February 18, 2025 - 6:15pm
Javier Milei is engulfed in a memecoin crisis. Last week, the Argentinian President recommended an obscure cryptocurrency called LIBRA. It shot up in value but quickly tanked, going from $5 valuation per coin to about $0.38. Milei has been accused of a “rug pull”, where the coin’s backers attract investors before pulling out and leaving the investors with worthless tokens. Argentina’s libertarian President has denied any wrongdoing and independently and immediately referred himself to the country’s parliamentary corruption watchdog.
Being caught up in this circus, however, does not look good. The whole scenario is tawdry. Barstool Sports mogul Dave Portnoy invested $5 million into LIBRA at its launch, lost it all when the coin tanked, only to be refunded personally by the coin’s founder, Hayden Davis. There have been even stranger revelations, with reports that someone who bought $5 million of LIBRA also bought $1 million of TRUMP when it launched and sold it for a huge profit before it fell in price. It is yet to be established who this player is, but a link between the coins has been made.
Crypto has always been a Wild West. But the advent of the memecoin — and its explosion in popularity over the last few months — has brought us into a whole new era of crude theatrics and rigged deals. It is a world where liquidity is constantly being recycled, where the self-licking ice cream cone has been perfected, and where certain favoured investors simply cannot lose even if they try.
So far, Milei’s contribution to the carnival seems to be limited to a single tweet — now deleted — in which he suggested the coin could be good for small businesses. The coin’s founder Hayden Davis had some well-placed Argentine collaborators, who in turn had a direct line into the President. Cleverly, it had been woven around one of his campaign slogans: “Viva la libertad”. It shows elegantly why the economic libertarians were daft to ever climb into bed with the crypto crowd.
In an interview with Coffeezilla, YouTube’s favourite scam baiter, Hayden Davis ties himself in knots with his sheer honesty. “It is an insider’s game,” he declares. “This is an unregulated casino […] It’s who loses last. It’s a game. Every single one of these is a game. My game was that some of these would turn into utility […] and I don’t think that at the current moment.”
There we have it: these are the people who mint these coins, their official spokesmen in the world, telling you to your face that there is fundamentally no way to price these assets.
Milei is probably the world’s most famous living economic libertarian. And in outline, the economic libertarian case for crypto is simple enough: a distributed ledger system nixes the need for a central bank — or any bank — to have a monopoly on the information of who-has-paid-who. By writing it on the blockchain, anyone anywhere can look up who owns a slice of a finite resource. (The “coin” in question is automatically self-limited by the sheer exponential cost of the electricity required to produce the next “block” on the “chain”.)
This has long been a sort of Philosopher’s Stone for anyone who believes that the divergence between the money supply and the underlying value of goods and services in the economy is the root of all evil — as Austrian School economists do.
Milei certainly believes this. The stories of how he began to read the works of Robert Nozick, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard have the full religious air of St Paul being banged off his horse. Almost all the medicine he is bringing to Argentina flows from the teachings of these economists.
No doubt the LIBRA coin was pitched to him on these libertarian terms. Yet in accepting that pitch, Milei shows a worryingly superficial understanding of his own favourite subject. Students of the Austrian School should be rigorously focused on the question of underlying value. What is backing this “currency”? Nothing. What are the incentives in this market? What is the utility of this as a product? Apart from secret untraceable transactions, not much. Beyond this, no further analysis is required.
LIBRA is a memecoin — essentially worthless “tokens”. But even Bitcoin, something designed more clearly around a use case, has always stumbled in the final analysis. In El Salvador, tough-on-crime President Nayib Bukele is experimenting with his own version of what you might call authoritarian-libertarianism. He has made Bitcoin legal tender, but its uptake is limited by three factors: the extreme volatility of the daily Bitcoin price, the slowness of transactions, and the artificial nature of the whole enterprise, in that Bitcoin often needs to be re-exchanged before it becomes useful.
Now, the memecoin flea circus has bitten Milei, as surely as if his enemies had planned it all along to discredit his project. Rather than following the path of untrammelled economic libertarianism, Milei and his allies should break free from the crypto-bro theatre.
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The mass protests in the UK make me realise that a ‘civil war’ in the USA may really also happen. Not a civil war with massed armies, of course, but a fight between the People and the forces of the Government, the Police, or the National Guard, or those members of them them that choose to fight against the People. With an armed People, such a conflict would have an uncertain outcome.
Another explanation might be the areas with low Muslim populations have looked at some areas with high Muslim populations and decided it’s not what they want to happen to them. Is that fair? Certainly not to the majority of Muslims but neither is it fair to force large demographic and cultural changes on communities that do not want it.
Don’t assume this problem does not exist in the south east either. I live near a large town on the south coast that has seen a large influx of (mostly Muslim) immigrants over the last couple of decades and people there do think it has gone too far too fast, the surrounding areas definitely don’t want it spreading to them at the same pace or scale either.
The sense l get is the people who have to make the biggest adjustments and benefit the least feel this is being forced on them by people who may well benefit from high immigration but never experience any of the negative consequences.
It’s all about making whites extinct in their own countries. White elites hate whites as their “luxury belief” system and get virtue from the praise of other nihilistic whites. The corporations get an endless supply of cheap third world labor which they’ve always wanted, but then the supply of white workers has dried up and now they want to replace them. The Marxists have always wanted to destroy the white race and Western civilization generally ever since they could not sell Marxism to the white working class. They will never forgive working whites for that betrayal.
In the US this has been the way for decades. Places with the fewest immigrants are most against immigration. Go figure.
In any case it doesn’t matter. Democracy is about the will of the people. Logic is not required. If the people want less immigration (or Brexit, or exclusive fishing rights) that’s what their representatives should be doing. Full stop.
I want thuggery of any sort to stop right now. It solves nothing – but Government needs to stop labelling people and show ordinary people that they understand why they are unhappy.
It’s not just about Muslims, it’s about total immigration numbers, plus the failure to build the infrastructure to cope with 13 million extra in 3 decades.
No-one wants a migrant hotel or camp in their area. It rubs salt into the wounds about housing priorities and waiting lists.
Here’s a thought.
Maybe the anger at the horrific nature of the crime, combined with the obviously deliberate witholding of information about the motivation for the crime by the police, combined with the blatant differences in how these angry protests were policed and reported on by the media, combined with the constant references to people with concerns about immigration as far right, combined with the forceful narrative control by the press and the government was all actually well perceived and understood by people in working class towns around the country from the outset.
Maybe there is a broader context but that broader context isnt the reason for the riots, its the broader context. Its a bit like the broader context for the murders of 3 children was that the murderer was born in Cardiff and had immigrant parents. Thats not the reason and thats what people are concerned about.
Not one single newspaper i have seen is answering the question why the murders happened, all of them are posing answers to why the protests have happened. Whether true or not, this is perceived as narrative control and is making things worse.
Excellent comment. Spot on
It is narrative control. Pretty much everything coming out of legacy media these days is. And they still think people are listening to them. Reminds me of the ancien regime in France.
Let us eat cake! (Well, brioche instead of white…)
‘cuz the murder was not racially motivated. Black men seem to have a fondness for killing. About half of the murders in the US are caused by blacks.
That’s a racist trope. Over 90% of US murders are by men, yet it’s race you focus on.The figures are similar in most countmries.
Mainly murdering other black men (who probably make up the majority of their immediate community). That the teenager who committed the murders of the girls is black, is imho, largely irrelevant. You might as well point out he was born in Wales (plenty of historic English prejudice towards the Welsh). Perhaps he has mental health problems? That is a more likely explanation, although it changes nothing about the crime and its effect on the victims and their families. Shall we wait for the facts to come out in the trial?
When do the police ever reveal the motivations of a crime? Once the offender has been apprehended, it’s the job of the criminal justice system to process them, and any evidence gathered (ie motivation) is part of the investigation, until the case goes to court.
‘Starmer said yesterday: “Whatever the apparent motivation, this is not protest; it’s pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or on Muslim communities.”’
Two-tier Keir couldn’t be clearer about his priorities, could he?
But what are the rioters protesting about? Perhaps it’s about vegan sausage rolls (they looted a branch of Greggs), or the selection of books at their local library (one was torched in Liverpool).
I was listening to the radio the other day where some “entitled” people were discussing the protests. One referred to the problem that the premier league hasn’t started where these proles would go to vent their anger. I wondered what decade the speaker was in and whether they had recently been to a football match? But then again it only mattered to demonstrate how out of touch the “entitled” are these days.
As an aside you shouldn’t refer to them as elite, they’re not they’re the “entitled”.
Or the Cruelites.
I don’t believe for one minute that this is all the work of the ‘far right’.
I think this feeds into a deeper anger.
There’s a weirdness to the world. A sort of disconnect between what you see, what you’re being told and what you know to be true.
Diversity is our strength. But who is the ‘our’ in that statement? It doesn’t look like a strength. It looks like a mess.
Advertising that insists on depicting family structures that are statistically quite rare. I suspect leaving many potential customers oddly disconnected from the products being sold.
Further advertising telling us that mean tweets to footballers leave scars. I suspect many fans would gladly take the £80K a week salary and live with the online abuse. I know I would. You CAN turn off twitter you know?!
The trans row that goes on and on and on. Creating a new oppressed class of people to join the already long line of oppressed peoples. I suspect many of these peoples are doing an awful lot better than those that are rioting.
The insistence of the female football pundits. Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous. And it is. But who asked for it? How many hardcore football fans said “you know what football is missing. Female pundits”. And sorry, some of them are truly dreadful to be fair.
A police force that runs away. Takes the knee. Does nothing for some protests and is heavy handed at others.
This same police force also has some teeny tiny female officers that physically seem incapable of doing the job of policing. Anyone who has seen the recent footage of a female officer struggling to even move and hold her riot shield will know what I mean. The officer in question looked like a child.
Add in immigration at 700k plus.
An inability to control borders.
No money to fix roads but money for ULEZ cameras.
It just goes on and on and on.
It’s totally bonkers.
And we know it’s bonkers.
And now it’s turning violent. And people in Westminster are surprised.
I’m not.
Comment of the day. Bravo, seconded.
Another one is the virtually complete erasure of white men from leading roles on tv and advertising (unless they’re gay)
The portrayal of straight white men as incompetent nincompoops inadvertising and the ASA ruling out ‘gender stereotypes’. Men do the washing and the childcare (badly) while the women unblock drains and prune trees.
Advertising has been a bit like that for decades. Can’t you take a joke, or is your ego a bit fragile? Men still in charge almost everywhere else in the real world.
But can you honestly say that Muslims are to blame for this? Islam is by and large against a lot of the liberal policies you decry, and ethnic populations like Pakistanis tend to be more conservative in their personal opinions and lives.
Just because the government has ridiculous policies does not mean the rioters are thoughtful people who are just fed up of nonsense. They are the nonsense. Many of them are racists who have lumped themselves in with an otherwise reasonable minded group of people opposed to far left policies, and giving them all a bad name in the process.
And I mentioned Islam where exactly?!
This last election produced the least representative government in our history. A huge section of the population has been completely disenfranchised by the Blairite hijack of the Labour Party.
Meanwhile the same population has been driven out of the housing market altogether by the bad policies of the same Blairite cabal, the mass importation of cheap labour and the removal of housing costs as a criterion from interest rate policy.
If Starmer was a man of genuine principle he would immediately reform both the housing market and the electoral system – even if it were to lead to his departure from office.
But let’s not hold our breath, eh?
So you go left on economics – right?
Do you have a substantive question ?
So you go left on economics – right?
No – in the endless war between the grafters and the grifters I’m 100% with the grafters. The problem in Britain is not that people get rich, but that the wrong people get rich. We have far too many middle class freeloaders.
Oh Labour has plans for the housing market, don’t you worry! Their intention is to take all of the illegal immigrants out of disused military camps and hotels, and disperse them in your town or village, all over the country! Multiple occupancy housing, social housing, and private rental accommodation for a start. If you’re on a social housing list, they’re about to put 90,000 new ILLEGAL arrivals ahead of you.
You couldn’t make it up…
And they call themselves the ‘Labour Party’? Isn’t that an offence under the Trades Descriptions Act?
Hallelujah, hooray, praise Jah. At last, finally someone is mentioning the taboo ‘e word’ – economics. Class is grounded in economics as much as culture. Instead of endless wittering about a ‘woman is a woman’ etc perhaps attention is shifting back to the real underlying causes of discontent such as asset inequality and rent seeking. But some well fed culture warriors on the right and the left like to go on about ethnic issues because it doesn’t really cost anything, while economic realities are uncomfortable to admit.
These
riotersprotestors are the part of the ice berg that is visible above water. There is a much bigger mass underneath, comprised of tens of millions of people. I think this is what the increasingly fascist British state is afraid of.Ultimately, all regimes only really care about clinging onto power. The post-WW2 regimes of Europe have failed utterly and need to go.
Thank you for that.
The question of morale amongst the post-industrial working class is overlooked and aligns with the questions of social, political and cultural representation and inclusion:
i) Reform only winning a small number of seats despite a large share of the vote (now apparently popular in young male voters too)
ii) The national football team losing an international final once again
iii) Where the working class feel represented in national football, they witness the cosy sporting support of middle-class British Olympians over an endless 2+ week period as a sort of ‘rubbing their nose in it’ by state media.
I read something this week that stayed with me: Lonfon is the 6th largest economy in the world with a poor country attached to it.
Absolutely spot on. Financialisaton has created a gulf between the regions. 8 of the 10 poorest regions in Northern Europe are in now the UK (along with the no 1 richest area – also in the UK)
Yes. And the poorer areas are often nearly 100% white, while London isn’t majority British white. Ranting about white privilege then is just pouring salt into wounds.
Actually we are an NHS with a poor country attached to it.
Only with a poor quality sticking plaster.
Not so.
Britain is not a poor country by any measure. And there are many, many wealthy regions outside London.
Yes, there are also poor and run down regions. But it is nothing like as bad as you portray. Nor is it beyond us to do something about helping the poorer regions. Of course, if we continue to import huge numbers of unskilled and poor immigrants we’re not going to make much progress. Deliberately choosing to pursue “growth” through a token increase in net GDP while eroding GDP per capita is – in words the left like to use – a race to the bottom.
Here in South Lincolnshire we have some of the best agricultural land in the entire country. Thousands are employed on the land, and thousands more in the food processing and packaging. Your McCain chips come from here. Del Monte fruit. You’ve probably never heard of Bakkavor. They’re huge. Five factories locally.
And Ed Milliband has decided to carpet miles and miles of prime food producing land with solar panels. 5000 hectares at Essendine near Stamford is confirmed. A 9 mile long chain of 5 separate solar fields is planned from Crowland (on the border with Cambs) to past Spalding. All connected by 400 MW, 50 m tall powerline that will go from Whitby in Yorkshire through the length of Lincolnshire, parts of Cambs to the Norfolk coast.
Lots of people unemployed. Dozens of HGVs every day down single track farm lanes. Thanks Labour.
It is absolute madness to do this …not only reducing our farming capacity but also requiring us to import energy when sun no shine & wind no blow …
When cities that were once affluent thanks to thriving internationally renowned industry supported by the establishment (eg Stoke and the pottery industry) turn to ruin after years of neglect of the local working class, it’s hardly surprising that frustration at the willingness of government to spend millions on unsustainable immigration schemes is running high.
.
It’s worth remembering that other areas with much higher immigrant populations did not have those characteristics a couple of decades ago. I suspect that most people in the areas where riots have occurred worry that their area is heading in the same direction – and that no-one in power cares.
Maybe they’re also rioting against a ruling class that clearly hates them and wishes them ill.
Unfortunately the rioters aren’t burning The Dorchester.
Probably because that isn’t where the ruling class or their paid politicians live…
You have to attack the ruling class cockroaches where they live and hide.