Argentina's Milei says shutting central bank 'non-negotiable'

You are still not half as confused as the average libertarian.

TL;DR: Basically, in the US at least, Libertarians are spoiled white guys who don't even understand how good they have it and have Ayn Rand power fantasies that they'll make their own way and the rest of the world has just been dragging them down.

A couple of my college buddies are full on Ludwig Von Mises/Murray Rothbard anarcho-capitalist nutjobs. The basic conceit is that all governments and states are illegitimate uses of force and are drags on the free functioning of the economy. Left with no "coercive" governments, people will competitively self-organize into private collectives to replace all governmental services, and all resources will flow to their best and natural use. It's absurdly naive and ignores absolutely everything about human nature and even the de facto reality of their desired end state.

So somehow private property will continue to exist and be protected by voluntary courts and security, and funny how it works out that in this case my buddies get to keep the fruits of the privilege enjoyed by centuries of their ancestors and built up in a decidedly non anarcho-capitalist system. All existing government property will be sold off and the proceeds distributed to... someone? No word on how natural monopolies like the best water route between two river ports will be handled, but it will be privately negotiated and definitely perfect!

It will be a utopia of people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and not letting silly things like "personal safety" or "living wage" or "stewardship of resources" get in the way of making the completely even-handed and non-coercive deals that all people will make with the private entities that spring up to replace governments, but only VOLUNTARILY! People definitely won't make deals they don't like, and that reduce their future power, to avoid death in a "market" with limited opportunities. They definitely won't leave their shares (or whatever) to their children and recreate all the same social structures we have now, but with corporate self-interest as literally the only governing norm.

Now, I suppose you could end up with corporate bodies that are outcompeted by "fairer" competitors (ignoring, of course, all first mover advantages and the willingness to protect profits by violent force that we already see in so many times and places), or maybe certain security and judicial corporations will make agreements with each other and install themselves as a layer over the more economically productive companies and collect fees that are definitely not taxes. Maybe some of them will be the "fairer" entities.

But where does that leave you? Basically, our current world is already at least a little better than the libertarians' best-case scenario, and what their system really does is tell people to give up, that they are not worth one cent more than the economic value they can provide to someone else, and that they deserve no voice in the governance of their lives beyond what they can take.

How this doesn't descend into competing warlord fiefdoms, eventually to be swept away by spasms of violence (in this system, "competition" is just a euphemism for politics and war), is beyond me. With some luck, it might lead to some parts of the world on a tortuously slow and uneven march in the vague direction of egalitarian governance to moderate the use of coercive force. In that case, CONGRATULATIONS! You've landed the world right back where it started, but now with millions dead and the Earth in even worse shape than it would have been.

I can almost understand the Personal Liberties Libertarian, which I think is what the philosophy was originally supposed to be about. But we often see Corpo-National Libertarians or Totally-Not-An-Anarchist-I-Swear Libertarians, and both of those are baffling to me.

confused

You've understood.

It always seems like "common sense" (short-sighted and moronically simplistic) solutions to problems they don't understand but waffle on about something tangentally related to make it sound like they do.

it's like I'm always with them for the first few seconds, then they just go way off base out of knowhere at some unexpected point in time

just make me confused

It's very simple. They incorporate as a superperson. You're a human, somewhat rich. You get a corporation. You put it on like a magic suit and you have super-immunity (impunity) from laws, you can do anything.

The freedom that they want is the freedom to exercise their power (money) with no bad consequences for them.

It's a simple theology: "Me first. Fuck you. Every man for himself."

While it fits great on a bumper sticker, it's a suboptimal strategy to build an economy, nation-state, or anything really.

It's neoliberalism

This move is a necessity in Argentina's Political and Economical situation, by shutting down the Central Bank (and subsequently moving to Dollars) Milei is killing the Politicians' (long standing and abused) Ability to finance themselves with monetary emissions (their Agendas and Deficient governments just to not say corrupt money laundering), which is the cause of inflation, which makes all Argentines poorer by the hour.

It is if not his biggest, one of the major promises on his campaign and the one most people voted him for, Argentines understand (as seen trough Random Street interviews) that this will create major hiccup on Economy while they transition to dollar, but given it's long tern effects are willing to put up with it