Milei and the risk of turning radical disruption into rigid doctrine

A couple of weeks ago, at an asado, I found myself in an argument. A supporter of President Javier Milei was defending the strict application of free-market principles, and when I pushed back, frustrated as I often am with presidents who apply half-century-old ideas to today’s problems, he answered with certainty: “Market laws are like the laws of physics.” Whenever I talk to Milei supporters, I hear the same confidence applied to concrete problems: prices will stabilize on their own, distortions will correct themselves, and the market, left alone, will do the work faster and better than any policy ever could. It’s a seductive line. Physics is stable, predictable, universal. But the analogy collapses on contact.  The laws may hold; our understanding of them, and how we use them, does not stand still. We don’t design buildings the way we did a century ago, although thermodynamic principles have not changed. New materials, new risks, new purposes. The principles endure; the applications evolve. And even that concession is too generous. Physical laws do not oblige passivity. Gravity dictates how water flows down a mountain, but it doesn’t stop us from building a dam. We intervene. We redirect. We shape outcomes based on collective priorities.  That is precisely why we elect governments: not to “create” markets as if they were natural phenomena, but to structure the terrain in which those forces operate so that society, not theory, determines the result. My libertarian friend wasn’t wrong to believe in principles. What I disagree with is what principles are for.  From radical to conservative Every political movement begins as an act of interpretation. It reads a changing world and proposes a way to make sense of it.  The danger is what happens later. Interpretation hardens into preservation, and the movement begins defending old answers instead of asking new questions.  This is not hypocrisy. It’s a pattern. Leaders read their context, turn it into principles, and ask others to follow. When the leaders are gone, what survives is not the reading. It’s the words. And words ossify. Guidance becomes instruction. Principles become prescriptions.  Principles can travel across time. Prescriptions rarely do. Consider the American founders. By any honest reading, they were among the most disruptive political figures of the modern era. They broke from an empire, wrote a constitution that treated sovereignty itself as an open question, and built in mechanisms for their own revision.  Two centuries later, their words are most often invoked to defend institutional arrangements they would barely recognize. The men who argued for radical change are now quoted to resist sensible changes to the status quo. First libertarian president Milei’s rise was genuinely disruptive. He broke conventions, challenged entrenched systems, and offered a clear, uncompromising framework for reading economic reality. That was a movement in its interpretive phase.  Governing is a different test. Fiscal adjustment meets falling incomes. Disinflation coexists with contraction. The promise of equilibrium has to survive contact with a society that still needs to make it to the end of the month. The argument is no longer theoretical. It’s distributive: who pays, who waits, who absorbs the cost. Take what is happening now. Inflation is creeping back up. Employment-heavy sectors like construction and industry remain weak. The government faces a familiar dilemma: prioritize price stability or prioritize activity.  The orthodox answer is to stay the course, avoid monetary expansion, let the adjustment run. That is largely the path being defended, even as the data complicates the narrative. The real question isn’t whether the principle is correct. It’s whether anyone inside the movement is still asking. At some point the data either reshapes the model or the model reshapes the data.  Dissenters get recoded as enemies of the project. Inconvenient numbers get postponed into a future where they will no longer matter. And a framework that once described how things work under certain conditions starts describing how things must work, full stop. Misinterpreting Friedman The irony is that this is a misreading of the tradition the movement claims. Milton Friedman did not write scripture. He offered tools for interpreting specific problems in specific contexts, and he revised those tools when conditions demanded it.  Treating his framework as a fixed script, immune to the same empirical pressure he applied to everyone else, is not fidelity to Friedman. It’s the kind of closed thinking he spent a career arguing against. Movements don’t become conservative because they age. They become conservative when they stop interpreting. The rigidity is not a betrayal of the original impulse. It is what happens when the impulse outlives the people who knew what it was for. The more I talk to Milei supporters, the clearer it is: they are not defending a policy; they are defending a feelingthat something has finally been settled. I understand the appeal. In a country where the margin for error is thin and the cost of getting it wrong is immediate, certainty looks like relief.  But a movement that won’t test its ideas against reality has stopped thinking. And in Argentina, that’s how you end up repeating the thing you promised to break.