From Mises Institute<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cLudwig von Mises is Latin America\u2019s leading economist,\u201d declared the headline of a Bloomberg opinion piece earlier this month by economist Tyler Cowen. <\/p>\n
The one-time principal economic adviser to the Austrian government, Mises fled his homeland in 1934 to escape the growing Nazi reach, eventually settling in the US, where he became a professor at New York University. His free-market policy prescriptions, framed by an economic thinking centered on human behavior and individual choice, were widely considered out of fashion at the time. <\/p>\n
But his strident rejection of socialism has found a foothold in places like Brazil, where a \u201cLess Marx, More Mises\u201d movement has swelled over the past 15 years in a backlash to the ruling center left party, propelled by the growth of social media and a series of corruption scandals, according to Camila Rocha, a political scientist and researcher at the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning. <\/p>\n
The movement is especially popular among young male students and low-income workers such as Uber drivers and street vendors \u201cwho started feeling and thinking like entrepreneurs\u201d and \u201cdon\u2019t want to pay taxes anymore,\u201d she said. Moicano has said he began studying economics after facing taxes on his first UFC winnings. <\/p>\n
In 2015, the \u201cLess Marx, More Mises\u201d slogan made its way onto the posters brandished by protesters in Brazil\u2019s massive right-wing demonstrations, which foreshadowed the rise of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who would later embrace the libertarian flank. <\/p>\n
Today, many experts believe the Austrian school may have no greater sway than in Buenos Aires, where President Javier Milei, himself a libertarian economist, retweeted a viral clip of Moicano\u2019s rant. <\/p>\n
After reading Mises for the first time, Milei felt \u201csuperlative conceptual clarity,\u201d he recalled in a 2017 interview. \u201cMilei considers Mises to be among the greatest economists in history,\u201d said Daniel Raisbeck, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. <\/p>\n
Since taking office in December, the wild-haired leader has pushed for wide deregulation. While many of his proposals have been blocked by the country\u2019s congress, his government achieved fiscal parity this year with a robust and controversial set of cuts, including shutting down the Argentina national press agency and reducing aid to soup kitchens. <\/p>\n
Milei\u2019s elimination of rent controls and price controls could be interpreted as harking back to Mises, Raisbeck said, pointing to the Austrian\u2019s thinking that <\/strong>\u201cfreely determined prices provide the vital information without which economic calculation becomes impossible.\u201d <\/p>\n But the idea has also been espoused by free market economists outside the Austrian school, like Milton Friedman, (after whom one of Milei\u2019s dogs is named), Raisbeck said. <\/p>\n
Instead, Raisbeck said, Mises\u2019s fingerprints might be clearest in Milei\u2019s anti-socialist rhetoric, like his January speech before the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he argued the West had to be wrested back from leaders \u201cco-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.\u201d <\/p>\n
Mises-watchers also see strands of the economist\u2019s thinking in the policies pushed by El Salvador\u2019s President Nayib Bukele, another buzzy right-winger upending the Latin American political scene. <\/p>\n
Remarks from Bukele earlier this year to the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington were awash in \u201clanguage familiar to the Austrians,\u201d reads a blog post on the website of the Mises Institute, a non-profit promoting the economist\u2019s teachings. <\/p>\n
Rocha, the Brazilian researcher, highlights local offshoots of the Mises Institutes and other libertarian centers as being \u201cvery skilled at disseminating their ideas to a broader audience in Latin America.\u201d <\/p>\n
Still, few mentions of Mises seem to have had as big an impact on the mainstream in recent years as Moicano\u2019s: as the clip went viral, Google search interest for the economist hit its highest since 2016, according to the company. <\/p>\n
The fighter\u2019s salute to Mises led to a live TV interview on Fox Business and a nearly nine-minute celebration from Ben Shapiro, the right-wing commentator whose YouTube videos can rack up millions of views. \u201cThat is my jam!\u201d Shapiro said of the Austrian school. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s also driven traffic toward Moicano\u2019s YouTube channel and a new podcast, which might be considered no bad thing in the mind of a free-market capitalist. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you start to understand the concept of the Austrian economic school,\u201d Moicano said in a recent YouTube video, \u201cyou\u2019re going to understand that\u2019s what I need: free market, liberties, and wealth, my brother. That\u2019s the whole thing.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n
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Brazilian UFC fighter Renato Moicano had just rallied back from an early-round beating to win a lightweight bout this month when he grabbed a mic to shout out his favorite economist. \u201cI love private property and let me tell you something, if you care about your country, read Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2440,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2439","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}