Argentinian president Javier Milei has called the late Pope Francis an “imbecile,” a “filthy leftist,” an “embarrassing communist,” a “piece of shit,” and “the representative of malignance on Earth,” delivering that last remark during his successful presidential campaign in 2023. Why the hatred? Milei is a devoted advocate of exactly the neoliberal order that Francis was criticizing when he declared in 2013 that “money must serve, not rule!” Among Milei’s heroes are the Austrian school of economists—Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard. In 1922, Mises warned that “a living Christianity cannot exist side by side with, and within, Capitalism.” Jesus was too much of a socialist. “No art of interpretation,” Mises huffed, “can find a single passage in the New Testament that could be read as upholding private property,” and “the Redeemer’s words” against the rich had done more harm than “the persecution of heretics and the burning of witches.” Mises also argued that the Catholic Church in particular was incompatible with nationalism. The West was faced with a choice: capitalism and nationalism or retrograde Christian compassion.
This view of the world has roots on both sides of the Atlantic. In the first decade of the twentieth century, an Episcopal minister named Albert Jay Nock abandoned his wife, children, and church for what became a decades-long career in libertarian journalism. He was an uncompromising opponent of the federal government. State intervention, “good or bad,” he wrote in 1924, “reduces the scope of individual responsibility, and thus retards and cripples the education which can be a product of nothing but the free exercise of moral judgment.” Virtue could arise only through natural selection, which required that individuals face the consequences of their mistakes without a public safety net. In this analysis, Nock took his cues from the Victorian anarcho-capitalist Herbert Spencer, the man who coined the phrases “survival of the fittest” and “there is no alternative.”
In Europe, pioneers of the Austrian school were making similar arguments. The key element of Friedrich Hayek’s thought was his hostility to the “consciously directed” in favor of “spontaneous order.” Take prices, for example: instead of some authority deciding how valuable something should be, market competition resolves individuals’ demands into a price “not determined by the conscious will of anybody.” Hayek called this lack of control freedom: to be free was to be bound only by the market, never by another human being’s will. Hayek viewed market society as a kind of fractal—a beautiful symmetry emerging from underlying rules rather than from individual or collective intention. He viewed the human mind similarly. Instead of the old model of reason governing the appetites, he believed that consciousness was subordinate to subconscious impulses. Far from the state being able to govern citizens, the individual citizen could not even govern herself, but was instead blindly impelled by spontaneous impulses.