"Machiavelli is dead." This is how Javier Milei opened his speech in Davos, in the very heart of globalism. It was not a rhetorical phrase. It was a frontal challenge to the idea that sustained centuries of political domination: that power can violate moral principles if it promises good results.
For far too long, politics justified itself under a premise as simple as it was lethal: the end justifies the means. Under that logic, power claimed the right to expropriate, regulate, censor, indebt, and impoverish, always in the name of a higher cause. The problem is not that this logic has been poorly applied. The problem is that it is false from its root.
The error doesn't lie in the fact that politics sometimes goes too far, but in believing that it can be morally legitimate. Political power is not a neutral referee that occasionally becomes corrupt: it is an institution structurally based on coercion. To claim to moralize it is to attempt to humanize a mechanism designed to impose decisions by force.
When people say that politics must submit to ethics, the inevitable conclusion is even more uncomfortable: if ethics forbids aggression, then politics, as we know it, is incompatible with ethics. It is not because it fails, but because its basic functioning rests on the threat and use of violence.
This point becomes crucial in the current context, where agendas proliferate that present themselves as "humanist," "inclusive," or "solidary," but that deep down still demand more political power, more central planning, and more control over people's lives. People no longer speak of socialism in classic terms. It is disguised with morally seductive language.
The problem is not aesthetic. It is ontological. Behind these "elegant" agendas, the same socialist core as always persists: the denial of private property, the dissolution of individual responsibility, and the belief that an elite can decide for others what is just. The words change, not the logic. That logic remains deeply unethical.
