A few nights ago, I was in my office when I caught an interview with a Fox Business guest about the speech in Davos given by the new president of Argentina, Javier Milei. The guest commented that the last person to make comments like Milei’s in challenging the “globalists” and the status quo was President Trump. This isn’t the first time I have heard Milei compared to Trump.

But Milei is nothing like Trump. He is like no other politician we have had in recent years, I should add. However, since former president Trump is the one whom he is most compared to, I will focus on him and on one of the most striking differences I see between the two leaders.

Milei is an economist with a deep understanding of the classical liberal tradition and its power to deliver prosperity to all. He also has a very clear philosophy about the limited role government should play in our lives and the greatness of markets. In contrast, Mr. Trump seems to have no systematic philosophy about the role of government or markets.

The best evidence of their profound differences is found in Milei’s very speech (which you can listen to in English translated by AI with the president’s own accent). In the speech, the new Argentine leader made the case for what he calls a free-trade capitalist regime and a free-enterprise capitalist system. He notes that:

Far from being the cause of our problems, free enterprise capitalism, as an economic system, is the only tool we have to end hunger, poverty, and indigence.

He is indeed a “market fundamentalist,” as Oren Cass likes to critically call those of us who believe that unfettered markets, though not perfect, are the best way to deliver prosperity to the masses rather than only to the politically powerful. Market fundamentalists such as Milei are also skeptical of all government schemes, including protectionism. He also makes a remarkable case against government interventions faultily justified as a means of correcting so-called market failures.

Milei comes across as a populist who dares to say things that elites at Davos don’t want to hear. The same can be said of Trump, who makes elites uncomfortable. I am sure the Davos elite didn’t like hearing the speech President Trump delivered at Davos in 2020. But that’s where the similarities end. In fact, the speech by Trump in front of Davos sounded nothing like the speech delivered by Milei.

Trump’s speech was mostly about what he and his government did, often through serious government interference in the market economy. It’s not to say that President Trump didn’t implement some free-market policies during his term. He did, and those delivered significant prosperity. It is the lack of a coherent approach to governing and of the role markets play in achieving prosperity that I am commenting on here: deregulator and tax reformer on one hand, bestower of subsidies for special interests, supporter of industrial policy, big spender, Tariff Man on the other hand.

Further, I don’t see any signs that Trump has developed a coherent philosophy about the role of government since he left office. Accordingly, if he were in office for a second term, the policies we got would very likely boil down to who his economic advisers were. If he picked his advisers from the ranks of the NatCons and those who believe that government interventions are the solution to most problems, cultural or economic, we would get lots of policies that looked very similar to the ones supported by the Democrats and take us further down the road to a pre-Milei Argentina.

The Wall Street Journal reminds us:

Donald Trump and some GOP populists have also embraced the economics of Argentine decline. Some of the harshest criticism of Mr. Milei’s victory came from those on the so-called new right. Compact magazine editor Sohrab Ahmari slammed the “Argentine weirdo” who was “seemingly grown in a secret laboratory funded by the Koch brothers” for his determination to liberalize Argentina’s system of industrial tariffs.

Milei warns us about these guys, too:

With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls and regulations to correct the so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals. This is how we come to the point where, by using different names or guises, a good deal of the generally accepted political offers in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openly communist, fascist, Nazis, socialists, social Democrats, socialists, Democrat Christians or Christian Democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressive, populists, nationalists or globalists.

For instance, it isn’t crazy to worry that Trump could decide to favor unions, as do some of the new-Right influencers these days. This would be ironic since Argentine unions, I fear, will likely be what derails Milei’s ability to achieve a good measure of his policy goals.

I have no idea if the new president of Argentina will be able to achieve what he is setting out to accomplish. After all, good economics and politics often clash. Politics being downstream of culture, and Argentina being culturally very left-wing, it will likely prove to be a challenge. I wish him luck.

However, I want to applaud him for trying. I also thank him for lecturing the world’s elites about the greatness of the free market and the danger of excessive government interventions, as he has been doing ever since he burst on the international scene. As he said at Davos, “We are here to warn you about what can happen to Western nations that became rich on a model of freedom if they continue down this path of servitude.”

I see no such market fundamentalists and coherent thinkers on our U.S. political scene these days.