# Axel Kaiser

Axel Kaiser (born 4 July 1981) is a Chilean writer, lawyer and political scientist known for his work on liberalism and free-market economics. Kaiser is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and has published articles in Forbes and other publications. He is also the author of several books, including The Tyranny of Equality and The Populist Deception.

## Biography

Axel Kaiser was born from Hans Christian Kaiser Wagner and Rosmarie Barents Haensgen, a German-Chilean family.
His paternal grandparents were Rosemarie Wagner Schilling, a fourth-generation German-Chilean, and her husband, the German immigrant Friedrich Ernst Kaiser Richter, who defined politically as a Social Democrat, arrived in Chile as a refugee from Wurtemberg in 1936, escaping National Socialist Germany after Adolf Hitler's rise to power and before World War II, having foreseen its outbreak.
He married his wife in April 1939 and settled in Villarrica in Southern Chile, where he was eventually elected as the 9th mayor of the city, serving between May 1956 and October 1957. His father was active in the National Party, serving as a youth leader.
He is the brother of Vanessa Kaiser, former scholar at the Universidad Autónoma de Chile and director of the libertarian think tank Centro de Estudios Libertarios and former councilor of Las Condes, he is also brother of Johannes Kaiser, a right-wing politician, current member of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile, founder of the National Libertarian Party from Leif Kaiser, chairman of the Chilean National Rifle Association, along with three other less prominent siblings.
He lived his childhood and adolescence in Villarrica with his brothers.
While living in the Chilean capital, he completed a Bachelor of Laws at Universidad Diego Portales. He qualified as a lawyer on 7 August 2007.
In 2009, Kaiser won a Fulbright Program scholarship and travelled to Germany to pursue two master's degrees (Master of Arts in International Law, mention Investments, Trade and Arbitration and another in American Studies) and a PhD in American Studies in Heidelberg University, with the thesis The American Philosophical Foundations of the Chilean Free Market Revolution.
Back in Chile, he was a full professor at Universidad del Desarrollo and the Universidad de los Andes, where he taught a course on Latin American Politics.

## Reception

A 2017 poll by La Segunda ranked him among the most admired public intellectuals in Chile.
Writing in El Desconcierto in 2018, pundit Rodrigo Karmy Bolton posits that Fernando Atria is Kaiser's main "intellectual enemy". Karmy Bolton criticizes Kaiser's for misportraying the left as "violent, statist and populist" and equating state intervention with violence. For Karmy Bolton, Kaiser's view is that "either we accept neoliberalism or we are stupid" and portrays Kaiser as a "worshipper of the market" (Spanish: "idólatra del mercado").
According to another pundit, Rodrigo Rettig, Kaiser has violated the principal premise of the social sciences —"from the particular case you can't obtain general premises"— when referring to political violence experienced by his brother in 2018. Kaiser wrote in reference to it that in Chile "grave injuries have, in practice, no punishment" while omitting the 2,500,000 CLP (about US$3,300) fine that was given to each of the two aggressors, and then stated that "in Chile, deliquency has been normalized".
Kaiser has further been questioned by actress Susana Hidalgo for copyright infringement by using one of her images of the 2019–2020 Chilean protests in the promotional posters of his talks in Mexico in February 2020.
Kaiser's and Gloria Álvarez's book El engaño del populismo was lambasted by Alfredo Joignant in a 2016 televised debate with Kaiser. Joignant called the book "confuse", "harmful" and "very bad". More specifically, Joignant criticizes it for having use of the "category of populism" that is "out of control" and that it mischaracterizes populism as a political project in its own right. Joignant concludes the book "does not withstand an undergraduate academic jury". Kaiser answered to Joignant's criticism by asking if he had actually read the book with Joignant replying "I read it in diagonal" because "the argument is too simplistic".

## Books

* El Chile que Viene (2007)
* La Fatal Ignorancia (2009)
* La Miseria del Intervencionismo (2012)
* La Tiranía de la Igualdad (2015)
* El Engaño Populista (2016), co-author with Gloria Álvarez
* El Papa y el Capitalismo (2018)
* La Neoinquisición (2020)
* The Street Economist: Fifteen economic lessons every citizen should know (El Economista Callejero) (2021)
* El odio a los ricos (2023), co-author with Rainer Zitelmann
* Parásitos mentales: Siete ideas progresistas que infectan nuestro pensamiento y sociedad (2024), ISBN 9789569948602

### Novels

* El libro de Asgalard (Ediciones Minotauro, 2023), ISBN 9789569957260