A genuine anarcho-capitalist establishment is emerging, housing foundations and think tanks, private in-person and online universities that are booming with regional authorization, as well as regional administrations and political parties.
España SA and a public university in Madrid as a speaker: the billionaire guru of ultraliberal “anarcho-capitalism”
In a closed classroom, a teacher decided to teach his class in a particular way. To criticize state intervention in the economy, the teacher raises a veritable cloud of legal tender notes that scatter around the classroom. This is the “monetary helicopter”: a rain of money that, according to some proponents of anarcholiberalism, the state promotes every time growth catches a cold. A public solution that, for this expert, keeps the Christian West in a chronic illness.
At the end of the session, the professor collects every last ticket. The doors can now open. The student body, which probably contains a great diversity of ideologies and beliefs, will have been shocked. The State disrupts the nature of economic exchanges; inflation necessarily comes from the printing of bank notes; Letting the market do its work is, in addition to being modern and advanced, the most moral; and the money is in our pockets better than anywhere else.
As in punk rock, the dominant formula in this society of spectacle, seduction and haste is three chords at most and the truth. A successful image speaks better than many consecutive subordinate images. The knowledge that citizens have about the economy lasts a few minutes or seconds of learning. And the graphics resist all kinds of later revisions.
This professor is not a line in the water, but rather a symptom. His name is Jesús Huerta de Soto and he has been practicing for 45 years. His chair, at the public Rey Juan Carlos University, has become a place of notable influence. While researchers in economics and other social sciences publish articles that appear in high-level magazines but have little circulation, teachers like this one multiply their message by thirty, forty or fifty listeners a day. His YouTube videos are also widely distributed and have inspired political leaders such as Argentine President Javier Milei.
Huerta de Soto is president of España Sociedad Anónima, an insurance company founded by his grandfather in 1928. He can make ends meet without his master classes at the public university, but his teaching activity now spans almost half a century and also extends to the field of scientific and editorial production. A mission that has been joined by many disciples.
One of them is Juan Ramón Rallo, a doctoral student at Huerta de Soto and a renowned expert and lecturer. With hundreds of thousands of followers, Rallo carries out his teaching activities in different private universities, such as the OMMA Center, the University of the Hesperides and the IE Business School.
Another is Gabriel Calzada, who defended his doctoral thesis under the same supervision. Both Rallo and Calzada are extremely polite in their dealings and erudite in their field of expertise.
Calzada and Rallo also gave courses at the Rey Juan Carlos public school, which offers a master’s degree in economics from the Austrian school, a trend to which they and their teacher, Huerta de Soto, belong. The Calzada family diversifies its activities in different sectors of the Canary Islands economy; one of them is the University of the Hesperides, a recently created private center in which ultraliberal thinking occupies a priority place.
From these promoters and others, the Juan de Mariana Institute was born in 2005, a center of anarcho-capitalist thought and dissemination that gave a new direction to the liberal doctrines of authors such as Adam Smith or David Ricardo. Its presentation in society took place precisely at the Rey Juan Carlos University. In it, harsh criticism was addressed to the sectors that denounce climate change, the “warmologists”, in the jargon used by the institute. This presentation included Esperanza Aguirre, then regional president.
Aguirre’s first political inspiration, Pedro Schwartz, professor of economics, supervised Huerta de Soto’s thesis. Aguirre had representatives of this economic approach in his governments, as did his successor Isabel Díaz Ayuso. One of them is Javier Fernández Lasquetty, who was Minister of Immigration and Cooperation and Health with Aguirre and Ignacio González, and of Economy, Finance and Employment with the current regional president.
By 2014, Lasquetty was exhausted: the courts had stopped the outsourcing process of Madrid hospitals and the then Health Director had resigned. “Being liberal in Spain is crying,” he declared a few months later on the Libertad Digital portal, a newspaper directed by Federico Jiménez Losantos that has hosted various opinion makers from the Austrian school since its foundation.
After leaving the regional government in 2014, Lasquetty became vice-rector of the Francisco Marroquín University of Guatemala, where Gabriel Calzada was in charge of the rectorate. Francisco Marroquín would grant the honorary doctorate in 2006 to former president José María Aznar and in 2009 to Jesús Huerta de Soto. Lasquetty, since leaving his position in the management of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has joined the board of directors of various private companies and the aforementioned University of the Hesperides.
What is described with the profiles presented here is a social network that extends to different centers of thought and study, key public and private institutions. Journalist Antonio M. Vélez recently looked at these relationships, which constitute a real establishment anarcho-capitalist and which houses foundations and think tanksin person at private universities and online which arise in the middle of a boom with regional authorization, as well as regional administrations and political parties.
The defenders of this ideological current have themselves recognized that they are overrepresented, but also that their function is important, since it is about establishing an ideological counterweight to the temptations of the left. But, with the electoral victory of Javier Milei in Argentina, they could take a step forward that would leave the Thatcherite revolution as an anecdote. If international powers like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund end up compromising with Milei’s decisions, the anarcholiberal influence will become even more transversal.
The importance of this phenomenon is already evident in its influence on moderate politicians. Mariano Rajoy, former Prime Minister, publicly supported Milei’s candidacy in the last presidential elections of the Argentine Republic. As former President of Madrid, Cristina Cifuentes received financial advice from Daniel Lacalle, a close if not member of the Juan de Mariana Institute. The Community of Madrid hosts former collaborators of the aforementioned think tank in various autonomous organizations and in its own government. Luis Pérez himself, “Alvise”, initially a UPyD activist and chief of staff of Toni Cantó – in his phase as deputy of Ciudadanos – in the Valencian Parliament, has defined himself on several occasions as a sympathizer of this ideological tendency.
In these times of radical uncertainty, beliefs and superstitions are becoming the new faith. Extremist solutions, such as Milei’s in Argentina, have given hope to many. The ideas that will allow this and other visionaries of the future to gain an audience have been in the making for many decades. The right has dominated the language of economic metaphor so far; and anarcho-capitalism, its extreme version, is not far behind. The left, often mired in the struggle for nuance, should pay more attention to these lessons.
