Quotulatiousness

March 13, 2026

Argentina shedding decades of mal-investment in uncompetitive industries

Filed under: Americas, Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Argentine President Javier Milei didn’t promise an economic revival for all of Argentina, because significant chunks of the Argentine economy were invested in low-profit or even loss-making industries as the country followed “traditional” South American economic advice. Tim Worstall celebrates some of the belated losses in those deadweight areas of the economy:

Argentina has, for decades now, been making itself poorer by following — effectively — fascist economic policy. That whole process of trying to make everything at home, not importing, being self-reliant in manufactures and so on. The effect being that everything is made by companies of sub-optimal size and therefore consumers can only gain access to expensive shite.

So along comes a liberal — Milei — who lets consumers buy what they wish to buy from whoever, whereever. The result is that those inefficient, expensive, manufacturing firms close down as people buy the better, cheaper, stuff from abroad. The people are better off because they get better, cheaper, stuff. Not that expensive shite from the domestic producers.

Now, true, those jobs go. But those workers can go and do something else. Which they will too. In fact, they are — the unemployment rate is falling.

So, who loses out here? Obviously, the domestic capitalists, the people who own the now bust factories. Which, well, the correct reaction is probably Har Har. If your wealth is based upon producing expensive shite your customers are forced to buy then why shouldn’t we celebrate when you lose the lot?

We can — and should — take our analysis that one step further too. If the absence of the trade restrictions harms the domestic capitalists then who benefitted from the trade restrictions? The domestic capitalists, obviously. Which is how that infant industry protection, that insistence upon self-reliance, how fascist economics always does work out — the people who benefit are the domestic capitalists. And why in buggery would we want to protect them from the effects of free trade?

March 4, 2026

QotD: Socialism

Filed under: Americas, Economics, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The blunt teaching of history is that socialism is not an advanced stage in the evolution of human society but one of its most primitive stages. A highly articulated form of socialism was practiced among the Incas, the tribe which Pizarro found in control of Peru when he landed there in 1527. All produce, whether agricultural, pastoral or industrial, was the property of the state … In fact, the Incas had not only “communal ownership of the means of production” but a “planned economy”. All the basic features of socialism were present, and the feature which has specially attracted the attention of the archaeologist is that the Incas were in effect a huge bureaucracy … [T]he lesson of history is clear that communal ownership is normal among primitive people, and the institution of private property in the “means of production” is the first big step on the road to civilization.

Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.

January 22, 2026

QotD: Higher education

Filed under: Americas, Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in the 1980s, I took an interest in Latin American guerrilla movements, especially in Central America. The general consensus among those who took an interest in such matters was that they were caused by the intolerable conditions of the poor, oppressed peasantry who rose up spontaneously against them. This was complete nonsense, of course. This is not to say that the peasantry was not poor and oppressed, but poor and oppressed peasants are rarely capable of more than a jacquerie, a kind of rural riot that exhausts itself and results in the oppressors coming back stronger than ever.

No; I came to the conclusion that the cause of the revolutionary guerrilla movements was the expansion of tertiary education in countries where it had not long before been the province only of the elite, largely, though never entirely, hereditary. (For the poor, gifted, and ambitious, the army was the route to social ascension.)

Tertiary education, however, was expanded with comparative suddenness. Before it was expanded, those who had it, being few, were more or less guaranteed important roles in the economy and government. They had already drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life. Not surprisingly, a false syllogism insinuated itself into the minds of the newly educated: If the rich were educated and important, then being educated would make you rich and important. Again not surprisingly, this turned out not to be the case. If you turn out thousands of lawyers, for example, the remuneration of their work, if they find any, will be reduced and they will be disappointed in their hopes and expectations. They become angry, bitter, and disaffected, believing themselves not to be valued at their inestimable worth. They and their ilk became the middle ranks of the guerrillas (the very uppermost reaches being filled mainly by the narcissistic, spoiled sprigs of the upper classes). Only revolution would acquire for them the positions of influence and importance to which they felt that their education entitled them, and which such education had always entitled people to in the past.

Is it possible that Latin America was not so much in the rear as in the forefront of this modern social development (the case of Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path of Peru, was a pure culture of this phenomenon)? Is it not possible that we in our societies have duped tens of millions of young people into believing that the prolongation of their formal education would lead them inexorably into the sunny uplands of power, importance, wealth, and influence, when in fact many a PhD finds himself obliged to do work that he could have done when he was 16? No one likes to think that he has been duped, however (it takes two for fraud to be committed, after all), so he looks around for some other cause of his bitter disappointment. It isn’t ignoramuses who are pulling down the statues, but ignoramuses who think that they have been educated.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Bees With Degrees”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-07-02.

Update, 24 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 17, 2026

How would Greenlanders cope with a sudden case of American citizenship?

Filed under: Americas, Europe, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Only a minority of Canadians would welcome Donald Trump’s offer to become the 51st state, and Canadians have a long history of coping with the overflow of American politics across the border. Greenland is suddenly a target for involuntary statehood if Trump gets his way, yet few seemed to be concerned how the actual people in Greenland feel about this proposed change of legal status:

Satellite view of Greenland, Iceland, and parts of Northern Canada.
NASA/Ames Research Center, 17 May, 2005.

According to President Donald Trump, taking possession of Greenland is a national security necessity. It’s so critical, he claims, that he’s willing to take the chilly island the “easy way” or the “hard way”. Denmark, which governs Greenland, isn’t eager to surrender the territory. Even more important, the residents of Greenland, most of whom don’t especially want to be Danish, have even less interest in becoming American. The leader of a country founded on high-minded sentiments about the “consent of the governed” should consider taking that into account.

[…]

“56% of Greenlanders answer that they would vote yes to Greenlandic independence if a referendum were held today, 28% would vote no, and 17% do not know what they would vote for,” The Verian Group announced a year ago about a survey it conducted in Greenland.

With regard to Trump’s long-voiced desire to acquire Greenland for the United States, Verian’s Camilla Kann Fjeldsøe added, “the results show that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to leave the Realm and become part of the United States, while 6% want to leave the Danish Realm and become part of the United States, whereas the remaining 9% are undecided”.

Greenland’s 57,000 people don’t want to be Danish, but they really don’t want to be American. If forced to choose between remaining an appendage of one country or joining another, they’ll likely take the devil they know over the one they don’t.

What About the Consent of the Governed?

That’s a problem for Trump’s imperial ambitions — annexing Greenland would have to happen over the objections of the people who live there. The U.S. could get away with that sort of thing when it didn’t even pretend to give a damn about what the Sioux and the Cheyenne wanted, and when it bought the Louisiana Territory and Alaska from autocratic regimes. It’s not as if Napoleon Bonaparte or Czar Alexander II were going to offer their subjects a say in the matter anyway. But Denmark is a relatively inoffensive liberal democracy that holds regular elections. Greenlanders are accustomed to picking their own political leaders and having input into their fate. If asked, they’ll almost certainly reject the offer.

So, is Trump really going to opt for doing it “the hard way” and just grab the island?

When the United States decided its own fate 250 years ago, the Declaration of Independence set out grievances with the British crown, as well as some basic principles for the new nation. Among them:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Most Americans no longer consented to be governed by King George III or the British Parliament and so set up a new country with a government of its own. What excuse would we have for foisting American governance and laws on Greenlanders if — as seems likely — they reject political affiliation with the U.S.?

In his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan — who has never in his life been a fan of Donald Trump — warns that “Greenland is a Red Line” and crossing that line will destroy the American constitution (Warning – contains Andrew Sullivan):

(more…)

January 9, 2026

Instead of “regime change” … “regime decapitation”

Filed under: Americas, Government, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter considers the startling return of military competence and the ongoing echoes of the decapitating attack on Venezuela:

Photo from Postcards from Barsoom

In the age of simulations and simulacra, every action is also a symbol. Within the hyperreality of discourse the semiotic content of a public event is primary to its physical, political, or economic import. This is true of war as much as anything else; war in this age takes place first and foremost in the psychic realm, at the level of meaning, of hermeneusis. Warfare is psychological, not only in the sense of bolstering morale or breaking the will of the enemy to fight, but in the more fundamental sense of affecting the minds of those caught up in its spectacle by inserting new ideas that change the way that they think. This is most effective, as any magician or hypnotist or marketing executive will tell you, when those effects are left implicit, that they might operate directly upon the collective subconscious, in the shadow realm of instinct and intuition from which all political impulse springs.

With that in mind we might ask, in the spirit of an augur inquiring after the flight of a dove at daybreak, a circling hawk at high noon, or the cold gaze of a crow in the gloaming, what is the meaning of the Caracas raid? We do not need to assume that the meaning we look for in this action is intentional, though we should not rule this out, either; what matters is how the act will manifest symbolically, how it will be interpreted in the minds of onlookers, which it will do regardless of intention.

The superficial import of the action is clear enough. America has seized control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world, and at a stroke applies crippling pressure to the economies of China, Iran, and Cuba (who were Venezuela’s best grey-market customers), as well as to the economies of its adversary Russia and its wayward sibling Canada (both of which depend for their prosperity upon high oil prices). Both China and Russia have been deprived of a key New World ally, and thus the Monroe Doctrine is reasserted, and foreign powers pushed out of Washington’s sphere of influence. A hostile communist government has been decapitated, opening the way for the millions of Venezuelans displaced by Bolivarian tyranny, refugees whose presence has destabilized Venezuela’s neighbours for many years now, to return home.

To be sure, there is still great uncertainty. Hugo Chavez’ tomb may have been destroyed, but his Bolivarian regime is still largely intact, his apparatchicks remain in control of Venezuela’s state apparatus and military, and his terrorist colectivos still control the streets of Caracas.

Trump’s declaration that America now owns Venezuela’s oil feels a bit premature. Can one really claim control, without boots on the ground? I confess that it is not at all clear to me exactly how this is all supposed to work. Perhaps it is meant to function through pure intimidation: whoever ends up assuming power in Venezuela, they will know that if they don’t do as they’re told, they might be next, and perhaps will not be given the grace of an arrest and a show trial but simply executed without warning by drone; meanwhile, America offers itself as the sole legitimate customer for Venezuela’s sole marketable product, while providing its oil industry engineers to rebuild (and assume control of) infrastructure fallen into disrepair following Chavez’ nationalization and subsequent decades of neglect and mismanagement. Trump holds out one hand in an offer of assistance and mutual benefit, while holding back his other curled in a mailed fist, a threat made plausible by the fact that he just punched them hard in the mouth.

Still, all of this is nothing more than realpolitik, the hard edges of power in the material world.

The real meaning, the symbolic importance, lies deeper. It is not measured in dollars or barrels of oil. It is a message.

So what is that message?

And some of the recipients of that message should be paying especially close attention:

Mass third world invasion is a choice. Economic sabotage in the name of preventing the weather from changing is a choice. Ruining the lives of young men with DEI is a choice. Blackwashing our history and mythology is a choice. Predatory taxation is a choice. Overregulation is a choice. Brainwashing the young to hate themselves is a choice. Yasslighting the young women into choosing girlbossery over family is a choice. Sacrificing the lives of the young to the fears of the old during the COVID lockdowns was a choice.

Allowing the incompetent to run things in the name of ‘social justice’ is a choice, and the contrast between the litany of inept fumbles that has resulted in and the smooth professionalism on display in the Caracasian raid has thrown the consequences of that choice – and the consequences of its alternative – into sharp relief.

And all we have to do to reverse the decline is decapitate the beast, put the right men in charge, and everything will follow naturally from there. Nature will begin to heal, as surely as Yellowstone’s ecology repaired itself once wolves were returned to their rightful place at the predatory apex.

That is why leaders across the Western world are squealing so loudly.

Canadian liberals, for example, are not actually worried that a Delta Force team will rappel down from an MH-47G Chinook Special Operations Helicopter to blackbag Prime Minister Mark Carney from 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1M 1M4, and not only because the inadequate security of the traditional prime minister’s domicile has motivated Carney to instead take up residence at Rideau Cottage, 1 Sussex Drive, where he is usually home by 9 pm with his wife Diana. The concern is much more general: that the beleaguered Canadian people, along with those of the rest of the rotting West, will look at the remarkable results obtained by regime decapitation in the United States, and start getting ideas.

Want to fix the United Kingdom, and make Great Britain again? Sweep the traitors of the Labour Party out of Parliament, remove that pusillanimous android Two-Tier Queer from power, put Nigel Farage and 300 Reform MPs in their place, and watch as they invoke the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy to cast off three decades of Blairite Fabianism in a Great Repeal Act that frees the British state to remigrate the foreign invaders, rebuild the country’s industry, and revive the British military.

Want to fix Europe? Cast down the old women in Brussels – they have no popular legitimacy in any case – and remove their creatures, like Macron or Merz, who keep their peoples yoked to the suicidal EUrocracy. Raise up nationalists in their place – Le Pen, the AfD – and watch as Europe’s natural creative genius and martial spirit reasserts itself. No more Net Zero incapacitating industry, no more European Court of Human Rights preventing invaders from being remigrated, no more Digital Services Act censoring the Internet, no more micromanagerial bureaucratic overregulation strangling the economy.

January 8, 2026

“Kidnapping the head of a sovereign state with whom you are not at war is also nuts”

Filed under: Americas, Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, David Knight Legg responds to an Andrew Coyne post on the legality of the US operation to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela:

Image from CDR Salamander

    Andrew Coyne @acoyne
    Kidnapping the head of a sovereign state with whom you are not at war is also nuts, Jason. The two go together.

Andrew @acoyne this isn’t accurate.

– Maduro was definitively not the elected President of Vanzuela. He was rejected as such by 50 nations incl the EU in 2024. He was a known narco-terrorist and cartel leader that used state capture and the army to run and enforce his drug and sanctions evasion empire.

– Biden put a $25million bounty on his head Jan 2025 for crimes against humanity and the USA cocaine trade, because destroying his nation for a decade, he fraudulently took power in 2024 and committed atrocities against his opponents after losing in a landslide so he could keep using state capture to run Venezuela — with the aid of terror groups and China Russia and Iran who protected him there and at the UN in exchange for oil, gold and a western hemisphere base of operations.

He was taken by the US to face trial just like Noriega in 1990 (on almost identical charges).

It may not suit your politics but bringing him to justice any other way had proven implausible. This is all well known.

Venezuelans around the world are celebrating wildly after two decades of socialist ruin and the worst humanitarian crisis in the western hemisphere creating 8 million refugees.

Honest question: what would you have done instead?

– status quo? let him stay in power with the help of Russia, Iran and China while actively torturing and murdering his opposition?

– more legal proceduralism at a UN Security Council where Russia and China protect him?

– bureaucratic inertia: letting people die and regional security deteriorate under the protection of another strongly worded reminder to abide by international law and stop the narco terrorism and atrocities?

There aren’t easy answers. It’s going to take a lot of work for Venezuela to come back from a deeply embedded Baathist-style state capture, but this is a critical first step for that nation.

If this is actually about Trump instead of the outcome, would you feel the same way if Biden instead of Trump had executed the same strategy to follow his bounty on Maduro?

The demise of Maduro is such an obviously good thing in so many ways it baffles me to see the debate revert to (often inaccurate) readings of legal minutiae with the underlying idea that it was better for him to be left in place …

A few days back, Daniel McCarthy suggested that the Venezuela operation reveals useful information on the “Don-roe Doctrine”:

A small detachment of Canadian “semi-professional leftist protesters” swapped out their Palestinian flags for this photo op.

President Trump is a wager of “un-war”, which confounds his critics and some of his supporters alike. The capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro over the weekend is a case in point. The usual semi-professional leftist protesters are hitting the streets of Europe and a few American cities to decry America’s latest war – but what kind of war lasts just two-and-a-half hours?

US troops didn’t invade en masse. A handful of special forces were dropped in, they killed el presidente‘s guards, nabbed their man and got out. Whatever one thinks about the justice of the whole thing, calling it a “war” is ridiculous. If that’s what this was, then Jimmy Carter waged a war with Iran in 1979 when he launched a doomed military mission to rescue US hostages. And the US must have been at war with Pakistan in 2011 when special forces raided Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden.

Critics of US foreign policy have long mocked the tendency of neoconservative hawks to frame every foreign tension as a replay of 1939. Such mockery is well deserved. Yet many of the same people who perceive the idiocy of treating every dictator as a new Adolf Hitler treat every US intervention, however small or brief, as a new Iraq War. Whatever else the Venezuelan operation might be, it isn’t that.

In fact, what Trump did in Venezuela isn’t even really “regime change”: the socialist regime that began under Hugo Chávez is still in power, only with a more pliable successor to Maduro now in charge. Former vice-president and now acting leader Delcy Rodríguez, despite initial remarks condemning the US action (and who would expect her to say anything different?), appears to be willing to de-escalate and cooperate with Washington. Trump’s own record, such as his intervention last summer in the Iran-Israel war, suggests he will want to de-escalate as well. He’s now made his point.

That doesn’t mean the situation isn’t perilous, of course. This may not be a war. There’s no ongoing fighting and Venezuela has continuity of government, albeit not the same president as a week ago. But even if Rodríguez and Trump both want a thaw in US-Venezuela relations, there are a multitude of scenarios that could lead to disaster. Hardliners or malcontents within the Venezuelan regime could stage a coup against Rodríguez. Or a popular revolt, with perfect justice on its side, could lead to bloody confrontations between the government and people. Trump seems to be inclined to minimise those risks by not pushing for speedy democratisation and liberalisation, but there may be some in his administration with less patience and more idealism.

January 7, 2026

“All of that operational brilliance was always there; it persisted through the Stupid Era”

Filed under: Americas, China, Government, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I missed this Chris Bray piece when it was published a few days ago, but it’s still fully relevant. In it, he discusses the contrast between the faltering and visibly failing military operations like Operation Craven Bugout, sorry, I mean “Operation Allies Refuge”, in 2021 as the US and allied forces abandoned the Afghanistan mission leaving behind billions in military equipment and untold numbers of pro-western Afghans to the “mercy” of the Taliban and the recent brilliant military success in Venezuela:

For years, I’ve been shouting two related messages. First, “we’re in a contest of persistence between elite cosplayers and low-status producers”. Institutions that advance leaders on the basis of their ability to engage in au courant symbol-chanting are crushing the people in those institutions who do the work, and therefore hollowing out the institutions. Second, and so closely related you could just call it the same point in different words, “We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down”. The “making stuff” people are mostly just fine; the “running stuff” people are mostly insane.

After years of dismal military failures, like the bafflingly inept withdrawal from Afghanistan after twenty years of ineffective warfare against the Taliban, the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro was operationally brilliant. It required perfection from everyone in a giant list of moving parts, executing a detailed plan with absolute precision. If you haven’t watched the briefing from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, who was ritually denounced by the idiot media and the Democratic Party as an unqualified choice for the job, take some time to watch at least some of it. You aren’t used to seeing competence and clarity from an American institutional leader, so it’ll bring back some parts of your consciousness that may have gone to sleep for a while.

With 150 aircraft in the air, launching from something close to two dozen points of origin, every asset arrived in place and on time, while the lights went out below them. From the transcript:

The “pathway overhead” was that the US military switched off the Venezuelan military. They pressed the off switch on another nation’s command, control, and communications systems. Venezuela spent 2025 posturing at the US Navy, displaying their power as a warning against American aggression:

Similarly, “Experts had warned that Venezuela’s layered air-defence network could complicate US air operations”. Apparently not. At the designated moment, it all just went away.

I’ve talked for years about “recipe knowledge”, about the ability to know the steps that will produce a desired outcome. If I want to produce X result, I have to perform steps A, B, C, D, E, and F, in that order. If I skip Step C, Result X doesn’t occur, even though I’ve performed all the other steps.

We’ve just watched a military that apparently lacked the recipe knowledge to destroy the Taliban, or even to withdraw from a failed war in an orderly fashion and without leaving a bunch of weapons behind, demonstrate a shockingly high level of recipe knowledge. A failing institution isn’t a failing institution. Brilliant planning, flawless execution, ruthless competence.

There’s no way in hell that a single year of top-down intervention reversed years of hard decline. All of that operational brilliance was always there. It persisted through the Stupid Era.

On Substack Notes, John Carter commented on the article:

This, right here, is the meta-message of the Venezuelan raid. Competence collapse isn’t a purely military pathology, nor is it solely an American affliction. It applies to every institution in every Western country. We’ve been living with the frustrations and humiliations of this imposed decline for decades now.

With one decisive act, Trump has demonstrated that decline is a choice made by a small, false elite – and that if that elite is removed, decline can be reversed.

Removing the elite is the fix-everything switch in the presidency, the US military, and the Venezuelan government.

And now the whole world sees it.

A related post from ESR on the social media site formerly known as Twitter explores one of the more geographically distant ramifications of the US operation in Venezuela:

    The Watcher On The Web @WatcherontheWeb

    “ThIs Is GoInG tO cAuSe ChInA tO aTtAcK tAiWaN”

    Yes retard, the country that just got shown all it’s calculations based on weapons systems which depended on being able to use RADARS to engage US aircraft/ships are essentially worthless and billions of dollars in investment and research have been wasted is going to feel VERY brave in launching an assault against a fortified island nation armed with US weapons, US fighters, backed up by the US navy and Japanese defense force …

    I’m sure they are just giddy with excitement to try and pull that off. Practically chomping at the bit

This is an extremely important point that I’ve been thinking about ever since we got an unexpected audit of Venezuela’s air defenses. Russian SAM-300s and BUKs, Chinese anti-air radar, all proved completely worthless against U.S. gear and operators.

I guarantee you that if you are a Chinese military planner contemplating how to get an invasion army across 100 miles of the Straits of Taiwan, you are shitting your pants right about now. Because you have just learned that if you had tried to bust that move yesterday, your nice shiny new invasion fleet would have gotten absolutely gacked by U.S. airpower and missiles that you wouldn’t see coming BECAUSE YOUR FUCKING RADARS DON’T FUCKING WORK.

Also, the Soviet anti-air missile designs you cloned turn out to be about as useful as so many busted shopping carts.

Some of your guys are going to be saying “That’s impossible. The fix must have been in. Air defense must have had orders not to engage.” Which is an extremely cheering thought, but …

… isn’t that what the Americans would want you to believe? The only thing better than having complete technological dominance of an adversary is having complete technological dominance of an adversary who’s been conned into believing it isn’t true and walks blithely into getting utterly wrecked by it.

Yep. Before this went down I was figuring a very high probability that the Chinese make their move on Taiwan in 2027. Now? I guarantee you that their confidence in their previous risk assessments has evaporated. They no longer know what they’ll be facing, and there’s a significant possibility that mainland China’s domestic air defenses are worthless too.

Now I’m going to suggest that you juxtapose two phrases: “thermobaric bombs” and “Three Gorges Dam”. A China that’s naked from the air has the biggest glass jaw in human history.

Now I think there’s pretty good odds that the invasion of Taiwan will never happen at all.

Update, 8 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 6, 2026

The “developing world” is not poor because the “rich countries” looted them

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Economics, Europe, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Lauren Chen reacts to an emotive claim that the Third World is poor only because of the exploitation of their resources by the First World:

People often say that the developing world is poor because the Western world colonized them and stole their resources.

The truth, however, is that over the past century, the developing world has, for the most part, shown that they are completely incapable of harnessing their own resources. They are not poor because we stole from them. They are poor because they do not know how to run and administer their own countries, resources be damned.

Take Venezuela. The world’s largest oil reserves mean nothing if you have a corrupt communist as your leader. People will actually be starving and trying to eat zoo animals while you sit on trillions of dollars in resources!

Africa is another example. Europeans left behind farmland, trains, roads, and mines in Africa. What happened to it all?

It’s not that all of a sudden, the Africans started running things like anti-colonialist activists had envisioned at the time. No, no.

All the infrastructure fell into disrepair and/or was stripped down and looted. They were literally handed fully functioning, completed supply chains for resource extraction, and basically unlimited wealth, but they couldn’t manage the simple upkeep.

Now, the defense for Africa might be that “The Europeans didn’t teach the Africans how to manage any of this! It’s not the Africans’ fault they couldn’t run it independently! They were never trained!”

But my brother in Christ, the Europeans DID try to train locals for management! Obviously it would have been easier to have at least some locals in administration, rather than having to import an ENTIRE workforce, but efforts to find African talent were largely unsuccessful.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the different outcomes in Hong Kong and Singapore when compared to Africa. In East Asia, Europeans often did work with locals in administrative and management capacities. When colonialism ended, Hong Kong and Singapore were able to manage themselves. Not the case with Africa.

Now, none of this is to say that colonialism is good. People have the right to self-rule and self-determination. However, the idea that colonialism and resources extraction are responsible for the developing world’s ongoing poverty? That is quite simply a crock of shit.

Considering the Venezuelan operation at D+3

Filed under: Americas, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander has some (guarded) thoughts on the recent operation to extract Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, which was accomplished with no significant American casualties (although some reports say a large number of Cuban troops were killed or wounded on the other side):

Image from CDR Salamander

If you didn’t get a chance to listen to Sunday’s Midrats Podcast with Mark and me, give it a listen to hear a broader discussion with some additional detail thrown in. Today is going to be a bit different.

We are still just ~72-hours from the events, so there is an order of magnitude more of what we don’t know than we do, but some items are breaking out from the fog.

On yesterday’s podcast, I briefly mentioned a framework for discussion that I think is helpful to flesh out here — an addendum to my comments on the podcast, so to speak.

As we stand here the Monday after the events of Friday night/Saturday morning, what are some clear items of consideration at the Tactical, Operational, Strategic, and Political levels?

Let’s do Top-3s at D+3:

Tactical:

  • No other military on the planet has the Joint/Combined Arms/Interagency capability to successfully execute this mission. None. This is a unique national capability that we should carefully nurture, steward, and improve on.
  • The death of rotary wing (RW) aircraft has been greatly exaggerated. As I have written often over the last two decades, one has to examine closely the lessons of small and medium sized wars, as they will inform you what will be needed in the next large war. That is the gold standard … but you have to be careful. Some lessons look to have broader implications, but they may be muted or amplified by the location and venue you are looking at. Yes, flying large groups of RW in the Ukraine theater is a questionable proposition, but that is because they are Ukrainian and Russian RW being flown by Ukrainians and Russians. American RW aircraft have training, equipment, and capabilities that others do not have. It was not by luck that none of our RW operating deep in Venezuela were shot down. Make no mistake, without a diverse, robust, and numerous RW capabilities, the Maduro Raid would not have been possible.
  • Unmanned systems are A tool, not THE tool. I agree, the use and utility of unmanned systems in the Russo-Ukrainian War has expanded at an astronomical rate, but in spite of what some may be trying to sell you, the future is not “All U_V All the Time“. Unmanned systems are like aircraft, submarines, and body armor — they get added to the tool box. The more diverse the toolbox, the more capable your military. That last comment refers to a lot more than unmanned systems.

Operational:

  • Sovereign Bases Matter: While we have seen other friendly nations let us use their facilities, the reanimation of Roosevelt Roads and the general Guamification of Puerto Rico over the last few months is a wake-up call to everyone. Serious policy makers need to put their accountants in the back of the room where they belong. A global power rides along support structures few see and understand at peace until they are needed at war but gone. Having a wide variety of inefficient and underutilized bases and facilities scattered around is a feature, not a bug. The future is unknown and an impatient lover. Do not test, taunt, or take her for granted. Reactivate more bases. Play hard ball with the UK about Diego Garcia. Pray for peace.
  • America Must be the Dominate Maritime & Aerospace Power in Order to be a Global Power: I don’t mind saying, “I told you so“. so I will happily say, I told you so. Yes, we need land power, but most of it should be light, expeditionary and exemplary. The balance of heavy maneuver forces should be based on US territory and the balance in the Reserve and National Guard. Everyone who went feet dry in Venezuela came back home because the U.S.A. dominated the air, electromagnetic spectrum, and the sea to such a degree that any challenge to that dominance was a death sentence to the challenger.
  • Few Things are More Useful Than a Large Deck Amphib: Let any person who poo-poos the USMC demanding more amphibious ships, or worse, bleats out how they are obsolete, be tarred, feathered, and run out on a rail. All hail the USS Iwo Jima (LHD-7). IYKYK.

Alexander Brown comments on the raid at Without Diminishment:

You can always find a cadre of pro-communist “fellow travellers” in any western nation … we just seem to have more of them than anyone else.

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: American regime-change efforts, on occasion, tend to age like oxidized guacamole. The teenage version of this writer remembers well the empty sugar-high of “Shock and Awe”.

A powerful aphrodisiac gets released when Things Actually Happen. To ignore the impacts of tribalism and the potential for another misappropriation of neocon bloodlust would be to ignore another elephant. But enough on the family Elephantidae and the order Proboscidea.

We may be as cold as Minnesota, with its miniature Horn of Africa engulfed in a real “learing” not “learning” opportunity after years of runaway fraud, but as Canadians, we should surely be looking inward at our own failings on the home front, our lack of leadership in foreign affairs, the hate we allow to fester in our streets, and the cozy relationships we foster with the most dubious of allies. But of course, we’re not.

Nicolas Maduro, one of the world’s great monsters, was “black-bagged” and perp-walked along with his wife yesterday, following a Swiss-watch-precise Delta op that only our neighbours to the south are capable of.

Let us not stand on the false pretence of a violation of “international law”: Maduro’s tenure was defined by a series of widely condemned and fraudulent electoral processes designed to ensure his grip on power. His track record includes a 2018 presidential election, dismissed by the international community as neither free nor fair. He banned major opposition parties and jailed or exiled key opponents.

This pattern escalated during the 2024 presidential election, where, despite independent tallies showing a landslide victory for opposition candidate Edmundo González, the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner without the data to prove it. The 2024 process was further marred by the disqualification of popular leader María Corina Machado, the intimidation of voters by paramilitary “collectives”, and a brutal post-election crackdown, known as “Operation Tun Tun”, that resulted in over 2,000 arrests and dozens of deaths.

And yet, as Hugo Chávez’s mausoleum smoulders, hundreds of thousands continue to flood the streets to celebrate, and the experts of “experts say” journey down from ivory towers to shoot the wounded and feign retroactive understanding of an op that took most by surprise, perhaps nowhere has the oppositional-defiant kvetching been louder than inside Canada’s elite Liberal circles, so much so that you almost have to applaud the utter lack of self-awareness and the sheer selfishness of it all.

January 4, 2026

Venezuela in the news

Filed under: Americas, Government, Law, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains that despite the usual suspects’ claims that “it’s all about the oil!”, it actually isn’t very much about the oil at all:

Trump taking — kidnapping, arresting, to taste — Maduro and his wife simply isn’t about the oil business. Please note, this also isn’t about whether it’s a good idea or not although I’ll admit to thinking that it’s way damn cool — getting in and out of hostile territory without, so far as we know right now, a single American casualty at all? Damn cool in that military sense.

This is about the shrieking we’re getting from the usual suspects — this is all about the oil! See! Ms. Raisin is one I’ve seen online already, there are those quoting that Counterpunch article with the idiot Michael Hudson and so on.

My point is solely and only about access to that oil.

So, travel back 10 to 15 years.

Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt oil is very “heavy”. Technically it is about viscosity but think about it as “thick”. It’s more like treacle than it is like a free flowing liquid. There are also issues with sulphur but leave that alone here. It is, in the technical parlance, “cheap shit”. So bad that it has to be mixed with much lighter (and usually “sweeter”, which means less sulphur) crude oil from different oil fields so you can pump it through a pipeline or get it into a tanker.

Venezuela used to have — still could have — fields of that light and sweet oil but they ran those fields — during and after Chavez — so badly that production fell over. So, they used to actually import US crude oil to then mix with that heavy crude so they could export. They also price petrol — gasoline — so low that they cannot possibly run refineries to make their own gasoline. So, they would import the US crude, mix it, export the blend to the US and then buy back the gasoline from those US Gulf Coast refineries. This was ridiculous, of course, but you know socialists with prices and economies.

It also meant that those US Gulf Coast refineries were adapted to use that Venezuela mix. You can change the mix a refinery uses but it’s potentially costly. The more the mix changes the more the cost rises. But the important thing to note is that the only refineries within cheap shipping distance that could use the Venezuela crude efficiently were those US Gulf Coast ones. Sure, they’d be pissed if they lost access to their supplies but they could be altered to work with other crude mixes. The reliance was much more of Venezuela upon the refineries than the refineries upon Venezuela — at least, the cost of adaptation to a change was lower for the refineries.

OK, so that was the old situation.

Over this past decade and a bit the US — under both Trump and Biden — has been saying, well, you know, we don’t think much of the Venezuelan Government. We also know the only money they get is from crude oil sales, so, if we refused to take that for those Gulf Coast refineries then we could screw with Maduro. Which is what happened — sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports which, most obviously, apply to people shipping into the US and so obeying US law.

Other people who do not, or don’t have to, obey US law haven’t, wholly, been abiding by those sanctions. OK. Maybe that’s all a good idea and maybe it isn’t — not my point here at all.

We should also note that the oil fields in Venezuela actually owned/managed by Chevron, a US company, have still been allowed to ship to the US and elsewhere under US law.

One more little fact. The US is now — as a result of fracking — a net oil exporter. This is also something done under Trump I, the lifting of the ban on crude oil exports. It can still be true that maybe buying in some Venezuelan oil — or Mexican, Canadian, whatever — meets either geographic or blend desires. We’d like some really heavy sludge, for example, or maybe Canadian oil works for Wyoming (not real examples, just ideas). But in terms of total oil production and usage the US produces more than it uses now. So any decision to import is about those marginal issues of location and blend, not urgent necessity for simple crude oil. Fracking works, d’ye see?

Shaded relief map of Venezuela, 1993 (via Wikimedia Commons)

On the other hand another bunch of the usual suspects are screaming about this as a violation of international law. ESR comments on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

Since there’s a lot of screaming about the legality of black-bagging Nicolas Maduro going on, let’s talk about the game theory of international law.

Before I do that, though, I’m going to acknowledge that the Trump administration’s legal posture doesn’t even implicate international law significantly. Their theory is that Maduro stole an election, is not the legitimate head of state of Venezuela, and is a criminal drug-cartel leader; universal jurisdiction applies.

This is why a photograph of Maduro restrained by a soldier wearing a DEA patch was released.

I’m not here to state a position on whether that legal posture is valid; I want to instead outline a game theory of the “rules-based international order”, which people are complaining has been violated because the US black-bagged a head of state.

There are two different ways to establish a framework of governing law. Most people only understand one of them, which is the imposition of law by a ruler or coalition with force dominance. I’ll call this “unitary law”.

The other mechanism is mostly only understood by a handful of libertarians; it is law as a violence-minimizing equilibrium among a number of roughly equal agents playing an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In such settings, cooperation evolves naturally and doesn’t have to be handed down by a single ruler or coalition. I’ll call this “IPD law”.

“International law” is enforced by an uneasy combination of both mechanisms. This is more difficult to see than it should be because there’s also a lot of air and bullshit around “international law”, bullshit consisting mostly of wordcels trying to cast magic spells on people with guns.

The air and bullshit is why it’s common to say that international law is a mirage, or a fraud that only serves the interests of the strongest powers. This isn’t true: what is true is that if an international norm is not sustained by being a stable strategy in an IPD game, only force majeure by a dominant power or coalition can uphold it.

Here’s an example of a moral good that was established by unitary law of nations: the general abolition of chattel slavery, which happened because a dominant coalition of Western nations said “Fuck your sovereignty, we’re no longer tolerating this anywhere our militaries can reach.”

Here’s an example of a moral good that was accomplished by IPD law of nations: generally humane treatment of prisoners of war in armed conflicts. This didn’t develop because great powers unilaterally said “stop doing that”, it happened because even a great power at war with a minor one is exposed to effective tit-for-tat retaliation if it abuses POWs.

If you want to understand “international law”, you need to be able to disentangle three different things that claim to be international law: unitary law imposed by great powers, IPD law enforced by the threat of pain-inducing defections in an international tit-for-tat game, and wordcel bullshit.

The thing to bear in mind is just because there’s a lot of wordcel bullshit going around in “international law” doesn’t mean there isn’t a reality underneath.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer rushes to distance himself from Trump’s action, for fear that someone might possibly mistake him for a vertebrate:

Leave it to the Babylon Bee to find the appropriate framing for a news story:

Update, 6 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 26, 2025

The US-Mexican border

Filed under: Americas, History, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An amusing exchange on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

    Ordnance Jay Packard Esq. @OrdnancePackard

    Hey @LineGoesDown, interesting your little map includes the Comancheria, a vast section of that northern green area that Mexico never set foot in because they’d get their shit pushed in by the Comanche.

    It was only after the Mexican-American war that the United States put a stop to the Comanche using Mexico like an ATM.

It’s actually even funnier than that.

The reason Mexicans kept getting their shit pushed in by the Comancheria was gun control.

No, seriously. It was Spanish colonial policy to keep the population disarmed and rely entirely on deployment of the military to keep order and prevent Indian incursions. Mexico inherited this.

This was impossible. The land was vast. State capacity and the military were overstretched. The Comanches were too mobile. Result: misery and massacre.

Americans, inheriting the British colonial policy of everybody bring your own guns and form militias, didn’t suffer as badly. Raiders more often went where the soft targets were, and that meant the disarmed ones in the Mexican zone.

This is also why Alta California was so sparsely settled that Spanish and Mexican control over it was at best nominal. Anglo settlers were culturally and politically much better equipped to hold the territory, making the Mexican session eventually inevitable.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-25.

Update, 28 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 7, 2025

QotD: The Great Applesauce Blight of 1977/78

Filed under: Americas, Food, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“An Army marches on its stomach.” — Napoleon

As we take our own little march down memory lane, let me state up front that I can’t stomach applesauce, just can’t. I liked it as a kid but now it has less appeal than the prospect of being duct taped to a chair, face down, in prison. Yeah, I hate it.

This may seem unreasonable, but anyone who was in at the time, at least in the Army or Marines, and some portion thereof that actually went to the field a lot, will probably remember the Great Applesauce Blight of 1977 and 1978, which was the reason I can’t stand the crap.

The “Great Applesauce Blight?” you ask. Oh, yeah.

The story I got, after some years and some digging, goes like this: It seems that sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a fruit company – the Monterey Fruit Company, so it was said – was going out of business. So the Monterey Fruit Company, if that’s who it really was, called the Department of Defense and said, “Boys, have we got a deal for you. Hundreds upon hundreds of tons of Grade A applesauce, and you can have it. All of it. Cheap.”

McNamara and his Whiz Kids – neither of them ever sufficiently to be damned, of course – were gone, but their spirits remained. Department of Defense, ever conscious of the value of a well-squeezed penny, bought that inventory of applesauce, and began to put it into the old style, canned, MCI; Meal, Combat, Individual, which is to say, “C-rations”.

C Rations of the day were entirely canned and composed of a main meal, for one meal, plus either a cake (or very rarely, canned bread) or fruit of some kind, usually a small tin of peanut butter or cheese of some kind of jam or jelly, and one or another type of B Unit, which would have some variant of crackers plus either candy or cocoa. Sometimes, as with the B-2 unit, the cheese was in those.

Now, perusing a case of 1978 C-rats, which would have been newer than those of the Great Applesauce Blight, but still broadly similar, one notes that there were twelve menus, twelve different main meals, and 12 different kinds of dessert, a sundry pack, plus variable candies, spreads, etc. Of that latter twelve, eight were fruit and four were cake of some kind. I seem to recall that, possibly for reasons of economy, the amount of fruit during the Great Applesauce Blight had gone up to usually ten cans out of twelve, some extra cheese or peanut butter seemed to be included with some, and the cakes went down to two, one of which was going to be Chocolate Nut Roll, essentially inedible, from the Nashville Bread Company and the other would be the even more thoroughly disgusting fruit cake. I don’t recall who made that, and that lack of memory may have been an automatic defense against a future charge of capital murder. None of the cakes except pound cake could be relied on to be edible, and pound cake was always rare.

Now picture this, you’re a soldier in the Panama Canal Zone, training – training hard – to fight for the Canal, living in the jungle maybe twenty-five or more days and nights a month, eating C-rats to the tune of sixty or seventy a month, and virtually every meal contains applesauce or something more innately disgusting. “No, none of that nice fruit cocktail or those ever so delectable pear slices for you, young man; Department of Defense, to save a few bucks, has determined that applesauce is good enough, three meals a day, for weeks on end.”

*****

Now we were already kind of thin, because no military feeding system can ever completely keep up with the caloric requirements for a soldier either continuously fighting or realistically training to fight. Normally, this isn’t a problem because he can pack it on in the mess hall. These were unusual circumstances, though, with an unusually high chance of fighting – or riot control, which is worse – over the Canal. So we’re pretty much living out there, in pretty much trackless jungle, with nothing like enough helicopters for regular hot rations from the mess. Besides that, the old 193rd Infantry Brigade, in the Panama Canal Zone, was unusual in that it made a very serious effort to train even the cooks to fight, which takes time, too. C’s are pretty much it.

Even so, thin and hungry or not, after a month or two we could not eat the applesauce. That was probably seven or eight hundred calories a days that just got tossed.

We began going from thin to frigging emaciated.

*****

When I think upon the Great Applesauce Blight, though, I do not think about hardship or hunger. No, I think – as we old farts are wont to – about happier aspects of it.

Now this is no shit:

There we were, the heavy mortar platoon of 4th Battalion, 10th Infantry, stuck on top of a non-descript hill somewhere southwest of Gamboa, Canal Zone.

PFC McBrayer had a birthday out there in the jungle. I think it was his nineteenth birthday. None of us had been able to do any shopping, so we were all just stuck for getting him a birthday present. “I’m not giving up my pet scorpion,” said Big Al, who in fact, had a pet scorpion for the mega-ant versus scorpion gladiatorial combats we used to stage. “I’d offer to give him some of my crotch rot,” said Art, “but I think he already has some of his own.” “Howler monkey?” “Who’s going to catch it? And those suckers are mean, too.” “How about a sloth? They’re easy to catch.” “If the Lord God didn’t see fit to give B’rer Sloth an asshole, I don’t see why we should add to his troubles by catching him and wrapping him as a present.” Finally someone, I don’t think it was me, might have been Sergeant Sais, said, “Gentlemen, there can be only one proper gift under the circumstances,” and then he held up a – you guessed it – can of applesauce.

So we stuck nineteen or twenty Canal Zone Matches in a Nashville Bread Company Chocolate Butt Roll, invited McBrayer over, torched off the matches, sang Happy Birthday, then presented him his can of applesauce.

He was touched; you could see that. As he dashed tears from his eyes while making his, “Gee, you guys are just all so special … you shouldn’t have,” speech, you could see the emotion radiating from his face. And then, all choked up, he turned to go and tossed that can off applesauce off the hill with a casual contempt I have never seen before or since. It was the sheer, distilled essence of everything we all felt about applesauce.

Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-05.

November 14, 2025

This is in your house … and you’ve never noticed

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Environment, History, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 12 Nov 2025

The Secret History of Wood – Rubber wood
(more…)

November 7, 2025

Milei – “If we don’t have [power], then the left will have it”

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Without Diminishment, Geoff Russ discusses Javier Milei’s recent podcast appearance and his demonstration that unlike a lot of theoretical libertarians, he understands the dynamics of political power:

    There are many liberals, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are really useless because all they do is criticise, let’s say, those of us who want to lead the world toward the ideas of freedom. And what they don’t realise is that power is a zero-sum game, and if we don’t have it, then the left will have it. Therefore, if you level your harshest criticism at those in your own ranks, you end up being subservient.

Have truer words ever been spoken by an English-speaking politician?

Argentine President Javier Milei’s words on the Lex Fridman podcast were a blunt reminder of something that many conservatives, particularly those in Canada, have chosen to forget.

Politics is the pursuit of political power and the chance to use it before your opponents can. Debates can be won, superb essays published, and quotes recycled from deceased politicians. Without power, however, it all amounts to nothing more than a glorified brainstorming session.

The thoughtful ideas and proposals go to waste if they lie stagnant in perpetual bickering opposition.

On October 26, Milei won a resounding victory in the legislative elections. His party, Liberty Advances, gained forty-two seats and smashed the hard-left Peronists who have dominated Argentina’s politics for more than half a century.

Milei is a fanatical believer in libertarian ideas, and has never pretended to be a moderate or incrementalist. He famously brandishes a chainsaw to represent his willingness to destroy the broken socialist status quo of Argentina.

Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

The rise of Milei has been a cultural battle for the soul of the country, and he is not shy about it. Milei leads a fresh, winning anti-Peronist coalition of forgotten and angry Argentines who want permanent, radical change.

It may be tempting to view Milei’s success as a pure affirmation of the appeal of libertarian ideology, but he is hardly Argentina’s first advocate of economic freedom. He succeeds because he is the opposite of a polite, centre-right reformer. Milei unapologetically embraces his place as a culture warrior seeking to remake the nation.

One of his targets is the institutional decadence and incompetence of the Peronist political machine. By swearing to snuff it out, Milei swept through traditional Peronist strongholds, whose voters had never considered voting for the formerly toothless Argentine opposition.

In Reason, Peter Suderman considers some of the lessons North Americans can learn from Milei’s stunning election victory:

To understand why Democrats overperformed in this week’s elections, look to Argentina.

Last month, Argentinian president Javier Milei won an unexpectedly large electoral affirmation, as his party significantly outperformed expectations by more than doubling its congressional representation in what was widely seen as a referendum on his agenda.

Over the past two years, Milei, the world’s most libertarian national leader, has slashed spending, cut red tape, and made his top priority restoring economic order and prosperity to a country that has long been a socialist basket case. Critics warned that his policies would be destructive, destabilizing, and unpopular. But not only did he deliver the country’s first balanced budget in over a decade, he oversaw a radical decline in inflation — from 200 percent when he entered office down to 32 percent last month.

Despite warnings that the country would reject Milei’s brand of austerity, the country responded with a strong vindication of his policies. In a post-election analysis, The New York Times noted that Milei’s message was that only he offered a “path for a country that has undergone years of runaway inflation under high-spending populist governments”. The report pointed to Milei’s economic record to explain his party’s win: “Many Argentines had grown tired of prices swinging wildly from day to day and of a ruling class they considered to be corrupt and irresponsible”.

The same report said Milei’s outsized victory was “unexpected”. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been, because economic stability and low inflation are what voters the world over clearly want.

When voters swept President Donald Trump into office for the second time last fall, large majorities of his voters gave the economy poor marks and said their own family finances had worsened over the years. Under President Joe Biden, the American economy had been wracked by the biggest surge in inflation in forty years. American voters punished the party that was in power when that happened.

This was true all over the world. After the pandemic, inflation skyrocketed globally, and in election after election, voters rejected ruling parties.

Inflation and economic instability have long been political losers: Look at Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, and his ensuing near-sweep of states in 1984 after taming a decade of out of control price hikes. The post-pandemic years have further reinforced this lesson.

Update: Undoctrination looks at Milei’s time in office so far.

Undoctrination
Published 6 Nov 2025

Javier Milei just pulled off the impossible … again.

In Argentina”s 2025 “midterm” elections, Milei’s 4-year-old party, La Libertad Avanza, went from a tiny minority to the largest party in the lower house, ending socialist dominance in Congress. The election was widely viewed as a referendum on Milei’s shock therapy plan for Argentina. The results are in: Argentines want more freedom.

In this video we cover:
How Milei slashed inflation from 211% to 31.8% in just 2 years
The 34,000 government jobs cut, 10 agencies eliminated, and 672 deregulations that freed the economy during Milei’s first year in office
How the Buenos Aires rental market exploded after lifting controls
How Peronists lost their veto-proof majority — and what it means for the future

And we feature expert analysis from Marcos Falcone, Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberal and Prosperity.

October 30, 2025

Javier Milei’s party does well in mid-term elections

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

J.D. Tuccille on the results of Argentina’s recent elections which returned significantly more of Javier Milei’s allies than pre-election polls predicted:

And things were going so well before 2am …

Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei won an important election victory on Sunday when his coalition, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), received a plurality of votes in the country’s legislative elections. With about half of the seats in the lower house up for grabs and a third of the Senate, LLA didn’t gain a majority, but it dramatically increased its share enough to block repeals of presidential decrees by lawmakers from other parties and to support presidential vetoes.

As Reason‘s César Báez commented, the results give Milei and his allies crucial time to continue needed free-market reforms and, hopefully, restore the fortunes of a country once held up as a model of prosperity, but which has been driven into poverty by decades of statist misrule.

In what it calls “a shocking electoral victory”, La Nacion reports that LLA pulled 40.66 percent of the vote. That’s well ahead of the opposition Peronists, who have long dominated the country and drew 31.7 percent of votes. Importantly, LLA won the populous province of Buenos Aires (home to 40 percent of voters), a Peronist stronghold where Milei’s allies were recently trounced in local elections.

From Wealth to Poverty Under Government Economic Meddling

This is good news for anybody who hopes for the advance of freedom, of course. But it’s especially encouraging for Argentines who, over the course of generations, have seen their country reduced from one of the wealthiest in the world to an impoverished basket case.

“At the end of the 19th century, economists agreed: Argentina, the ‘land of silver’, had a golden future ahead of it,” Deutsche Welle noted in 2020. “‘Rich like an Argentine’ was a common phrase at the time.”

The German broadcaster added, “in an unprecedented fall, Argentina went from ranking among the world’s top economies to one at the very bottom of the list. Today, economists simply roll their eyes at the fate of Argentina, which is now a developing country.”

The reason is simple enough: Argentines handed their political fates to a man named Juan Peron. In the 1930s, Peron served as a military observer in Europe, traveling to countries including Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He was deeply impressed by some of the worst ideas to ever motivate a government and blended them into his own “justicialist” ideology. Through decades of political dominance, first Peron and then successor justicialists demonstrated that, in practice, there’s no real difference between fascism and socialism and that statist economics by any name are destructive.

To illustrate just how destructive Peron’s legacy has been, it’s worth pointing out that after Sunday’s election, The Wall Street Journal reported that Milei’s free-market, smaller-government policies “have restored some credibility to Latin America’s third-largest economy, but about one in three people still live in poverty”. One-third of the population living in poverty is horrifying, but what’s remarkable is that this is an improvement over what went before. At the end of the preceding Kirchner presidency, poverty stood at 41.7 percent and then briefly rose to 52.9 percent before falling to its current level.

In Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that the success of La Libertad Avanza is almost diametrically opposed to what most mainstream media reports were saying in the days leading up to the elections:

Argentine president Javier Milei has won a significant victory in Argentina’s midterm elections, held on Sunday. His libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), claimed more than 40 per cent of the vote, effectively doubling its share of seats in the senate and lower house to 37 (out of 72) and 64 (out of 257) respectively.

The result came as a bitter shock to much of the mainstream Western press. Milei’s assault on established economic orthodoxies since his election in December 2023 led many “experts” to take it for granted that Milei’s party was in for a hiding.

In a primer for the election published last weekend, the Observer had already begun salivating over the prospect of Milei’s defeat. “Argentina is counting the cost of its turn to Javier Milei”, wrote economics editor Heather Stewart. Glum portraits of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump behind Milei loomed above the article. “Politicians around the world are closely watching what happens when populist economic prescriptions collide with reality”.

This was a comparatively soft take compared with what the Guardian published earlier in October. “Farage, Trump, Musk: your boy Javier Milei just took one hell of a beating. Why so quiet?”, blared the headline when Milei’s party was defeated in a provincial election in the capital Buenos Aires. The Guardian said Milei’s “hard right” administration was “melting away”, along with his “once-packed international throng of cheerleaders and wolf-whistlers”.

Unsurprisingly, the BBC struggled to get to grips with Milei’s victory on Sunday, even though its only job was to convey the results impartially. Apparently, the president made gains despite Argentina “hurtling towards an economic collapse”, it editorialised. It said the voter turnout of 68 per cent reflected “widespread apathy”. This might be lower than past midterm elections in Argentina, but it was still higher than turnouts at last year’s US presidential election (65 per cent) and the most recent UK General Election (60 per cent).

None of this should come as a shock. Since Milei’s rise to power in 2023, most of the commentariat has been eager to see him fail. His promises to radically cut public spending and deregulate key industries were seen in the eyes of many economic experts to only mean one thing: the dreaded return of Thatcherite “neoliberalism”, from which, they claim, Britain and America have never truly recovered.

The antipathy is mutual. In a speech to the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Milei famously referred to the world’s political classes as “parasites who live off the state”. That his speech was shared approvingly by Elon Musk on X confirmed, in the eyes of the Western establishment, Milei’s status as a dangerous insurrectionist.

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