Mises Wire

[The following is the Acceptance Address by the Professor Jesús Huerta de Soto, at the ceremony conferring the Order of May for Merit. White Room, Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 27, 2025.]

First and foremost, I wish to express my heartfelt and humble gratitude for this undeserved and extraordinary honor, the Order of May for Merit awarded to me today by the Argentine nation, represented by its President, Javier Milei. And I would like to take this unique opportunity to send a message of encouragement, support, and hope to the entire Argentine people and, of course, to Spain and the rest of the world, who follow with keen expectation and the utmost interest what is unfolding in this great country. Since Javier Milei was elected President of Argentina by an overwhelming majority, this country has become a model for a world in the grip of statism and standing at a historic crossroads, where it can choose—as Argentina has done—for freedom as the only alternative to the continuous political strife, wars, and social and economic upheavals of every kind that are the inexorable consequence of statism and that today afflict humanity.

Economic science has already demonstrated that the state is not only an unnecessary chimera but is also scientifically incapable of providing what it promises to humanity. At the popular level, it is assumed that the state is indispensable because people confuse its existence with the essential nature of many of the services and resources that it currently provides, albeit poorly, on an exclusive basis. People observe that roads, hospitals, schools, and public order, for example, are provided by the state, and since these are essential, they conclude—without further analysis—that the state must be indispensable as well. They do not realize that these goods can be produced with much higher quality, more efficiently, at lower cost, and above all, more morally through the spontaneous order of the market, entrepreneurial creativity, and private property. Furthermore, they also fall into the trap of believing that the state is needed to protect the vulnerable, the defenseless, the poor and the destitute, without understanding that the supposed protective measures—as economic theory shows time and again—systematically have the effect of harming precisely those they purport to protect.

On the other hand, it is equally important to understand that the definition, acquisition, exchange, and defense of property rights, which articulate and propel the social process, do not require a monopolistic agency of violence. Not only are they unnecessary; on the contrary, the state acts by trampling on multiple legitimate property titles, safeguards them very poorly, and corrodes the individual habit of respecting private property rights.

The legal system is the evolutionary embodiment that integrates the general principles of law, especially those of property rights, which are inseparable from human nature. The law, therefore, is not what the state decides (democratically or otherwise), but it already exists, embedded in human nature, even if it is discovered and consolidated jurisprudentially over time and, above all, doctrinally in an evolutionary and customary manner. The state is neither required to define the law nor to enforce and defend it. This should be particularly obvious today, when the use of private security companies, even by many government agencies, is the order of the day. It would be unrealistic to explain in detail here how the private provision of what are today deemed “public goods” would work. In fact, it is impossible to know today all the entrepreneurial solutions that an army of entrepreneurs would devise to the problems at hand if only they were allowed to do so. Even the most skeptical must recognize, as is already known today, that the market—driven by creative and coordinated human action—works, and it does so precisely to the extent that the state does not coercively intervene in its social process. Difficulties and conflicts invariably arise precisely where the spontaneous order of the market is not allowed to develop freely. Therefore, regardless of any effort we might make to imagine how an anarcho-capitalist network of private agencies for security, defense and arbitration would operate—each sponsoring more or less marginally alternative legal systems—we must never forget that the very reason we cannot know exactly what a future without the state would look like is the creative character of the entrepreneurial function and, as Kirzner notes, that same creativity is precisely what reassures us that any problem will tend to be overcome when all the effort and entrepreneurial creativity of the human beings involved is devoted to solving it.

That said, thanks to economic science, we not only know that the market works, but we also know that statism is theoretically impossible in the sense that it cannot achieve what it promises. It is impossible for the state to fulfill coordinating objectives in any domain of the social process into which it seeks to intrude, for four reasons examined in detail by the Austrian School of Economics:

First, because of the enormous volume of information required to do so, which exists only in a scattered or disseminated form among the eight billion people who participate in the social process each day.

Second, because the information needed by the state interventionist body is predominantly tacit and inarticulable and therefore cannot be transmitted unambiguously so as to lend a coordinating content to its mandates.

Third, because the information used at the social level is not “given” or static, but changes continuously as a result of human creativity, making it obviously impossible to transmit today the information that will only be created tomorrow and that is needed by the state interventionist body in order to achieve its objectives tomorrow.

Fourth, above all, because the coercive nature of the state’s mandates blocks the entrepreneurial activity that creates the very information the interventionist apparatus needs as a timely blessing in order to give coordinating content to its own commands.

Moreover, once the state exists, it is almost impossible to limit the expansion of its power. Historical analysis is incontrovertible: the state has done nothing but grow. And it has not stopped growing because the combination of the state—as a monopolistic institution of violence—with human nature, is literally explosive. The state drives and attracts like an irresistible magnet the passions, vices, and most perverse facets of human nature, which attempts, on the one hand, to evade its mandates and, on the other, to take advantage of the state’s monopolistic power to the utmost. In addition, the combined effect of privileged interest groups, the phenomena of governmental myopia and “vote-buying,” the megalomaniac tendencies of the political caste, and the irresponsibility and blindness of bureaucracies produces a dangerously unstable and explosive cocktail, continually shaken by social, economic, and political crises that, paradoxically, are always seized upon by the political caste to justify further doses of intervention that—instead of solving problems—further aggravate them.

The state has become the idol that everyone turns to and adores. Statolatry is, without a doubt, the most serious and dangerous social disease of our time. We are taught to believe that every problem can and must be detected in time and solved by the state. Our fate depends on the state and on the politicians who control it, who are presumed to guarantee everything our welfare demands. In this way, the human being remains immature and turns against his own creative nature (the very source of the inescapable uncertainty of his future). He demands a crystal ball that will assure him not only knowledge of what is to come, but also that any problems that arise will be solved for him. This infantilization of the masses is deliberately encouraged by the political caste, as it justifies their existence and secures their popularity, predominance, and capacity to control.

In addition, a legion of intellectuals, so-called experts, and social engineers also join this arrogant intoxication of power, and not even the Church or the most respectable religious denominations have been able to diagnose that statolatry is today the principal threat to the free, moral, and responsible human being. The state is a false idol of immense power, worshiped by all, that will not allow humanity to free itself from its control or to maintain moral or religious loyalties beyond those it can itself control. What is more, it has achieved something that might appear impossible a priori: to conceal, sinuously and systematically, from the citizenry that the state itself is the true origin of social conflicts and ills, creating scapegoats everywhere (such as capitalism, the profit motive, and private property), onto which blame is shifted and against which the gravest and most emphatic condemnations are directed, including from moral and religious leaders themselves, almost none of whom have realized the deception or yet dared to denounce that statolatry is the main threat, in this century, to religion, morality, and therefore, human civilization.

Perhaps the main exception within the Church is found in the brilliant biography of Jesus of Nazareth, written by Benedict XVI. The fact that the state and political power constitute the institutional embodiment of the Antichrist should be obvious to anyone with the barest knowledge of history who reads Benedict XVI’s reflections on the greatest temptation the Evil One can present to us (and I quote Ratzinger literally):

The tempter is not so crude as to suggest to us directly that we should worship the devil. He merely suggests that we opt for the reasonable decision, that we choose to give priority to a planned and thoroughly organized world, where God may have His place as a private concern but must not interfere in our essential purposes. Soloviev attributes to the Antichrist a book entitled The Open Way to World Peace and Welfare. This book becomes something of a new Bible, whose real message is the worship of well-being and rational planning [of the State]. (Volume II, pp. 66-67)

Nor should it surprise us that, for example, the great author of The Lord of the Rings (270 million copies sold), J.R.R. Tolkien—whom many of us have enjoyed and whose Catholic anarchism I fully share—even went so far as to say he would arrest anyone merely for daring to utter the word “state.” Therefore, since the state is, always and everywhere, a reality of systematic violence and coercion against the most intimate essence of the human being, which is our capacity to act freely, creatively, and spontaneously, we must conclude that the state is essentially immoral, and that statism constitutes the principal threat to humanity.

The revolution against the Ancien Régime was led by our predecessors, the great classical liberals, among whom, in this part of the world, two figures stand out: the Liberator José de San Martín, who, in his maxims for Merceditas, sought to instill in her a love of truth, a hatred of lies, respect for the property of others, and love for the homeland, and above all, of liberty; and the very father of Argentine liberal constitutionalism, the great Juan Bautista Alberdi. Well, if we wish to be loyal to these heroes and founding fathers of the Argentine nation who preceded us, it is our responsibility to complete the work they began, and to do so by recognizing that their enterprise finds its natural continuation today in the anarcho-capitalist revolution of the twenty-first century.

Anarcho-capitalism is the purest representation of the spontaneous order of the market, in which all services, including those of law enforcement, justice, and public order, are provided through an exclusively voluntary process of social cooperation. In this system, no domain is closed to the impetus of human creativity and entrepreneurial coordination; efficiency and justice are enhanced in addressing any problems that may arise, while the conflicts, inefficiencies, and corruption generated by every state—or any monopolistic agency of violence—are eliminated at the root.

And I shall conclude with this: the message of anarcho-capitalism is, therefore, unequivocally revolutionary—revolutionary in terms of its objective: the dismantling of the state and its replacement by a competitive market process, formed by a web of private agencies, associations, and organizations; and revolutionary in terms of its means, especially in the academic, socio-economic, and political spheres:

Firstly, in the academic realm of economic science, which becomes the general theory of the spontaneous market order, extended to every area of social life, and which is developed by the Austrian School of Economics, incorporating the analysis of the discoordinating effects generated by statism wherever it intrudes. It also includes the study of the various paths to dismantling the state, of the necessary transitional processes, and of the comprehensive privatization of all services that are today considered public, which are a priority field of research within our discipline.

Secondly, the economic and social revolution. We cannot even begin to imagine the immense achievements, advances, and human discoveries that could be made in an entrepreneurial environment entirely free of statism. Even today, despite continuous governmental harassment, an unknown civilization is already emerging across an increasingly globalized world, with a degree of complexity beyond the grasp and control of state power. Such is the force of human creativity that it finds its way even through the narrowest cracks left by governments. And, as human beings become more aware of the essentially perverse nature of the state that restricts them, and of the immense possibilities that are frustrated each day when it blocks the driving force of their entrepreneurial creativity, citizens will cease to believe in the state and the social clamor for its reform and dismantling will multiply.

And finally, the political revolution. It is true that we must always support the least interventionist alternatives in clear alliance with the efforts of the classical liberals in pursuit of the democratic limitation of the state. But the anarcho-capitalist does not stop there, knowing that he can and must do much more. He knows the ultimate goal is the total dismantling of the state, and this knowledge drives all his imagination and political action on a daily basis. Incremental advances in the right direction are undoubtedly welcome, but without falling into a pragmatism that could obstruct the supreme goal of bringing the state to an end which, for pedagogical reasons, and to shape popular opinion, must always be pursued in a systematic and transparent manner.

An exciting future opens before us, in which we will continually discover many new paths that will allow us to move toward the anarcho-capitalist ideal, helping everyone to break free from the drug of statism so that we may live in freedom and responsibility, and, in any case, always welcome with open arms those who finally see the scientific and moral truth, wherever they may come from.

This future, although it may seem distant today, could at any moment witness giant strides that would surprise even the most optimistic among us. Who could have predicted, a mere five years beforehand, that in 1989 the Berlin Wall would fall and, with it, the whole structure of Eastern European communism? Who could even have imagined that just a year and a half ago the Argentine nation would freely elect the first liberal-libertarian president in history?

History has entered an accelerated process of change that will never cease and that, as the great Jorge Luis Borges (another conservative anarchist or, as Rothbard would say, paleo-libertarian) wished, will open up a totally new and splendid path for the human race when, for the first time in history, it succeeds in ridding itself definitively of the state and reducing it to nothing more than a dark historical memory.

Thank you very much.

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