Machiavelli Is Dead: Why Politics Without Property Rights, Rules, and Moral Limits Cannot Work

Machiavelli is dead, why politics without property rights rules and moral limits cannot work.

By Jenny Joyce Schumann, Javier Miele's Davos speech marks a decisive break with a dominant political

mindset. The belief that upholding and expanding political power justifies moral compromise,

and that political authority should be judged primarily by effectiveness rather than legitimacy.

This might make right logic was perhaps most coherently formulated as a political philosophy

by the early modern thinker Nicolò Machiavelli in his influential work Il Principe.

It is this Machiavelli in call for power regardless of moral cost that Miele fundamentally rejects.

At the core of the Argentine president's argument lies a straightforward but radical claim.

Efficiency and justice are not adversaries but complementary dimensions that can co-exist only

within capitalism. This runs counter to the modern tendency to treat markets as a narrowly

confined necessary evil, mere machines in need of technocratic optimization, while government

intervention is cast as a necessary good to deliver fairness. Such a dualistic worldview overlooks

the dynamic nature of economic order. Markets function not because they are deliberately designed

by a central authority, but because individuals are free to act, experiment, fail, learn and adapt.

This process, however, requires something unfashionable in contemporary politics,

stable moral and legal rules grounded in individual rights.

Property rights illustrate this point clearly. In mainstream policy debates,

property is often treated as negotiable, susceptible to taxation, regulation or redistribution

whenever higher goals are invoked. Miele reverses this premise. Property rights are not a concession

from the state but a pre-political right of the individual. Private property is the necessary

precondition for all economic activity, trading, saving, investment and long-term planning.

If actors cannot trust that they will retain the fruits of their labour, they stop producing,

innovating and taking risks. Capital formation slows, entrepreneurship evaporates and prosperity

declines. Far from delivering justice, the continual erosion of property rights breeds stagnation

and poverty. This is not moralising, it is empirical. When governments penalise success while

socialising failure, incentives weaken unpredictable ways, entrepreneurs become cautious,

capital flows elsewhere and innovation stalls. These outcomes can be observed repeatedly across

the Western world and particularly in Latin America. Argentina itself offers a clear example.

For years, successive governments relied on capital controls, export taxes, price interventions

and monetary financing of fiscal deficits. The result was not social justice, but chronic inflation,

capital flight and collapsing investment. By 2023, annual inflation exceeded 200% per month,

savings were eroded and productive activity increasingly shifted into the informal economy.

These outcomes were not the result of market failure but of systematic political interference

with prices, profits and property. When returns are confiscated and losses are politicised,

rational actors retreat. Economic stagnation under such conditions is not surprising,

it is the predictable consequence of distorted incentives. Miele's critique also targets short-term

economic engineering, price controls to combat inflation, subsidies to relieve scarcity

and regulations to curb so-called market power. Such measures may temporarily calm public

anxiety but they undermine the price system that coordinates economic activity in the long run.

Price ceilings do not make goods more plentiful, they generate shortages, hoarding and black

markets. In the case of Madura's Venezuela, extensive food price controls have long been linked

to disinvestment and chronic shortages of basic goods. Controls introduced in the 2000s were

intended to make staples affordable, yet they reduced production, emptied shelves and encouraged

smuggling. In parallel, persistent inflation and scarcity continue to erode basic living

conditions. Drawing on the work of Jesus Huerta de Soto, Miele offers a counter-perspective

through the concept of dynamic efficiency. Progress in this view is not centrally planned

but emerges from decentralized experimentation and entrepreneurial discovery.

D-regulation does not mean chaos, it means removing artificial barriers so that voluntary

cooperation can function. By lifting these constraints, supply, innovation and coordination

are allowed to re-emerge. Even if the neoclassical notion of perfectly competitive markets fails

to hold in static terms, markets operate with remarkable efficiency dynamically through

continuous adjustment and spontaneous reordering of supply and demand. The connection between markets

and moral rules is therefore not incidental. Markets depend on trust, enforceable contracts

respect for property and the non-aggression principle. Where these principles are honored,

wealth is created through voluntary exchange among many. Where they are violated,

markets become coerced and distorted, serving the interests of the few.

Authority justified by such success becomes authority without constraint.

Politics must therefore operate within moral limits to function at all. A regime that

disregards property, exchange and voluntary cooperation cannot sustain prosperity

regardless of its intentions. Calls for reform that avoid these foundations

amount to administrative tinkering rather than genuine renewal.

Machiavelli's logic has failed empirically. Systems built on manipulation,

discretion and centralised control collapse under their own contradictions.

Freedom, by contrast, is not utopian. It is the institutional condition that makes peaceful

cooperation possible. Rule-based orders grounded in predictable rights, voluntary exchange and

decentralised decision-making create the conditions for societies that are both economically

productive and morally just. Freedom does not promise perfection in an imperfect world,

but it remains the only framework that allows us to build a more perfect future.

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