it is that from the perspective of dynamic analysis justice and efficiency are two sides of the same coin. Without a doubt the one who anticipated this situation with the greatest clarity was Murray Rothbard by proposing the connection that exists between the dynamic conception of economic efficiency and the realm of ethics. Rothbard considered it essential to previously establish the appropriate ethical framework that drives dynamic efficiency given the lack of knowledge we have regarding the ends means and utility functions that exist in reality. Thus for Rothbard to which I subscribe even from my role as president of the great nation of Argentina only the ethical principles underlying western culture can serve as a criterion of efficiency when making decisions on public policy matters. Put in blunt terms when designing public policies it is inadmissible from the point of view of ethics and morality to sacrifice justice on the altar of efficiency. This slogan in favor of values is not only above economic efficiency but it is even far above even more so than political utilitarianism. Thus by setting aside ethical and moral values this leads to policies that are not only unjust but also lead to collapse not only economically but also socially to such an extent that it could end up destroying western civilization itself. Therefore, in 2024 at this forum, I pointed out that the West was in danger. In turn, in my presentation of 2025, I showed that the agendas and policies that were being promoted from the various international organizations and forums were nothing more and nothing less than a whole set of socialist policies, elegantly wrapped to deceive people with noble and beautiful souls, with good intentions, but with the same catastrophic results as always. That is why we must never forget the words of Thomas Sowell about socialism to which he recognized the merit that it sounds very nice but whose flip side is that it always ends badly, horribly badly. Without going any further and beyond the continuous disasters caused by socialism during the 20th century, we see the apparent damage caused in Venezuela and not only by an 80% drop in its GDP, but much worse still in light of the establishment of a bloody narco dictatorship whose terrorist tentacles expanded throughout our American continent. Therefore, today more than ever, in the face of the ethical and moral degradation that the West is going through as a result of having embraced the new socialist agenda, it is necessary to resolve and push the ideas of freedom. However, unlike the way it was approached in the past, which was based on a utilitarian approach, today the defense of the free enterprise capitalist system must be based on its ethical and moral virtue. This is as Israel Kirzner points out today's socialists do not deny the superiority of capitalism in production. They question it for being unjust. Therefore, it is not enough for the system to be more productive because if its root were unjust, capitalism would not deserve to be defended. Therefore, today I will show you that free enterprise capitalism is not only more productive, but it is also the only system that is just. In turn, I will show you that there is no dilemma between political utilitarianism and value-based politics because if they were in conflict, it implies that the foundations of political utilitarianism must be discarded as unjust. Therefore, this will imply that if we want to escape our dark present, we must once again draw inspiration from Greek philosophy, embrace Roman law, and return to Judeo-Christian values, which will allow us to save the West. A large part of human conflicts arise from a failed interrelationship between natural law and positive law. Thus, natural law is the law that should govern human beings because it conforms to their nature and therefore is just in a universal sense. It is a common law for all men because it is intrinsic to their essence and therefore unchangeable and immutable. On the other hand, positive law is what men draft to follow their own convenience. In this way, when positive law is in line with natural law, there will be justice. Otherwise, it will be legal, but it will not be legitimate. Based on this, two fundamental rights are recognized. The rights to life and to liberty. Man is born alive and born free and has the right to preserve these attributes of nature. Furthermore, he has the right to have his fellow men respect them in order to seek his own happiness, which is the end toward which every man tends. In parallel, we have acquired rights which are neither natural nor inherent to the human being, but are instead earned through merit or obtained as a gift. In this way, the fundamental right to liberty is derived from the acquired right of private property. And this is manifested in our ability to freely acquire a good with the fruit of our labor. Or we can receive a good that is freely donated or inherited. In turn, the right to property, especially because of its dynamic consequences, is linked to Locke's principle of appropriation. So that now property can not only derive from a donation, gift, inheritance, or exchange, but also includes appropriation through discovery and creation. Finally, these rights are complemented by the non-aggression principle which states that no human being has the right to commit aggression of any kind against another human being which not only includes physical aggression but also all types of coercion, constraint or imposition under the threat of the use of force. That is why we define liberalism according to Professor Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr. as the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the non-aggression principle and in defense of the right to life, liberty, and property whose institutions are private property, markets free from state intervention, competition understood as free entry and exit, the division of labor and social cooperation. Naturally associated with this social order, the question arises as to whether it is just. Therefore, to determine if the system is just, the mandatory reference is Ulpian, whose basic premise constitutes the foundations of Roman law and is undoubtedly one of the pillars of western civilization. Thus, justice is the constant and persistent will to grant to each person their right. That is the intention to give to each person what is theirs, what belongs to them. However, Ulpian's sentence did not stop there. But next he added that the principles of law consist of living honestly without causing harm to anyone and giving each person what is theirs. Therefore from all this it follows that one of the characteristics of free enterprise capitalism is that it is a just doctrine. Given the emerging institutional framework which we have also proven to be just, it is now time to prove that it is also efficient. The first proposal in this regard was made by Adam Smith who using the invisible hand argument postulated that each individual pursuing their own interest led to maximum social welfare. Later the neoclassics guided by an idea of the invisible hand based on Pareto optimality managed to derive the first axiom of welfare economics that is every competitive equilibrium is Pareto optimal. However, this implied embracing a mathematical structure that left the doors open to state intervention under the good intentions of correcting market failures which from my point of view do not exist. To this end, the proof developed by Hans Hoppe based on property rights in line with Locke's principle of original appropriation along with the non-aggression principle is not only satisfactory in proving optimality but also leaves no room for doubt for intervention. In this way, Hoppe points out that any deviation from this set of rules implies by definition a redistribution of property titles and therefore of income from the users and contractors of goods to non-users, producers and non-contractors. Therefore, any deviation in this sense implies that there will be relatively less original appropriation of resources whose scarcity is known and thus there will be less production of new goods, less maintenance of existing goods and fewer contracts and trade that are mutually beneficial. This naturally implies a lower standard of living in relation to the goods and services that pass from hand to hand. In addition to the postulate that only the first user, not the last, of a good acquires the property right over it. It ensures us that productive efforts will be as high as possible at all times. In turn, the notion that only the physical integrity of property, not its value, must be protected guarantees that every owner will carry out the greatest productive efforts of value. That is efforts to promote favorable changes in the value of the property and to prevent or counteract any unfavorable change in its value. Therefore, any deviation from these rules implies a reduction of productive efforts at all times. Note that pivoting on private property and not on excess demand functions derived from optimization exercises allows reaching an optimum without the need for esoteric assumptions that later provide support for state intervention. At the same time, it avoids falling into the empirical ridicule of the second theorem of welfare economics, which postulates the independence between production and distribution as if the choice between capitalism and communism were neutral in terms of outcome. Therefore, having proven that the institutions of free enterprise capitalism sustained by natural rights, Locke's principle of original appropriation and the non-aggression principle, are not only just, but also efficient, at least in static terms. It is now time to prove that free enterprise capitalism fulfills all these same properties in dynamic terms. Xenophon as early as 380 years before Christ pointed out that economics is a knowledge that allows men to increase their estate while postulating that private property was the most beneficial vehicle for each person's life. After that, Xenophon deals with the concept of efficiency which he approaches from two perspectives. On the one hand, from a static view, he defines as efficient the management of available resources aimed at avoiding waste where he also highlights the benefit of private property by pointing out that the master's eye is the best formula for fattening his cattle. On the other hand, Xenophon in his second definition of efficiency enters the dynamic field pointing out that efficiency in turn implies increasing the estate. That is it is about increasing the available quantity of goods through entrepreneurial creativity. This is through trade and speculation. This last efficiency criterion is of fundamental importance for the study of an economy's growth since unlike a static model in which only what Robert Lucas Jr. defined as deep parameters that is preferences, technology and initial resource endowments in the dynamic sphere. Both technology and initial endowments can vary and in fact they do so continuously as a result of entrepreneurial creativity. Moreover, a separate chapter is due to the institution of private property and that pivoting on it the Austrian school of economics from Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Kirzner, Hoppe to Jesús Huerta de Soto have demonstrated the impossibility of socialism and therefore debunking the fantasmagorical idea of John Stuart Mill that postulated the independence between production and distribution. An academic deafness that led to socialism and cost the world the lives of 150 million human beings while those who managed to survive the terror did so in absurd poverty. According to what has been stated and in line with the second definition of Xenophon's analysis, economic theory has identified four sources of economic progress. First, we have the division of labor which was exemplified by Adam Smith with the pin factory. Basically, it is a mechanism by which productivity gains are generated that manifest as increasing returns. And although its limit is bounded by the size of the market, the size of the market itself is positively affected by it. However, it is also worth clarifying that this virtuous process is not infinite. Its limit colliding with the initial resource endowment. Second, capital accumulation both physical and human. Regarding physical capital, the interaction between savings and investment is crucial, highlighting the fundamental role of the capital market and the financial system in carrying out such intermediation. On the human capital side, the focus should not be limited to the educational level, but should also consider the development of cognitive abilities from the birth of the human being, their nutrition and health, fundamental elements to be able to access education and the labor market. Third, we have technological progress, which means being able to produce a greater quantity of goods with the same amount of resources or producing the same using a smaller amount of inputs. Finally, we have the entrepreneurial spirit or rather the entrepreneurial function which according to Professor Huerta de Soto constitutes the main engine of the economic growth process. Since although the three factors mentioned are important, without entrepreneurs there will be no production and the standard of living would be extremely precarious. Where the entrepreneurial function does not focus so much on short-term efficiency but rather on the growth of the quantity of goods and services which leads to higher standards of living. What is truly important is to expand the production possibility frontier to the maximum. Thus, dynamic efficiency can be seen as an economy's ability to drive creativity and business coordination. In turn, the criterion of dynamic efficiency is inextricably linked to the concept of entrepreneurship. This being the typically human capacity to notice profit opportunities that arise in the environment and acting accordingly to take advantage of them. Making the task of discovering and creating new ends and means fundamental driving a spontaneous coordination aimed at resolving market imbalances. On the other hand, this definition of dynamic efficiency proposed by Huerta de Soto appropriately and coherently combines Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction with North's adaptive efficiency. Naturally, given the role of entrepreneurship, the institutions under which it develops are of vital importance. In this sense, both Douglas North and Jesús Huerta de Soto see reducing uncertainty as a key function of institutions. Thus, while North presents it as a set of human device constraints that structure social interaction in a repetitive way, Huerta de Soto considers that these institutions conceived by human beings emerge from a process of social interaction spontaneously without the design of a single person which reduced the uncertainty of the market process. In this way, as Roy Cordato points out, the appropriate institutional framework is the one that favors entrepreneurial discovery and coordination. So in this framework, economic policy should be oriented towards identifying and removing all artificial obstacles that hinder the entrepreneurial process and voluntary exchanges. In this sense, given the determining influence of institutions on economic progress, this directs our gaze towards the importance of ethics since those societies that adhere to more solid moral values and ethical principles in support of institutions will be dynamically more efficient and thereby enjoy greater prosperity. Thus, the fundamental ethical problem comes to be conceived as the search for the best way to foster coordination and entrepreneurial creation. Therefore, in the field of social ethics, the conclusion is reached that the conception of the human being as a creative and coordinating actor implies accepting as axiomatic the principle that every human being has the right to appropriate the results of their entrepreneurial creativity. That is to say that the private appropriation of the fruits of what entrepreneurs create and discover is a principle of natural law. Because if the actor could not appropriate what they create or discover then their ability to detect profit opportunities would be blocked and would disappear. The incentive it has to carry out its actions. Ultimately the ethical principle we just stated is the fundamental ethical basis of the entire market economy. Therefore, what we have just shown is that free enterprise capitalism is not only just in its nature, but it is also remarkably efficient. And furthermore, it is what generates a higher growth rate. So therefore, given the conceptual framework of dynamic efficiency and the existence of dilemmas between efficiency and ethical values when designing public policies, its implementation in real life is of interest. Beyond the enormous achievements we have shown during these years of management, eliminating a fiscal deficit of 15 points of GDP, lowering inflation from 300% to 30%, reducing country risk by 2500 basis points and growing the economy while poverty fell from 57 to 27%. Implementing public policies guided by ethical and moral values. I would like then to focus on the case of the ministry of deregulation or as we call it internally the ministry of increasing returns. This ministry is inspired by the evolution of GDP per capita since the Christian era which has the shape of a hockey stick. This figure arises from the fact that until the year 1800, GDP per capita was almost constant and from then on it multiplied 15 times in a context where the population size multiplied by 10. In parallel, while GDP grew, extreme poverty fell from levels of 95% to 10%. However, this marvel implies the existence of increasing returns which in economics is associated with concentrated market structures. And that is where the public policy dilemma between Pareto efficiency and justice arises. In Pareto analysis, increasing returns imply the existence of non-convexities in the production set which let's say does not allow for deriving profit functions that yield a maximum. So neither the supply of goods nor the demand for inputs is optimal. Faced with this, it is proposed to regulate companies and treat them as a perfectly competitive case. That is to kill increasing returns and with it economic growth. Just look at the effects that regulation causes all over the world. The vision based on the ethical values of capitalism points out that if that position was reached through discoveries, voluntary exchanges and without violating the non-aggression principle, there is no reason to justify intervention. In fact, intervention is a violation of property rights. So by punishing profits the potential growth of the economy falls. Therefore intervention and regulation are dynamically inefficient because they are violent and thus unjust. That is why since coming to the administration in 2023 we have carried out thanks to the herculean task of Minister Federico Sturzenegger 13,500 structural reforms which today allow us to have a more dynamically efficient economy which allows us to grow once again. This is make Argentina great again. Therefore, this shows how questionable the Pareto optimality analysis is. Based on it, many consider it appropriate to regulate these concentrated structures, making their results similar to a competitive model. However, as I had pointed out, this implies killing increasing returns whose side effect is to kill growth. Note that along these same lines, we can address the issues of artificial intelligence. In this sense, such an instrument could be seen as the 21st century version of Adam Smith's pin factory. That is a booster of increasing returns and with it greater growth and well-being. So the most responsible thing that states can do regarding the issue is to stop bothering those who are creating a better world. To put it more directly, politicians must stop bothering those who are making a better world. At the same time, I want to point out that all the fears associated with dystopian scenarios are nonsense. The answer is Adam Smith. The limit of increasing returns is given by the size of the market. And finally, we must not forget that the implementation of the