Comparing — and Contrasting — Javier Milei’s Inaugural Speech with FDR’s

Buenos Aires — The iconoclastic economist Javier Milei was sworn in as Argentina’s president on Sunday, capping a remarkable political rise. He wasn’t even elected to his first public office until two years ago.

Newly published figures show that 45 percent of Argentina’s 46 million people are in poverty and the economy is on the edge of hyperinflation. Facing this stark reality, Milei used his inauguration speech to pledge a “new era of peace and prosperity” for Argentina that will include shock budget therapy, dollarization of the economy, and an attempt to form “a new social contract [that] proposes a different country, in which the state does not direct our lives.” He added a point that he has often stressed: “The only way out of poverty is through more freedom.”

He declared, “Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of a tragic era for the world, these elections represent a tipping point in our history.”

But first Milei called on citizens to have patience, because they will have to endure more economic hardship: “Even if we stop printing money today, we will continue to pay the costs of the monetary imbalance of the outgoing government. We are going to pay for it in inflation.”

If nothing is done, the nation will face “an inflation rate of 15,000 percent a year that we are going to fight tooth and nail to eradicate,” he warned. “I would rather tell you an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable lie.”

“We neither seek nor desire the tough decisions that will have to be taken in the coming weeks, but we have been left with no choice. Our commitment is unalterable.”

Watching Milei’s speech from the spectator stands, I was struck by how much his speech reminded me of another inauguration speech: Franklin Roosevelt’s famous 1933 inauguration in which he declared that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

But Roosevelt’s speech was far more than that. It was a call to arms, presenting him as the commander of a nation in a war against want and despair, with FDR’s proposed “New Deal” as the battle plan.

Like Milei, he too had someone to blame for the perilous state of the economy: the greed and incompetence of bankers and business leaders:

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

And Roosevelt had an answer for those who said his proposed changes couldn’t be put into practice. He promised to shift the power dynamic of the Constitution itself if he felt it necessary:

It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure. . . . I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Roosevelt indeed reshaped America and bent the country to his will. And, as a result of the New Deal, we now have a fundamentally larger and more intrusive government.

Ever since, progressives have pined for a new Roosevelt. Nancy Pelosi once responded to an accusation that Democrats had run out of ideas with just three words: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” Just after Barack Obama won the 2008 election, Time magazine ran a doctored photo of Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt on its cover, complete with cigarette holder pinched in his mouth, and the headline “The New New Deal.” Much the same thing happened after Joe Biden’s 2020 election, with historian Jonathan Alter proclaiming Biden as “FDR’s heir” in the New York Times.

Milei, of course, completely rejects as poison the Roosevelt cocktail of government controls and subsidies. His advisers note that FDR’s 1933 inauguration was written by Raymond Moley, a political economist who was part of his “Brain Trust” until 1936. Then Moley broke with Roosevelt because he feared he was undermining America’s free institutions.

In his 1952 book How to Keep Our Liberty, Moley wrote that FDR’s policies were “largely hit-or-miss improvisations mixed with plenty of the old inflationary ideas. . . . The relief program and the carrying on of public works on a modest scale were perverted into a great spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect government agency.”

Moley became a contributor to the Foundation for Economic Education’s Freeman magazine (which a friend of Milei credits as having helped strengthen the new president’s commitment to free-market economics) and later to National Review. At both outlets, he kept up his warnings about the dangers of New Deal thinking.

Roosevelt’s inauguration speech had an enormous impact and is remembered to this day. Milei has embarked on a reform project in a country that is even worse off than America is today, and he has made no FDR-like demands for greater executive power. But if Milei succeeds, the principles he articulated in his speech may become an alternative model for struggling countries. Argentina is one of several nations that need to escape the failures of interest-group politics and runaway spending that have impoverished once-wealthy regions.