Libertarian Death Cults
MILEI: “OK so let’s take a look at economic externalities: a corporation that pollutes a river. Who cares? Where’s the damage? Where is the damage? That corporation can pollute the river as much as it wants. Do you know why? Because something’s missing, partial equilibrium, they don’t see the general equilibrium problem, which is that in Argentina there’s a water surplus. So in a society with a water surplus, what is the price of water? Zero. So, who’s going to claim ownership of that river? Nobody! Because there’s no money to be made from it. So what happens if water starts to become scarce? Yes. It will no longer be worth zero. Suddenly there’s a business. That’s when someone will step in to take ownership of that river, and then there will be property rights to ensure that, let’s say, the pollution is brought to an end.”
Javier Milei, speech excerpted in “Patagonia for Sale”
Introduction
This essay examines libertarian influences in Artificial Intelligence (AI), in arms manufacturers and in the oil industry. Donald Trump and Javier Milei are both riding a wave of funding for the dissemination of libertarian socioeconomic ideas. Far right political messaging is being coordinated internationally, it has deep pockets. Extreme libertarian positions may even nudge us toward a World War. What we know for sure is that this far right tendency is certainly detrimental to the climate.
Libertarian economics is a defunct socioeconomic theory, it offers nothing new but dovetails well with fascism. As a rule-book for building policy it is also entirely incompatible with taking any action to avoid worst-case climate chaos. This is exactly the point! Bringing back stale political theories from the early 1900’s like libertarianism helps preserve the idea of unipolar military power in Washington. It solidifies property rights for billionaire corporate shareholders and in the Silicon Valley the libertarian cult is being used to protect AI from regulation including military AI deployment in targeting and drones (UAVs). It also serves as an argument against taxing extreme wealth. In a word, it’s antisocial.
This essay is adapted from my upcoming book that examines libertarian ideas in the Americas, ideas promoted by algorithms in social media trained to distort democracy for political aims. These same algorithms helped monsters like Milei, Trump and US vice-president, JD Vance to come to power. Libertarian economic theory is an elite project that serves no social purpose, quite the opposite. It serves to blinker society to the perils of climate chaos; then nature strikes back with another hurricane or fire. It’s a fight to the death. Libertarian ideas buy time for the continued use of fossil fuels powering up business as usual and stalling action on the climate. Worse still libertarians argue for building thousands more data centres and scaling up various wars for oil and gas supplies (Iran, Ukraine, Nigeria and Venezuela). More resources for AI and for war itself implies more mining and burning more fossil fuels into the atmosphere, all destructive and avoidable. This essay takes a look at the agenda of those who continue to try to sell these unpopular libertarian ideas.
Killer Clowns
Javier Milei is the world’s first libertarian president and hopefully the last. Elected to the Argentine presidency in December 2023, on a post-pandemic protest vote, he defeated a weak candidate from the divided social democrats, the Peronist alliance. Milei stood as a libertarian economist promising to privatise the state, implying that the market itself would eliminate corruption. Subsequent corruption scandals, including those involving Milei and his sister, showed. if anything, that corruption in the Argentine government got worse. Prices spiked and the internal economy collapsed with a new boom in largely un-taxed mining commodity exports.
In Milei’s mind he’s a libertarian economist not a politician. Like most self-illusions, this includes a grain of truth. Milei worked a few years as a corporate economic consultant in an Argentine conglomerate called Corporación América then run by Eduardo Eurnekian who is one of Argentina’s richest men. Eduardo gave Milei his nickname “El Loco“. Like Trump’s obnoxious antics on the reality show The Apprentice, Milei also worked in Eurnekian’s broadcast media channels including A24 appearing on talk-shows while developing his own offensive media personality. Milei had a Rolling Stones cover band and he even claimed he was a tantric sex coach. As to his economics qualifications Milei has two postgraduate diplomas in economics, that is less than a masters degree. To the untrained Milei talks a good talk on the economy, he knows just enough to be dangerous.
Milei’s conversion to the cult of libertarianism came late in life when he read Murray Rothbard’s books. Rothbard was an obscure New York economic theorist who made a living promoting libertarian ideas. Rothbard’s texts seem to have stirred something messianic in Milei. These strange economic ideas are Milei’s safe place, a font of secret economic truth, however delusional. Rothbard is Milei’s dogma, he now identifies as a Rothbardian Paleolibertarian. He is happy to evangelise Rothbard’s ideas even parroting them to audiences at Davos (twice).
Milei likes to get out of Buenos Aires when he can. He prefers to travel abroad, giving talks at libertarian or at far right political conferences like the US-run Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC.org) based in Washington DC with franchises from Buenos Aires to Budapest. Milei’s gormless smirk sells out venues to his propeller-head fans which are almost all men. They don’t come for the content (Milei’s speeches are often unintelligible) but they come for the show. Milei often sings Argentine rock songs and he loves YMCA always ending his speeches with his signature: “Viva la libertad Carajo!”. Libertarians are his people, they make him feel loved. He often wears the conservative blue suits his sister bought him but prefers his zipped leather jackets when he takes to the stage to sing.
Donald Trump is not a dogmatic libertarian and he’s neither naïve nor messianic. He doesn’t even claim to be an expert on macroeconomics and has probably never heard of Murray Rothbard. Trump is the boss, he’s an opportunist, he’s transactional. Unlike most libertarians Trump’s a nationalist. He’s a president-CEO running a dangerously competitive nuclear power like it was his family money-laundering business. Trump’s USA is an empire in decline, the US dollar has become a problem, so too has military overreach. In a unipolar world Trump would not need a a logo like “America First”. Those days are over.
Trump returned to power in 2024 defeating an unprepared candidate, former vice-president Kamala Harris. Peter Thiel convinced Trump to take JD Vance on as vice-president. Vance had questioned whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler”, he was a “Never Trump” guy, but, clearly, Thiel has influence. Thiel schooled Vance for years as a libertarian Venture Capitalist (VC). Thiel was his political sponsor to the tune of fifteen million dollars for Vance’s Ohio Senatorial race.
Trump understands his job is to sell fiscal far right ideas to his MAGA base. They’re not enamoured with his wars. They don’t like datacentres. They also hate the fact that AI is taking away their jobs but Trump, like Milei, is a showman. They trust him. He’s a brilliant communicator and a natural liar. He basically invented the Epstein-class. Hardly religious, Trump has learned that there are moments when even the most powerful man on earth needs to bow his head to their Jesus. Religious alliances win US elections on the far right. If that means cuddling up to Pentecostal Christian sects, so be it. Benjamin Netanyahu primes these same religious leaders with end-times Zionism when he visits the US.
Silicon Valley VCs have really deep pockets, people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen have got behind libertarian ideas. They are also tempted by government contracts. Unlike Milei who is a true believer, Trump sees the libertarian cult as a lucrative opportunity. Libertarian sponsorship, like Pentecostal religious alliances, are a pathway to power. Without Christian Nationalism neither would be in power.
Trump’s presidential style is that of a ‘Caudillo’ Spanish for populist warlord. General Francisco Franco ran Spain’s fascist government from 1936 to 1975. His official title was Caudillo. Trump is the Caudillo of clan MAGA.
Trump is comfortable with plutocracy, a fact that has become obvious even to his distracted electorate. His autocratic style see millions march across the US in a “No-Kings” backlash. Trump always listens to power and especially to money. He enables his libertarian political sponsors, many in the oil sector or from Silicon Valley, not because he’s a believer, but because they are useful to him. Republicans have feasted from the libertarian trough for years, but in all that time only one libertarian senator was elected and even then he stood as a Republican. Libertarians are extremely unpopular once you get to know them.
Deploying Neoliberalism in the Americas
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan supported neoliberal experiments in their own nations in the 1980’s but neoliberalism was road tested to stop democratic socialism in South America by Nixon in the 1970’s in Chile. Hayek, a famous libertarian Economist from the Austrian school was more than willing to lend economic arguments to the CIA. The 1973 Chilean Coup d’État was organised by President Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Staff from Hayek’s Economics faculty at the University of Chicago were already deployed to the Catholic University of Chile before the 1973 coup. They stayed on while Pinochet’s fascist military forces (the DINA) hunted and assassinated former politicians while in Chile the lives of thousands of dissidents were killed by Pinochet’s troops. Pinochet’s rule began with the death of Chile’s president, a socialist medical doctor, Salvador Allende.
Students from Hayek’s Chicago School trained by Hayek’s US colleague Milton Friedman were central to Pinochetism becoming his economics advisers. Hayek who visited Pinochet multiple times. Hayek got on well with Pinochet. Hayek’s and Friedman’s students were called the Chicago Boys they helped launch South America’s first neoliberal experiments in Chile.
Argentina was the next experiment in torture and neoliberal economics. The IMF itself adopted neoliberal ideas selling them in Argentina and elsewhere, it helped them loot third world nations forcing them to sell assets to multinational corporations to pay off national debt. This left the states with nothing; they had to buy their own water, petroleum, electricity and healthcare from foreign multinationals in their own nations. Profits went abroad, costs stayed local, the nations got poorer. They borrowed more debt to keep their heads above water, the problems got worse.
Carlos Saúl Menem, the Argentine president became the next star convert to neoliberalism. The IMF presented Argentina’s deployment of neoliberalism in the 1990’s as a case study for other countries. They loved Menem. The Argentine neoliberal experiment allowed Menem to convert odious international debt (from corruption by the previous dictatorship (1976-1983) into national debt, he effectively dollarised the economy tying the peso to the US dollar. The clock started ticking and nine years later it all fell apart, the Argentine economy collapsed on Christmas 2001 in the world’s worst default. In the political chaos that followed there were five presidents in just one week and 37 people were shot dead by police in the streets.
At the same time across the Andes Chile suffered many more decades of Pinochet’s secret police and military thugs, political restrictions, generalised poverty, and human rights abuses. Neoliberalism, it had become clear, was Libertarianism-light. It minimalised, while increasingly privatising, the welfare state into a for-profit business. It still does.
Despite its victims, neoliberalism was rarely questioned until its internal inconsistencies brought down Wall Street then collapsed German, British and many more private banks in the subprime mortgage crisis which began in 2007 and became the Euro Crisis in Europe. Like all banking crises this one was the result of speculative excess made possible by economic deregulation, the neoliberal political system was just as fragile as its libertarian ancestor was. Silicon Valley libertarians continue to demand deregulation and increase risk and Trump is giving it to them quid-pro-quo.
Libertarian Talk, Neoliberal Walk
Argentina’s Minister for Economics is Luis (Toto) Caputo, he used to work at the New York investment bank JPMorgan. The head of the US Treasury is Scott Bessent, he worked at Soros Fund Management. Both came from the private financial sector and while they worked for the other side they made speculative, often destructive, financial bets against economies with debt problems, sometimes betting against the financial stability of states. Bessent infamously made leveraged bets against UK finances forcing the Bank of England to devalue the British Pound. Caputo was also minister for economics under previous right wing governments. Under both Macri and Milei, Caputo contracted new state debt, leaving the next government to clean up after him. Such practices are typical of the fiscal right in many nations. Foxes guarding the henhouse, Bessent and Caputo are now tasked with maintaining the public trust sustaining financial stability in their respective states.
To understand libertarians it can be helpful to separate economic theory from economic practice. Neither the US nor the Argentine economies are libertarian, they’re neoliberal. This latest libertarian craze is a contrived attempt by the very rich to turn back the clock on economics dodging right while blocking left. Bessent and Caputo are both neoliberals on the fiscal right of centre. A little more Hayek than Keynes. The US and Argentine economies have been neoliberal since the 1980’s. They trade globally so they are required to practice debt realpolitik.
Libertarian economics, on the other hand, is theory not practice. Libertarianism and neoliberalism are related though. Hayek redefined neoliberalism as the bastard child of libertarianism at a conference in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland in 1947. Neoliberalism was Hayek’s (and later Friedman’s) reactionary attempt to privatise the welfare state while clawing back negotiating power from workers and unions following wage improvements in times of post-war economic growth with low unemployment (using austerity and flexibilization of labour where they could). Neoliberalism is libertarianism-light, a compromise that, rather than erase social services altogether, argues to privatise services like health, education, pensions or transport. This allows corporations to make profits providing these services to the state.
Libertarianism is a shift right from neoliberalism advocating removing all social supports, a Darwinian survivalist power grab by elites to reduce taxation and push an extreme right agenda. Think university degrees with state backed loans administered by for profit private banks. High fees replacing free education.
Libertarians suspect anything not driven by the profit motive, they label people who act this way as ‘collectivists’. They distrust self-organised groups, they demonise unions. When Milei came to power he tried to privatise local football clubs which also went down like a lead balloon.
Libertarian States are top-down, with power at the top. Milei and Trump reduced corporate and individual taxation; they’ve cut back the welfare state and they both spent much more money on weapons. Argentine legislation in 2025 and 2026 reduced workers rights. Both presidents increased national debt. They’re both anti-socialist and they both try to equate anti-fascism (AntiFA) with terrorism. If being anti-fascist is terrorism then where does that leave the government?
In mid 2026 public universities in Argentina ran out of funds. Milei had cut their budgets by a third. Congress told Milei was told to pay up, Milei used his presidential veto, the veto was beaten by a vote and still Milei simply refused to pay. By doing so Milei risked jail-time ignoring explicit instructions from Congress to release funds. Libertarians hate the idea that poor student have access to a quality public education. Milei himself tried to enter the largest public University in the nation, UBA, but could not pass the entrance exam so he ended up studying in a private university. Faculties of public Universities placed banners on their buildings saying: “In a democracy laws are obeyed“. Universities learned that libertarians are not just antisocial, they’re anti-democratic.
Libertarians in AI and Crypto
In the mid 20th century many libertarians were industrialists and oil men. In the 2020’s the most lucrative extractive industries exploit human knowledge to train AI. The world’s richest libertarian cult leaders are now Silicon Valley VC investors. Their high priest, Peter Thiel (personal wealth nearly thirty billion US dollars) recently relocated to Buenos Aires leaving California in an attempt to avoid paying a state billionaire wealth tax, which will be spent exclusively on public healthcare and food for California’s poor.
Milei wrote up legislation to allow for the creation of AI corporations, which may be owned and managed by AI agents (not human CEOs). These companies will also be able to operate without any human staff. This absurd idea can provide a mechanism to privatise synthetic Intellectual Property (IP), enabling the patenting of synthetic IP made by AI. This is not fiction but has already happened.
In the UK, DeepMind (a Google AI) was taught to predict the folding structures of proteins. This won DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, a Nobel Prize but also created a conundrum. To whom did this synthetic IP belong? DeepMind’s human CEO donated this synthetic knowledge (the descriptions of protein structures) free to humanity. Humans are also made of proteins after all.
Milei could never fathom giving anything to humanity. There is no profit in a donation? For libertarians synthetic intellectual property, like rivers and even the air itself, must all be owned (preferably by a corporation). None of this makes any sense from a societal perspective but libertarians don’t do society. Libertarians do property; they do profit.
Crypto Crime
Trump has pardoned some of the worst money laundering crypto CEOs, most of them convicted of fraud by the SEC, some sold drugs online. Subsequently Trump acquiesced to generous donations from the crypto lobby and was amenable to lobbying to reduce crypto regulation. He removed SEC jurisdiction over crypto which brings FinTech Apps closer to competing with Wall Street banks. Trump’s family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, has made billions from stablecoin investments. Their $USD1 is marketed as The Dollar Upgraded. Stablecoins linked to the US dollar are yet another dumb idea claiming to aid dollar stability.
Koch Industries is some of the most influential old money behind US libertarians. They have tried everything to make libertarian ideas popular. The Koch brothers launched the CATO Institute in 1977 handing it over to Milei’s hero, Murray Rothbard. They also helped with the Atlas Network, think-tanks which have been peddling libertarian ideas for decades with little success while spending tens of millions on endowments at private universities attempting to greenwash their fascist ideas in Academia.
When it comes to security, Trump is authoritarian. He promised peace then went to war on three continents, crucially his Iranian incursion, prompted by local enmity with Israel, is not going well. Trump spent the better part of an extra Trillion dollars on Homeland Security’s ICE and on the Pentagon in his second term, outlays that are not funded by taxation. Trump permitted the US military to deploy US AI for live war targeting like Project Maven in Iran and Habsora/Gospel in Gaza. Letting AI technologies compile kill lists or control autonomous weapons is risky in the extreme.
Trump put Elon Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk’s PayPal partner Peter Thiel ascribes to Curtis Yarvin’s libertarian reductionist co-option of the US state. Yarvin is Thiel’s House political philosopher. Rather than ‘DOGE’ Yarvin used the acronym ‘RAGE’, Retire all Government Employees to describe Musk’s efficiency task. Musk tried to reduce the state but to no avail, he broke the government but did not save money. He did however take advantage of his DOGE position to raid government data, putting technical employees from his own companies into government departments to download US State data into Palantir databases thus giving the US state the tools they need to supercharge authoritarianism allowing the US deep state catch up with China. Some of this Medicare data made it’s way into the Palantir ELITE App used to hunt ICE targets. ICE subsequently used ELITE to fill their detention camps with targets (even children) wreaking havoc with human rights. Musk too is an African immigrant.
Trump cut taxation, mainly benefiting the very rich. The cuts started out renewable (every 5 years) then he made them permanent. This left a massive hole in the budget. First Trump emitted more debt, then in a fiscal panic he slapped taxes on US imports, figuring his voters would not recognise that import tariffs were just a regressive tax on the poor who shop at Wal-Mart or sleep in their trucks in Wal-Mart car parks. Trump also tried to intervene in the US central bank (the FED) to drive down interest rates desperate to plug the hole in the budget. Libertarian theory prevents taxing the rich or reducing the Pentagon budget. Trump’s Silicon Valley warlords will not let that happen.
Milei would never intervene in interest rates. To do so would mean intervening in private bank profits. As a dogmatic libertarian Milei puts the markets first and the nation second. Electing a libertarian to the presidency when he wants to destroy the state is counterproductive.
Religion
The far right is never far from religion. Milei, like Trump, learned that attaining power on the far right requires alliances with religious socially conservative cults. In Argentina and the US some of these votes come from Jewish and Pentecostal Christian sects. Funding can also be accessed from the considerable resources available to the invite-only catholic cult Opus Dei.
Milei himself has moved on from Catholicism. He likes to say that he’s studying the Torah to convert to Judaism. As president of Argentina Milei has visited Israel multiple times. He cried on camera at the wailing wall in Jerusalem. In many ways he’s more supportive of the attack on Iran than Trump. On his 15th trip to the US since becoming elected, Milei spoke at the Yeshiva University in New York. “I am the most Zionist president in the world”, he told his audience.
Debt and the Dollar
On the campaign trail Javier Milei told his electorate he would close the Argentine Central Bank and dollarise the Argentine economy. This would have meant that Argentina would use the US currency for all transactions: taxes, savings, payments, thus eliminating the Argentine peso. Both Ecuador and Panama dollarised their economies, it did not go well for either. Milei then reneged on his promise. Long term this might have been Milei’s best economic decision yet, but it did not make him popular with his voters.
Both the US and Argentina have problems with the US currency; they’re two sides of the same coin. All nations need dollars, especially for commodity imports, but it’s much worse in Argentina because of it’s unstable currency.
Countries with stable currencies enable their populations to accumulate savings in that local currency. These local savings, in banks or funds, help provide credit to loan into the local economy, recycling those deposits with newly created money. Money moves trough the economy stimulating it in a virtuous circuit.
Argentina is a commodity export-driven economy, especially since Milei has helped to de-industrialise the country. Argentina regularly devalues its currency to cheapen its local labour supply in dollar terms keeping local wages depressed. They call this competitive devaluation. It’s not good for Argentine workers unless local costs like energy and food are cheap which requires subsidies or price controls. Under Milei local prices (in dollar terms) have tripled. In mid 2026 many products service and food are more expensive than in the US. Poverty and consumer debt have both spiked.
Argentina’s commodity exports such as soya beans, copper or gold, bring dollars to its central bank. However Argentina’s imports require spending these central bank dollars to pay the bills. Argentinians keep their savings in cash dollars (not pesos) thus creating a further dollar shortage by absorbing the local dollar supply. Caputo’s supercharged neoliberalism has exploded imports and also caused international and internal debt to rise. Like an insatiable addict Argentina needs more and more dollars.
Argentina, like most nations, is deep in debt, but because of its awful credit history it pays extortionately high interest on this debt. For Argentina the inflated IMF interest rates are relatively cheap so the country is the world’s largest IMF debtor. The IMF is a lender of last resort. Something has got to give financially in Argentina, but not until Trump says so.
Trump decided to help Milei win his mid-term elections, for now it makes geo-strategic sense for Trump to keep the Argentine economy afloat. Milei is a useful idiot for Trump and for Netanyahu. Trump ordered Bessent to feed extra dollars to Argentina to prevent a default just before Milei’s mid-term elections. Most of these dollars went right back to lenders in debt payments, it was good business. The loan (technically a swap) helped Milei to do well in the mid-terms and prevented economic collapse. The Argentine economy, Caputo and Milei are all now hostages to the US dollar.
For the United States government the US dollar is one of its greatest strengths but also its Achilles heel. US banks lend too many dollars and the nation has been running a deficit for decades sucking in imports creating debt. It is increasingly difficult to manage this debt due to rising principals and interest payments (now over a trillion dollars annually). Trump and Bessent have also blown out US debt by lowering taxes on their 0.01% billionaire friends, and funding Netanyahu’s wars. Republicans typically do this, but at Trump’s levels the debt will soon be unsustainable.
The 0.01% and the 99.99%
The gap between the extremely wealthy and everyone else in the US in the 2020’s has surpassed even the Gilded Age of the robber barons, the worst such gap in almost half of the history of the 250 year old republic. In Argentina the wealth gap is worse than the US. It always has been. The social instability caused by these extremes pose a threat to billionaire wealth in both nations. Trump’s billionaire sponsors were quick to realise libertarian economic arguments help protect their own wealth, they have excellent accountants and can even afford lobbyists for custom tax laws when they need them.
Worst case scenario billionaires can buy their own countries, many of the richest have shown investment interest in forming their own Network States like Próspera on Roatán Island in Honduras. Milei too, is out on the loony fringe when it comes to taxation. He calls taxation ‘theft’. Neither Milei nor Trump seem to consider no-bid government contracts as ‘theft’.
Trump respects his political sponsors. Quid-pro-quo agreements, though technically illegal, are common in a plutocracy. For example Trump is busy deregulating FinTech, Biotech and Crypto sectors; all of which have massive Silicon Valley VC investments. VC investors sponsor Trump’s MAGA political project. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
Trump is also enthusiastically disarming environmental regulation. He has reversed most of Biden’s green energy initiatives replacing them with perverse policies like increased fracked gas LNG exports and local incentives for “clean coal”.
Most important for the Silicon Valley billionaires Trump continues to protect American AI from regulation. Even technical experts who work in AI warn that this is an extremely dangerous policy. Perversely, when advanced Anthropic Claude models exposed security risks to banking in mid 2026, Trump panicked, changing his mind, and imposing controls on AI to protect banks. He even decided to start talks on cooperating on AI regulation with China, a 180-degree turn on regulating AI.
Poor people typically own no property. Centi-millionaires and billionaires can buy a new mansion every week just with the income from their wealth without even selling share assets. Libertarian economic theories generalise property rights beyond land and buildings to also include share ownership and the right to profits created by workers in firms those investors own. Copper fastening property rights is hugely important to the rich, as is preventing or eliminating wealth taxation while minimising inheritance tax. If AI is to replace workers then ownership in firms with AI production may require new laws such as Bernie Sanders’ sovereign wealth fund bill to keep countries afloat and to keep the poor and unemployed from abject poverty. That would be very anti-libertarian.
In Argentina both wealth taxes and inheritance tax are zero or close to zero however during the COVID-19 pandemic a tiny wealth tax was imposed on the super rich to pay for the damage done to the economy. This panicked some very rich Argentines which did not hurt Milei’s election campaign.
Climate Chaos
Libertarian deregulation of environmental controls gives the private sector excuses to continue to make profits even if the creation of these profits requires using more fossil fuels which, in turn, worsens climate chaos. The Gods of the market (shareholders of corporations fired up by fossil fuels) can thus continue to dump environmental costs on society. This goes for all manner of commercial activities many of which are entirely unnecessary. For example building more hotels, cruise-ship tourism, global military expansion, wars, and thousands of new AI datacentres.
Milei and Trump both deny human-caused climate change. That their denials are baseless and wrong does not matter to them nor does it cause them sufficient political damage due to generalised ignorance about the climate and disinformation. All they see is money, votes and power. Climate chaos is invisible in both neoclassical and libertarian economic theory but it is becoming increasingly visible.
Putting a price on that carbon released into the atmosphere in greenhouse gases, thus taxing those emissions, brings them back into the economic system because it gives the climate damage a cost that they must pay. The owners of corporations know this so they’ve doggedly resisted this tax to protect their profits. While putting a price on carbon might remove some excess greenhouse gas emissions it will do nothing for biodiversity loss. How much is the fine on a company that helps to wipe out a species?
Of course the acceleration of sea level rise, extreme weather, the immunity of capital to climate chaos is breaking down. This began in Switzerland with the re-insurance sector. Actuaries in re-insurance firms analyse the cost of coverage to house insurance for example. If a city burns someone has to pay the rebuilding costs. Reinsurance backstops wildfires and flood damage as well as deaths in heat waves. These fires can happen in asset-rich areas like the 2025 fires in Southern California, reinsurance pays out billions.
Insurance exposure is beginning to make environmental damage visible to capital, they pay it in their insurance policies if there is insurance available for purchase. If not mortgages become impossible for lack of coverage in certain areas like Southern California. This is causing a bit of a panic in banking and real estate. Libertarian economic theory buries this climate chaos like an ostrich’s head in the cinders. It is a way to refuse to face reality. Human and environmental costs, such as famines, have been purposefully and massively underestimated. Freedom to pollute is nonsensical but it is also libertarian gospel. Industrial and military emissions along with the destruction of war are great for the short-term goals of arms makers but in the long term they’re suicidal for society. Libertarians don’t do long term.
Libertarian politicians are hell bent on wriggling out of paying for the climate chaos they are helping to create. In their blinkered world it helps to argue that ‘society’ does not exist. Margaret Thatcher, the same UK prime minister who helped launch neoliberalism also had libertarian tendencies. She famously said:
“There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first”.
Thatcherite libertarian logic makes climate change irrelevant. Even if it were recognised as relevant (by corporate executives) the board “must look to themselves first” which means they will always protect their profits over protecting the global climate. This is what happens now in most companies, often greenwashing their activities with vapid corporate responsibility initiatives.
This is also an international coordination problem to fight climate change. Competing nations, under such game theory logic, put themselves first too. No nation has an incentive to act first to cooperate on the climate so they negate climate change. In a competitive zero-sum game, no nation will be first to allow their military or their economy be weakened. Zero sum means the world is condemned to collapse. This needs to change but it can’t under libertarian logic. Again, that’s the point!
Neither Milei nor Trump discuss climate chaos, species extinction or biodiversity. For a libertarian and for neoliberals these concepts are intangibles. Economists call them ‘externalities’ because they literally can’t be counted in dollars. Sponsors of libertarian think-tanks go further to shield themselves. Many are in the oil sector. Some oligarchs literally buy their own media channels, newspapers and social media platforms. This allows them to write fake news or to censor the real news. They can also write opinion pieces to back certain political campaigns. This helps drown out the voices from increasingly panicked scientists. The Washington Post editorial board wanted to take a stance against the last re-election of Donald Trump. The newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos (who also owns Amazon Inc., and various rocket ships) stopped that from happening. Like Mafia bosses on a climate trial, they attempt to destroy evidence by removing witnesses. You are less likely to hear climate scientists if no journalists interview them.
Milei and Trump are even more proactive, they have helped to destroy climate science in their own nations, de-funding climate research and even weather forecasting. In the US Trump has even turned off data on sea-level rise and ocean temperatures (beamed down from space from incredibly expensive climate monitoring satellites). Trump’s oil sponsors do not want society to know the truth about such global chaos in the making. That would be bad for business. Milei’s intentional ignorance went beyond de-funding science. He also threatens to leave the Paris accord. Trump has done this already… Twice!
Humans and Nature
Could it be that humanity has reached a fork in the road, coinciding with improvements in AI. Maybe it’s a pitchfork not a fork? Beijing, China and the Silicon Valley, in California, are both locked and loaded building war technology that uses AI to kill each other. On a human level this means that humanity is becoming even more of a rogue species disconnecting ourselves more and more from life, while destroying biodiversity and burning the atmosphere. Is this healthy? Maybe we need to stop destroying nature and messing with our environment and give life a chance to recover, allowing time for biodiversity to again become diverse, to regain its splendour. Maybe that might save us too. It will definitely save many other species.
This is not the road we are currently on, quite the opposite, our economic systems see no costs to biodiversity, therefore there is no reward (and no mass focus) on biodiversity in our societies. It is, in fact, a fringe topic for most people. Could it be time to pause for a moment and try to understand this gross dichotomy between technology and life. Maybe it is time to take a suspicious look at the owners of these wonder technologies used to kill people while damaging the environment.
Silicon Valley capital is hell-bent on making and training ‘thinking’ machines. They call each iteration of their synthetic intelligence “models”. The models are named after Greek mythology, one was actually called Mythos. This fabulously expensive race to the bottom of climate chaos is entirely unnecessary. Their marketing people (those who market shares and not products) say they just need to build a few thousand new datacentres. They don’t say these will need to be powered by fossil fuels and cooled by sucking trillions of litres of drinking water from our food and irrigation systems.
Nobody believes them so their leaders say they have to have the datacentres because of military competition with China or Washington DC (depending on which side of the pacific ocean they are on).
But what do they want to do with these new AIs if they ever become really useful? They are not solving climate change that is for sure. Instead they are selling the Pentagon, the Ukrainians, the Israelis and the Chinese Communist Party more weapons. Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs), basically suicide drones; killing machines. Their marketing laud how AI can “optimise the kill chain”. Musk and Besos fire hundreds of rockets into space to send thousands of new military satellites up there to fight more wars and kill more people more accurately. Is this really what we need right now?
Technology fetishes are accelerating our suicide, destroying our planet and creating weapons that kill us more efficiently. That’s you and I at the end of their kill chain, in a world war everyone is someone’s enemy. Now these same psychopaths tell us we must be capable of winning a war with autonomous AI-driven weapons adding this to the nuclear threat. Something tells me another extinction technology is not going to be a solution to anything.
Then, almost as an aside, they tell us that if we keep building this tech it might help save the planet also. Noting that 4500 data centres were already running in the US, some of them with the electricity consumption of whole cities, the Climate Information site “DeSmog” wrote in July 2026: “The myth of AI was that it would lead to human flourishing and progress. Yet, in the span of a few short years, Big Tech has gone from promising climate breakthroughs to breaking the climate”.
Accelerating human technological activity is undermining biodiversity and the environment, threatening life on Earth. These are the very living substrates we have depended on for millions of years to keep us alive. We have already kick-started a sixth great extinction. Excessive use of fossil fuels have destabilised the Holocene climate. Climate chaos has begun. It was this very stable environment that allowed our species (and many others) to flourish, it gave us the chance to build civilisations. We are knowingly destabilising this climate to build more war machines.
We need another civilisation, a different kind of economics if you like and definitely different politics, something compatible with the planet not something that helps billionaires become trillionaires. We don’t need machine-learning to teach us how to re-balance our relationship with ‘nature’. Humans have lived in balance with nature for millennia. The degradation of our relationship with soils, seas and the atmosphere is a product of extreme greed which is the driving force of our current economic systems. Libertarian ideas with make this go from bad to worse as the owners of these technologies board their rockets to Mars or bury themselves in New Zealand bunkers. Who are the AI companies trying to fool?
War
Trump and Netanyahu are causing lethal and unsustainable wars, all increasingly likely to end humanity. Both were voted in by religious end-times cults by local populations who support these wars. Meanwhile we can’t seem to deal with our schism with nature? Could these two facts be related?
Our education systems tell us to shoot our oligarchs into space yet it is obvious we need a focus on protecting our planet from them instead. The dogs of war, states like Israel, the US, the UK and North Korea sell us even dumber economic theories than the last one (which didn’t work either). This is a fast train to extinction.
Libertarians are leading the fray toward extinction of the poor who ca¶t afford their private bunkers, their technological and financial might deploying ever more psychotic technologies tasked with our slaughter, we have seen this tested in Gaza. While Palantir, Anduril and White Stork activate the kill chain, their commercial technology salespeople claim “70% kill rates”. They’re killing humans, that’s you and me! There is no ‘them’. Psychopaths like Eric Schmidt or Alex Karp build AI driven robot factories to make automated suicide drones to bomb our cities. AI corporations, their libertarian owners and their incel technologists are chomping at the bit for mouth-watering Pentagon, IDF, CIA and Mossad contracts. They are all aboard with hastening human destruction.
But we are still here.
Revolution or Extinction
Rather than worshipping Silicon Valley warlord man-boys maybe we could do something useful for ourselves for once. We could start with minimising run-away climate change and regulating AI to avoid their Terminator future. Maybe if we got off their social media platforms we could stop their techno-death cults and get real about building a new economy, an ecological system that will assure humanity a decent future. Maybe, while we are at it, we might stop species extinction and give our climate and the natural world a chance to recover from our mistakes? Nature might still welcome us back. We can still choose life not a dystopian dark AI machine future.
Take back control from these man-boys. The future is nature. The future is feminine. The future is ecological and social. It always was. Degraded and futile libertarian economic theories have never worked and they never will. They bring no solutions, they are the problem.
Time to re-balance human life with all life. Synthetic intelligence fed on the entrails of past failed thinking is not going to bring us Nirvana. These so-called advances in AI and the dark money behind them gave us failed far right experiments in fascism with monsters like Trump and Milei. America First or Israel First are driven by messianic military man-boys and libertarian cults. Time to end this Hegsethian cul-de-sac before it ends us. Hit the brakes on libertarianism, redistribute wealth in a way compatible with life on Earth, not a machine-intelligence zero-sum war game. Take back democratic control over the means of production which means choosing what we make and how, so that our economy can again become compatible with our bountiful survival. It’s possible even if it isn’t quite as profitable as suicide.
If this requires a revolution (and it does) I’m already there. Are you with me? We have nothing to lose but our extinction.
This essay is adapted from the author’s soon to be published work ( capitalandclimate.com ) on the rise of the far-right in the Americas, the result of research and lived experience in the Silicon Valley in the 1990’s and the 2000’s and in Argentina in the two following decades.