In March 2026, the Mises Institute published an article by Marcos Giansante. Though readers of Mises.org might think that it should be yet another of the usual good articles published on the website, the piece is an invocation of responsible statism. That is, something that should not happen at an intellectual hub regarded by the very Institute’s director of outreach as the legacy of Murray Rothbard. In fact, in one of its promotional videos on YouTube, the 2015 recipient of the Murray N. Rothbard Medal of Freedom, Robert Higgs, asserts:
The Mises Institute has a vision of a genuinely free society, not one that compromises with any kind of state whatsoever.
Budgetary Discipline and Economic Distortion
In its first paragraph, the article of Giansante says:
In contemporary political discourse, fiscal adjustment is often celebrated as a moral achievement rather than recognized as what it fundamentally is: an institutional obligation. In economies marked by chronic deficits, inflationary pressures, and bureaucratic expansion, the mere restoration of budgetary discipline frequently appears heroic. From an Austrian perspective, however, fiscal responsibility is not an extraordinary accomplishment, it is the minimal condition for preserving economic calculation and social coordination.
Of course, the state’s task of taxing its subjects, i.e., of stealing, cannot be heroic in the least, for it is utterly immoral, even if carried out within the bounds of budgetary discipline. Besides, the claim that fiscal adjustment is an institutional obligation is not at all convincing, given that the absence of fiscal adjustment is permitted by the state’s legal and institutional structure.
Anyway, the concept of fiscal responsibility is illusory, if not contradictory. For the state never assumes responsibility—accountability—for any of its expenditures, and it is always shifting costs onto its subjects. The state does so regardless of whether it must finance part of those expenditures through public debt or money printing due to a lack of government revenue. Therefore, Giansante’s call for fiscal responsibility amounts to nothing more than adopting a specific stance of the typical blindness to the moral issue of statism and government funding. In this case, a stance based on a balanced budget. Yet, as a matter of fact, fiscal responsibility could be observed in both a large-scale welfare state and a minarchist state.
Then, while citing Ludwig von Mises, Giansante explains:
… persistent deficits distort economic calculation by obscuring real resource scarcity. Governments that spend beyond their means rely… on debt expansion, inflationary finance, or regulatory extraction.
Actually, debt expansion, inflationary finance, and regulatory extraction are part of the government’s means, since these are practices exclusive to the government sphere. Moreover, it is not the fiscal deficit per se—which may be negligible in monetary terms—that causes a distortion in economic calculation and social coordination. Rather, it is government financing itself—regardless of whether there is a fiscal deficit or surplus—that causes this distortion, including any amount of money created to finance budgetary or extra-budgetary activities.
People continue to coordinate and calculate despite government intervention, which includes the expansion of the money supply driven by the central bank’s money production. Additionally, the distortion caused by the expansion of the money supply does not cease simply by ending fiscal deficits, and Giansante does not mention the open market operations of central banks. In sum, Giansante’s fiscal responsibility cannot in any way be considered the minimal condition for preserving economic calculation and social coordination.
To help preserve economic calculation and social coordination to some degree, rather than aspiring to fiscal responsibility, the objective should be for the state to divert fewer and fewer resources from its subjects, at least in relative terms. Indeed, a government with a small fiscal deficit might be diverting far fewer resources than one with a large surplus. And the central bank of the former might also be printing less money to finance extra-budgetary activities than the central bank of the latter. In the end, the specific activities of a government play different roles in total government spending, and the matter is ultimately defined by private production and the diversion of private resources toward government activities in general.
Taxation and Classical Liberalism
Next, the author tackles a new challenge:
From a liberal classical standpoint, taxation itself raises a philosophical problem. If taxes are understood as compulsory contributions exchanged for public goods such as legal protection and infrastructure, their legitimacy depends on effectiveness and proportionality. When fiscal extraction becomes detached from reliable institutional services, it assumes the character of coercive appropriation.
If the legitimacy of taxes depends on the effectiveness and proportionality of so-called public goods, then it depends on the arbitrary judgment of the statist order. Unlike private providers competing in the market, where cost-benefit accounting makes sense, such public goods are financed through coercive means and provided under a monopoly. This implies that consumers have not had the opportunity to freely acquire similar services from competing providers.
Furthermore, from a legal standpoint, Giansante’s distinction between a compulsory contribution and a coercive appropriation is irrelevant, since in both cases there is a tax obligation arising from legal provisions enforced by the government. These public goods are provided regardless of whether an agreement has been reached between the state and its subjects regarding their effectiveness and proportionality. In conclusion, Giansante states:
In a genuinely liberal framework, limited government, fiscal restraint, and legal clarity are… the enduring foundations of a social order in which individuals remain free to coordinate their plans and adapt to an uncertain future.
Contrary to what Giansante claims, “limited” government has proven to be unlimited government. Basically, this is due to the government’s monopoly on final decision-making in society. Thus, such limitations are continuously redefined by government officials themselves, who possess extraordinary powers and can also interpret the established limits at their discretion. And only in the mind of a classical liberal like Giansante could individuals remain free to coordinate their plans within the framework of such a government.
The Fantasy World of Daniel Lacalle
Giansante’s article is not just a one-off anomaly on Mises.org. Take, for example, an article republished from Daniel Lacalle’s own website in June 2025:
Government spending is out of control in developed nations. Furthermore, no interventionist government wants to cut spending or balance the budget…
Interventionist governments aren’t concerned about debts, deficits, or inflation.
Lacalle’s statements are, at best, naive. He seems to imply that a government that cuts spending and balances the budget could be depicted as non-interventionist. But that is impossible, since the very nature of any government is to intervene in social life. Nor is there any government that is truly concerned with putting an end to debt, deficits, and inflation, since that would mean abandoning activities that are inherent to its structure and functioning.
What concerns Lacalle is public debt, as he recommends ways to reduce it without proposing any repudiation, as Rothbard did. The truth is that public debt is immoral and should remain unpaid—perhaps this is the only way to ensure that public creditors stop lending to governments as long as they exist. In fact, reducing the debt is not even beneficial for the economy, since it can only be achieved through tax collection or by issuing money, which erodes the purchasing power of the currency used by the population.
Lacalle advocates applying the concept of solvency to the state, noting that inflation reveals “the loss of solvency of the issuer of money.” However, since the state finances itself at will and at all times through taxes or money printing, it cannot become insolvent like private entities can. Applying the concept of solvency to the state further confuses people by conflating the nature of private enterprise with that of the public sector. Lacalle then writes:
… central banks have stopped playing the essential role of curbing fiscal excess to become enablers of rising fiscal imbalances.
What world does Lacalle live in? One of the core functions of central banks is precisely to enable government spending beyond any fiscal constraints. Otherwise, no government would really need a central bank, since money actually emerged before government intervention as a social institution of the market process. But Lacalle does not stop there:
Now that central banks have stopped being the essential limit to government excess, there are only two alternatives: gold and Bitcoin…
Gold and Bitcoin are reminding governments that they cannot spend and print currency forever… the powerful message to the world is clear: the years of uncontrolled government spending and printing are over…
Bitcoin and gold are now playing the essential role that independent central banks should be enforcing.
First, central banks have never served as the essential limit to government excesses. On the contrary, the emergence of central banks has facilitated such excesses more than ever before. Second, governments can, in fact, spend and print currency forever, as long as there is no significant and widespread shift in public opinion and action against it—and the years of uncontrolled government spending and printing are certainly not over. But even so, under what criteria would they be deemed “uncontrolled”? As expected, it will be government officials themselves who establish the criteria. And last, how on earth can someone who has written for Mises.org for so many years believe in the independence of central banks?
Mileism as a Turning Point
It is surprising that someone capable of spouting so much nonsense and positions contrary to Austro-libertarianism as Lacalle—even more so outside Mises.org—has been promoted so frequently by the Mises Institute. In the last year alone, the Institute republished Lacalle at least two more times from his personal website. This occurred despite Lacalle’s Zionism and his repeated defenses of a statist villain of the stature of Donald Trump. But here is where things start to make more sense, as Lacalle is also a propagandist of Javier Milei, the self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist president of Argentina who has been tarnishing the reputation of Austro-libertarianism worldwide since taking office in December 2023. Nevertheless, this would never have been such a major disgrace without the indispensable help of intellectuals.
Even Giansante’s endorsement of responsible statism led him to make a reference to Milei’s Argentina in his article. However, the case of Argentina demonstrates precisely that so-called fiscal responsibility does not guarantee the minimal condition mentioned by Giansante, since the monetary base quadrupled in less than two years despite monthly fiscal surpluses recorded for nearly two years without interruption. Hence the importance of considering the extra-budgetary aspects of central banking in total government spending.
Although the unrealistic assessments of Mileism published on Mises.org were, to some extent, understandable for a time, since no administration can be fully judged before it has actually governed, the real trends came out pretty clearly after Milei’s first months. And, in fact, a few things were crystal clear from the start, such as Milei’s terrible cabinet and foreign policy, which immediately disqualified him as a libertarian who truly wanted to fight against statism. Other things, though already true before his presidency, were only known to writers who took the trouble to investigate in depth, such as Octavio Bermúdez, who in July 2024 demonstrated that Milei was, at heart, just another neoclassical economist. This was not the case with Benjamin Williams, who in May 2024 described Milei as an Austrian economist. Williams hailed Milei for the “impressive feat” of two consecutive months of financial surplus, without mentioning that this was achieved not only through budget cuts but also through tax hikes.
Then there is the case of Finn Andreen, who, two years after Milei’s inauguration, relied on little more than official price inflation figures and misleading indicators such as GDP. In his monetary analysis, Andreen makes no mention of the massive money printing and has the audacity to reiterate Milei’s alleged plan to abolish the central bank, when all Milei has done is save the central bank and steer it in a direction that best serves the financial elite. To top it all off, Andreen’s article reinforces the propaganda that Milei is inspired by Austrian economics.
Undoubtedly, it is possible to conduct poor analyses in good faith, and the cases of Andreen, Williams, and others in the Mises Institute would be better classified as such. On the other hand, what distinguishes a propagandist from a mere misguided intellectual who once wrote an ill-advised article is constant activism in defense of the propagandistic narrative and the presence of other relevant factors. This is true of Lacalle and of more striking cases, such as those of Jesús Huerta de Soto, Philipp Bagus, and Bernardo Ferrero, who have continued to promote Milei to this day, even though he is, among other disgusting things, a neocon whose administration is a showcase of a Zionist police state. And while Lacalle was never a full-fledged Austro-libertarian, Huerta de Soto and Bagus have made a name for themselves as staunch Austro-libertarians, becoming Senior Fellow and Fellow at the Mises Institute, respectively. This being said, the Institute has published and promoted the Mileist propaganda of these intellectual frauds all these years, seriously insulting Rothbard’s legacy.
Editorial Decline
Despite the descriptions provided on Mises.org, in practice there is no clear policy regarding the criteria editors consider when deciding whether to publish an article in the main section. And yet, regardless of their placement on the website, all the articles criticized here were promoted on the social network X via the Mises Institute’s account, which is even more important for visibility in today’s information landscape.
It is true that there has also been criticism of Milei on Mises.org, but the editors have been willing and knowing accomplices in the publication of Milei’s propaganda, as well as in the wider celebration of Milei on the website over the past few months. Meanwhile, particular criticisms of Milei did not receive any promotional support. This is unbecoming of an institute that is supposedly committed to honest history and research from an Austro-libertarian perspective, inspired fundamentally by Rothbard’s remarkable example.
Many people are introduced to Austro-libertarianism by reading articles on Mises.org, so the editors have a crucial responsibility to select, publish, and promote appropriate content. Given the importance of the Mises Institute, the editors receive a flood of submissions from around the world every month. Consequently, it is not difficult for them to consistently secure good articles on various current and globally significant topics. Thus, the task of publishing good articles is, in reality, the easiest part, whereas the publication of mediocre and propagandistic articles should be unacceptable. Since the latter has taken place more frequently than ever in the last few years and has far exceeded any reasonable margin of anecdotal error, editorial incompetence is evident. However, since it is also evident that the editors possess sufficient experience and judgment to realize what has been pointed out here regarding content, the truth is that they simply do not care enough about the Institute’s founding values.
The Mises Institute will probably continue to benefit for quite some time from the prestige built up over decades. Its academic publications are still the best in the world in the Austro-libertarian tradition, and Mises.org is still a fitting place to find praiseworthy pieces regularly. Nonetheless, the latest testimony from a living legend of the Austro-libertarian movement like Hans-Hermann Hoppe about the current situation of the Institute further highlights its moral and intellectual decline, as well as its betrayal of Rothbard’s legacy in some important aspects.
