The victory of Javier Milei in the Argentine primaries has led to a certain debate about the divergences between the approaches of the extreme right that advance in Europe and America. And since, in general, the protectionist and interventionist brushstrokes of these approaches are exaggerated to the detriment of the important elements of continuity with respect to the traditional proposals of the liberal conservatives in economic and social policy, there has been a tendency to highlight the spectacularly neoliberal orientation of plan for the reform of the State presented by Milei himself as if rowing in a completely opposite direction.
One of the points that has attracted the most attention in his program, which proposes to drastically reduce the weight of the State and eliminate most of the existing ministries, is the creation of a new ministry of human capital to replace those of Work, Health and Education. To understand the meaning of the proposal, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that it is articulated with a series of measures, such as the school check, which aim to leave behind definitively the way of understanding public services characteristic of the welfare state and rethink of the government's role in these areas. The theory of human capital, forged to erode the classic conception of the welfare state, is a doctrine that invites individuals to think of themselves as entrepreneurs who can take advantage of the capacities they have and the skills they acquire . And the school check is a system of funding education that presupposes this theory and in which the government "invests in the human capital" of citizens by allocating to the families of the future entrepreneurs themselves an amount to enroll their children to the public, private or charter schools of their choice, so that the schools receive more or less money depending on the students they manage to recruit. Both this theory and this method were already promoted decades ago by the Chicago neoliberal school of Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, who, as a defense of the check, enshrined the demagogic discourse on "freedom to choose", the same as used by Vox, which, even if it does not waste time talking about human capital, has turned this financing system into the flagship of its educational proposal.
Unlike the supposed disciple and the Chicago boys, the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, whom many describe as Milei's main ideological reference, was against the school check, which he considered interventionist and not very liberal. With some malice, he defined it as a tax-funded program to favor the private school. As we could already see during the Chilean dictatorship that was imposed half a century ago, the social policies of the Chicago school have always combined well with the extreme conservatisms that want to enhance the role of religion in the State.
