Quotulatiousness

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.

July 23, 2025

Javier Milei is delivering “a man-made miracle” for Argentina

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niall Ferguson‘s thread on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, thanks to the Thread Reader App:

While the world fixates on Donald Trump’s populist cocktail of reciprocal tariffs and big, beautiful deficits, @JMilei is delivering a man-made miracle that should gladden the heart of every classical economist and quicken the pulse of all political libertarians.

@JMilei has brought monthly inflation down from 13% to 2%. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7%. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks — indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42%, when Milei was elected, to 31%

These are astonishing feats. And they have ramifications that go far beyond South America. Free-market economics and political libertarianism are sometimes dismissed as a fad of the “neoliberal” 1980s, long ago superseded by the new populisms of the left and the right. Not so. The world has never seen a government more radically libertarian than @JMilei. But the amazing thing is not that it is working economically. The true miracle is that Milei’s shock therapy is working politically.

With his leather jacket and late ’60s mop top, @JMilei is part–rock star, part–mad professor, dancing, singing, and screaming his catch phrase: ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! — “Long live liberty, damn it!” It’s as if Joe Cocker had gone onstage at Woodstock and sung “I’ll Get By with a Little Help from My Friedman”. Never in the history of democracy has a tribune of the people won power this way.

July 18, 2025

Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president

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

J.D. Tuccille says that Argentinian President Javier Milei may be the politician who has most successfully “defied the expectations of the chattering class” by not only winning the presidency but also by the completely unexpected turnaround of the national economy:

Drawing on official data, Reuters reports that Argentina’s “economic activity rose 7.7 per cent in April compared with the same month last year”. That was higher than expected and a welcome addition to news that the economy had grown by 5.8 per cent during the full first quarter relative to the same quarter the previous year. Early numbers put Argentina’s second-quarter growth at 7.6 per cent. By contrast, Canada’s economy grew at an annual 2.2 percent in the first quarter and the U.S. economy shrank a bit.

In equally encouraging news, Argentina’s “monthly inflation rate has fallen below two per cent for the first time in five years,” according to the Financial Times. That’s still high in North American terms, but Argentina’s governments have a history of wildly expanding the money supply to pay off debt and finance expenditures, resulting in inflation rates in the hundreds and even thousands per cent per year. Inflation slowed somewhat in recent years, but it was over 200 per cent in 2023 and Milei was elected on a promise to stabilize prices — even if it meant adopting the U.S. dollar as the country’s official currency.

Importantly, the poverty rate in Argentina has also fallen to 38.1 per cent of the population at the end of 2024 from 41.7 per cent when Milei took office. Again, that remains very high, but it’s an improvement in a country where politicians have long seemed committed to keeping people poor and dependent on the state.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. In a November 2023 open letter, over 100 economists warned that Milei’s economic “proposals, rooted in the economy of laissez-faire and which include controversial ideas such as dollarization and significant reductions in public spending, are fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful to the Argentine economy and people”.

The economists — including such academic luminaries as Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh — warned of havoc if Milei implemented his free-market plans. Voters weren’t impressed by the forecast of doom; they chose the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” economist and his upstart political coalition over the standard-bearer of the dominant Justicialist Party.

The Justicialists have been the strongest force in Argentine politics since their launch in the 1940s by Juan Peron. Peron served as a military observer in Europe and apparently combined the worst ideas he encountered into a peculiarly Argentine ideology he called “justicialism”, better known as Peronism. At its heart, the ideology drops the pretense of any practical difference between socialism and fascism and promotes a brutal mélange of statist economic schemes. This means that, while most property and business activity is in private hands, it’s subject to government dictates, distortions, and control.

July 12, 2025

Noah Smith on how surprisingly well free market policies are working in Argentina

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

In the headline, you should read the unstated “surprising to far too many mainstream economists and political commentators”, but full credit to Noah Smith for admitting that Milei’s radical agenda has started to make life much better for ordinary Argentinians:

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

So to be clear, when I say that criticism of free markets has been overdone, I’m partly talking to myself. A couple of months ago, horrified by Trump’s tariff policies, I wrote an apology to libertarians, admitting that I had failed to see the political usefulness of their project in terms of maintaining economic sanity on the Right.

But it’s not just the political benefits of free markets that have been undersold; I think the purely economic advantages are also too often ignored.

Exhibit A is Javier Milei’s track record in Argentina. A year and a half ago, when Milei was elected President of Argentina, a bunch of left-wing economists warned darkly that his radical free-market program would lead to economic devastation:

    The election of the radical rightwing economist Javier Milei as president of Argentina would probably inflict further economic “devastation” and social chaos on the South American country, a group of more than 100 leading economists has warned … [S]ignatories include influential economists such as France’s Thomas Piketty, India’s Jayati Ghosh, the Serbian-American Branko Milanović and Colombia’s former finance minister José Antonio Ocampo …

    The letter said Milei’s proposals – while presented as “a radical departure from traditional economic thinking” – were actually “rooted in laissez-faire economics” and “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people” … [T]he economists warned that “a major reduction in government spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality, and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”

    “Javier Milei’s dollarization and fiscal austerity proposals overlook the complexities of modern economies, ignore lessons from historical crises, and open the door for accentuating already severe inequalities,” they wrote.

Milei won anyway. His first big policy, and the one the lefty economists fretted about the most, was deep fiscal austerity. Argentina’s long-standing economic model, created by dictator Juan Peron in the 1950s, involved a large and complex array of public works projects and subsidies for various consumer goods like energy and transportation. Milei slashed many of these, as well as cutting pensions, civil service employment, and transfers to provinces. Overall, he cut public spending by about 31%, resulting in a near-total elimination of Argentina’s chronic budget deficit:

The point of all this cutting wasn’t just to remove state intervention in the economy — it was to stop inflation. Basically, macroeconomic theory says that if deficits are high and persistent enough, then they convince everyone that the government will eventually inflate its debt away by printing money (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy). And most or all countries that experience hyperinflation end up escaping it only when they get their fiscal house in order. Perpetual deficits were part of Argentina’s “Peronist” system, and it’s probably a good bet that this has been responsible for the periodic bouts of hyperinflation that it experiences.

[…]

But still, Milei’s success so far should make us somewhat more confident about free-market policies — especially when we evaluate them against the new socialist ideas that have been gaining currency in the U.S. In the past, socialists and other left-leaning economic thinkers advocated central planning and nationalization of industry; in recent years, they have taken to calling for expansion of the state through fiscal policy, mixing macroeconomic justifications with micro. At all times, they call for deficit-financed expansion of social programs; when fiscal hawks want to tame the deficits, the lefties warn of the short-term macroeconomic harms of austerity.

If you’re always more terrified of austerity than you are of deficits, expansion of the state — and of the deficit — becomes a one-way ratchet. This approach is very different than Keynesianism, which advocates stimulus to overcome recessions, followed by austerity during boom times. You’ll recognize it as bearing a distinct similarity to MMT; that pseudo-theory has largely fallen out of favor, but there are plenty of more respectable progressive types whose ideas nonetheless have a lot of this “macroleftist” flavor.

July 9, 2025

Argentina after 18 months of Milei’s leadership

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

All the mainstream media folks were predicting that Argentina would be an utter economic disaster after the election of Javier Milei. A few of them are starting to come around to admitting that Argentina seems to have made the right move:

What’s happening in Argentina is super impressive, but it’s not a miracle.

Yes, Milei’s reforms are generating great results, but that is exactly what libertarians and small-government conservatives said would happen.

Let’s start with this celebration of the amazing growth of private-sector wages since Milei took office in late 2023.

Or how about the astounding way that Milei has conquered inflation (I also like how this tweet mocks the statists like Piketty who frantically and erroneously warned that Milei’s election would produce an economic catastrophe).

[…]

Let’s close with another tweet.

Here’s Noah Smith, who is not a libertarian, shared two days ago.

Give him credit for acknowledging Milei’s success.

I’ll add two comments about this tweet, one about economic data and the other about predicting whether Milei would get great results.

Regarding data, I don’t think anyone should get overly excited by one month or one quarter of economic data. Even one year of data might create a misleading impression (which is why my Anti-Convergence Club is always based on decades of data). That being said, there is every reason to expect continuing strong results for Argentina.

Regarding predictions, Smith’s tweet asserts that libertarians didn’t expect Milei to be so wildly successful. At the risk of sounding like a politician, I agree and disagree.

  • The “agree” part is that many libertarians were worried at the beginning of Milei’s presidency that he might face immovable opposition from the Peronist-controlled legislature. We also worried that the special interest groups might launch massive – and successful – protests that would derail necessary reforms. So if you asked me in December 2023 for my prediction, I would not have been overflowing with optimism.
  • The “disagree” part is that I have always had total and absolute confidence that radical pro-market policies will produce great results, anywhere and everywhere. And I assume other libertarians (as well as Reagan-type conservatives) share my faith that good policies lead to good outcomes. So if I was told in December 2023 what Milei would have accomplished in his first 18 months, I would have fully expected the great news we now see.

In other words, what’s miraculous is that the reforms happened. The subsequent economic renaissance has been boringly inevitable (but totally wonderful).

P.S. I am cautiously optimistic that Milei will get more allies in the legislature after Argentina’s mid-term elections later this year.

January 10, 2025

Javier Milei’s “devastation” and “social chaos” report card

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

In the Washington Examiner, David Harsanyi checks the current state of Argentina against the doom-and-gloom predictions from the start of Javier Milei’s term:

In the days leading up to the August 2023 presidential election in Argentina, a hundred “leading” economists from around the world, including progressive favorite Thomas Piketty, published an open letter warning that “radical right-wing economist” Javier Milei would inflict “devastation” and social chaos on his country.

However, they said it like it was a bad thing.

By the time Milei unexpectedly won the presidency, Argentina, once one of the wealthiest nations in the world, had a poverty rate of over 40% and the third-highest inflation rate in the world. After decades of Peronism, a toxic melding of fascism, socialism, and unionism, the nation bankrupted its central bank, and the peso was depreciating at warp speed. Do you think your mortgage rate is bad? Interest rates hit 118% in Argentina weeks before the election. The country was on its way to becoming another Venezuela. Milei wanted to blow it up.

After Milei’s unlikely victory, political scientist Ian Bremmer warned, “Economic collapse is coming imminently”. Felix Salmon, the chief financial correspondent at Axios, argued that Milei’s policies would plunge Argentina into “a deep recession”.

Seven months later, Argentina was out of a recession that had set in before Milei’s victory. The chainsaw-wielding economist, “el Loco” to friends, followed through on his promise of “shock therapy”, prioritizing taming inflation by cutting spending and deregulating the economy.

Almost all problems in modern Keynesian fixes are prominent features of governance in the modern West. Governments are always bragging about spending their way out of economic tribulations (tribulations they usually instigate). If a person suggests that free-market economic policy would have been more beneficial in the long term, they are forced to rely on a counterhistory. This is one reason why lots of elites are rooting against Milei, who argues that most of the West’s economic ills lie in Keynesian economics. They want him to fail.

As we all know, most panic-inducing cases of “austerity” are just minuscule reductions in the trajectory of spending growth. Not Milei’s plan, which entailed shutting down 13 government agencies and firing over 30,000 public workers — around 10% of the federal workforce. That is an unrivaled political revolution. Argentina’s federal budget was reduced by 30%. Even if the Department of Government Efficiency accomplished everything Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are talking about doing, they wouldn’t come close to 3%, much less 30%, in spending cuts. There has likely been no comparable austerity program in any Western economy.

By May 2024, Argentina recorded its first quarterly budget surplus since 2008. Inflation, still high, dropped from a debilitating 25% at the end of 2023 to 2.4% by the end of 2024. Per capita salary, having plunged, is now also recovering.

Dan Mitchell agrees that it’s easy to mock economists for their hair-on-fire reaction to Milei’s election:

Consider the supposedly prestigious left-leaning academics who asserted in 2021 that Biden’s agenda was not inflationary. At the risk of understatement, they wound up with egg on their faces.1

Today, we’re going to look at another example of leftist economists making fools of themselves.

It involves Argentina, where President Javier Milei’s libertarian agenda has yielded amazingly positive results in just one year.

Some of us knew that good policy would lead to good results.

Others, like the editors at Bloomberg, perhaps did not expect such a quick turnaround. But, to their credit, they just acknowledged the amazing progress in an editorial.

The U.K.-based Telegraph leans to the right, so this headline can probably be interpreted as a victory dance.

January 4, 2025

Can Javier Milei Make Argentina Great Again?

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Adam Smith Institute
Published 3 Jan 2025

In November 2023, Argentina elected Javier Milei, a libertarian economist armed with a chainsaw and a bold plan to rescue the country from decades of decline. Facing 142% inflation, a crumbling peso, and 40% poverty, Milei slashed spending, deregulated markets, and delivered a historic budget surplus — all within a year.

Sam Bidwell dives into Milei’s radical reforms, exploring the challenges that have made them necessary. He traces the country’s rise as a global economic powerhouse in the early 20th century, its decline through years of government intervention and Peronism, and its resurgence under Milei’s leadership.

Discover how this fiery libertarian turned Argentina’s economic fortunes around — and what the world can learn from his audacious blueprint for recovery.

🔗 Subscribe for more insights on global economics, history, and leadership!
🔗 Check out our website for more economics content: https://www.adamsmith.org/

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Start
00:53 Golden Years
02:59 Decline of Argentina
05:20 Peron
08:47 The Legacy of Peronism
11:56 After the Falklands
15:38 Javier Milei
18:17 Challenges
24:31 Lesson for the UK and the wider world

December 21, 2024

German democracy tottering on the brink (again) after latest attack by Elon Musk!

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Germany is, yet again, convulsed with political unrest as politicians react strongly to foreign interference in German affairs by … dun-dun-duuuuuun … Elon Musk:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

German democracy, which has existed undeterred since 1949 but is somehow always shaken to its foundations whenever anybody sings the wrong song or holds a televised debate with the wrong person, is once again on life support.

Christian Lindner, head of the market-liberal Free Democrats, did much to trigger the present catastrophe on 1 December, when said that the Free Republic should “dare more Milei and more Musk“. Because there is little distinction between praising Milei and Musk and demanding the return of National Socialism, there ensued a brief period of establishment hyperventilation.

Less than a week later, CDU chief and probable future German chancellor Friedrich Merz, did his part to denounce Lindner’s political wrongthink in a statement to Deutschlandfunk:

    So neither the Argentinian president nor, how shall I put it, the American entrepreneur Elon Musk – let’s put it plainly – are role models for German politics in my view. I don’t see where we can find similarities in German politics. What Christian Lindner meant will probably remain his secret.

The next day, Merz repeated the same denunciations, only more harshly, explaining to one of our extremely adult and far-sighted pantsuit talkshow hosts that “To be honest, I was completely appalled that Christian Lindner made that comparison“. Milei, Merz said, is “really trampling on the people there”.

Yesterday, all of this came to the notice of the (honestly rather tiresome) influencer Naomi Seibt, who posted a video statement to X rehearsing all of this old news to her largely American audience:

Elon Musk then brought down the hammer on the German democratic order, retweeting Seibt’s video and remarking that “Only the AfD can save Germany“.

Today a lot of very important and influential people got out of bed and took to their keyboards to denounce Musk’s election interference. His statement might be illegal, at any rate it is very likely fascist and certainly it is beyond the pale for an American to voice an opinion about German politics. Germans absolutely never, ever, utter the slightest word about American politics and certainly would never advance negative opinions about the American president in the middle of an election campaign. Our Foreign Office would never try to fact-check an American presidential debate! Our journalists would never depict President Donald Trump dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member or offering the Hitler salute or decapitating the Statue of Liberty! That’s just not done!

Like a great stream of green diarrhoea, the outrage is pouring fourth. Matthias Gebauer, who writes for Der Spiegel, observes that “Elon Musk … is openly promoting the AfD” and concludes that “Putin is not the only one who loves this party”. Erik Marquardt, head of the Green faction in the European Parliament, says that “The EU Commission and EU member states should no longer stand by and watch as billionaires misuse media and algorithms to influence elections and strengthen and normalise right-wing extremists”. This “is an attack on democracy”, and “has nothing to do with freedom of expression”. Dennis Radtke, CDU representative in the European Parliament, concludes that “Musk … is declaring war on democracy” and that “the man is a menace”. We are also under siege via “interference from Putin”; “the erosion of our democracy is being fuelled from both within and without”. Julian Röpcke, who writes for BILD, believes that “This is interference in the German election campaign by a tech billionaire who uses algorithms to decide what gets heard”. If Germany does not “respond with penalties, there will be no help for our eroding democracy”.

November 28, 2024

How is Argentina doing after a year under Javier Milei?

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I don’t normally follow South American news all that closely, as despite being in the same hemisphere, little that happens there has much importance to us here in Canada or the United States. The election of Argentinian President Javier Milei, however, has made Argentina a much more interesting place to watch as Milei valiantly attempts to turn the economy around from its near-century-long decline. Here, Dan Mitchell provides his assessment of Milei’s efforts so far:

… let’s focus today on Milei’s goal of maximizing economic liberty.

The bad news is that if he wants Argentina to become the new Hong Kong, Milei has a long journey. According to Economic Freedom of the World, Argentina ranked a lowly #159 out of 165 nations in 2022.

As you can see from the EFW rankings, Milei’s country gets especially bad scores for Sound Money, Trade and Regulation (dead last for Sound Money and in the bottom-10 percent of the world for the other two categories!).

The good news is that you don’t have to be libertarian Nirvana (or even Liberland) to make a big jump in the rankings.

You don’t even need to be Hong Kong (which used to be very good with scores above 9 but has now declined to 8.58 thanks to Beijing’s intervention).

Heck, almost every country in the western world has experienced a significant decline in economic liberty this century.

Milei actually could put Argentina in first place today merely by achieving the same level of economic liberty (8.67) that the United States had in 2004.

For what it’s worth, I think it would take several years of good reforms to climb that high.

That being said, dramatic improvements are nonetheless possible in a very short period. Here’s my back-of-the-envelope estimate of where Argentina could be by the end of next year.

October 2, 2024

Duelling reports on how Javier Milei’s Argentinian “shock therapy” is working

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander tries to find something approaching the truth between the pantingly enthusiastic libertarian reports and the angrily negative progressive reports:

How is Javier Milei, the new-ish libertarian president of Argentina doing?

According to right-wing sources, he’s doing amazing, inflation is vanquished, and Argentina is on the road to First World status.

According to left-wing sources, he’s devastating the country, inflation has ballooned, and Argentina is mired in unprecedented dire poverty.

I was confused enough to investigate further. Going through various topics in more depth:

1: Government Surplus

When Milei was elected, Argentina went from constant deficits to almost unprecedented government surplus, and has continued to run a surplus for the past six months.

This wasn’t fancy macroeconomic magic. Milei just cut government spending:

This source says he cut the size of government by about 30% overall. Unsurprisingly, this eliminated the Argentine deficit.

[…]

6: Overall

When Javier Milei took office, he promised to do shock therapy that would short-term plunge Argentina into a recession, but long-term end its economic woes.

He has fulfilled his campaign promise to plunge Argentina into a recession. Whether this will long-term end its economic woes remains to be seen.

I think he gets credit for some purely political victories (completing the budget cuts he said he would complete), for decreasing inflation, and for improving the housing market. But in the end, history will judge him for whether his shock therapy eventually bears fruit. I don’t think that judgment can be made yet, and I don’t see many economists eager to go out on a limb and say that there are strong signs that his particular brand of shock therapy will definitely work/fail.

There are disappointingly few Milei prediction markets, probably because it’s hard to operationalize “he makes the economy good”. This multi-pronged mega-market has few traders, and weakly predicts a mix of good and bad things, maybe leaning a little good. But here is a more specific one:

… which compared to Argentina’s historical GDP growth rate seems — no, sorry, Argentina’s historical GDP growth rate is too weird to draw any conclusions.

And maybe the most important test:

September 9, 2024

Update your Overton Window – “[A]nyone to the immediate right of 2024 liberal democracy is a fascist”

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

In Niccolo Soldo’s weekly commentary, a few insights into European “mainstream” political views on extreme right-wing crypto-fascists like … everyone who doesn’t support far left positions:

If you think that US media is bad, you should check out just how awful their German colleagues are. Their media is filled to the brim with daily hysteria about the Russians, Nazis, fascists, and so on. Every single day is a struggle to survive against these existential threats.

To the mainstream German media, a conservative Christian Democrat (the kind that ruled much of Western Europe during the Cold War) like Viktor Orban is a fascist in disguise. To the mainstream German media, a statist centrist like Vladimir Putin is Hitler without the disguise. A 90s Clinton Liberal like Donald Trump is both.

Thankfully, Der Spiegel reached out to writers and researchers who specialize in fascism to tell us that all of the above are fascists, and some are Nazis too:

    The reversion to fascism is a deep-seated fear of modern democratic societies. Yet while it long seemed rather unlikely and unimaginable, it has now begun to look like a serious threat. Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions in Russia. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism in India. The election victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Marine Le Pen’s strategy of normalizing right-wing extremism in France. Javier Milei’s victory in Argentina. Viktor Orbán’s autocratic domination of Hungary. The comebacks of the far-right FPÖ party in Austria and of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Germany’s AfD. Nayib Bukele’s autocratic regime in El Salvador, which is largely under the radar despite being astoundingly single-minded, even using the threat of armed violence to push laws through parliament. Then there is the possibility of a second Trump administration, with fears that he could go even farther in a second term than he did during his first. And the attacks on migrant hostels in Britain. The neo-Nazi demonstration in Bautzen. The pandemic. The war in Ukraine. The inflation.

Meloni, Modi, Milei, Wilders, Bukele … all are suspected of crypto-fascism here.

Trump? “Fascist”, says neo-conservative Robert Kagan:

    In May 2016, Donald Trump emerged as the last Republican standing following the primaries, and the world was still a bit perplexed and rather concerned when the historian Robert Kagan published an article in the Washington Post under the headline “This is how fascism comes to America.”

    The piece was one of the first in the U.S. to articulate concerns that Trump is a fascist. It received significant attention around the world and DER SPIEGEL published the article as well. It was an attention-grabbing moment: What if Kagan is right? Indeed, it isn’t inaccurate to say that Kagan reignited the fascism debate with his essay. Interestingly, it was the same Robert Kagan who had spent years as an influential member of the Republican Party and was seen as one of the thought leaders for the neocons during the administration of George W. Bush.

    The article has aged well. Its characterization of Trump as a “strongman”. Its description of his deft use of fear, hatred and anger. “This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes,” Kagan wrote, “but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ‘tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party – out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear – falling into line behind him.”

Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, says that fascism has already come to America:

    Six years ago, Stanley published a book in the U.S. called How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. The German translation only appeared two months ago, a source of annoyance for Stanley. He also has German citizenship and says that he loves the country despite everything.

    So how does fascism work? Modern-day fascism, Stanley writes, is a cult of the leader in which that leader promises rebirth to a disgraced country. Disgraced because immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals and women have taken over the media, the schools and cultural institutions. Fascist regimes, Stanley argues, begin as social and political movements and parties – and they tend to be elected rather than overthrowing existing governments.

Timothy Snyder says that both Trump AND Putin are fascists:

    Timothy Snyder speaks thoughtfully and quietly, but with plenty of confidence. Putin is a fascist. Trump is a fascist. The difference: One holds power. The other does not. Not yet.

    “The problem with fascism,” Snyder says, “is that it’s not a presence in the way we want it to be. We want political doctrines to have clear definitions. We don’t want them to be paradoxical or dialectical.” Still, he says, fascism is an important category when it comes to understanding both history and the present, because it makes differences visible.

Austrian Political Scientist Natascha Strobl says that fascists are now everywhere:

    But this kind of violence can be seen everywhere, says the Austrian political scientist Natascha Strobl. It merely manifests itself differently than it did in the 1920s, when, early on in the fascist movement in northern Italy, gangs of thugs were going from village to village attacking farmer organizations and the offices of the socialist party, killing people and burning homes to the ground. Today, says Strobl, violence is primarily limited to the internet. “And it is,” says Strobl, “just as real. The people who perpetrate it believe they are involved in a global culture war, a struggle that knows no boundaries. An ideological civil war against all kinds of chimeras, such as ‘cultural Marxism’ or the ‘Great Replacement’.”

For Bulgarian think-tanker Ivan Krastev, AfD is a fascist organization:

    It is all rather perplexing. Back in Berlin, Ivan Krastev makes one of his Krastevian jokes. An American judge, he relates, once said that he may not be able to define pornography, “but I know it when I see it”. The reverse is true with fascism, says Krastev: It is simple to define, but difficult to recognize when you see it.

    The “F-word”. F as in fascism or F as in “Fuck you”. It is permissible, as a court in Meiningen ruled, to refer to Höcke as a fascist. The question remains, though, what doing so actually achieves.

So there you have it: anyone to the immediate right of 2024 liberal democracy is a fascist.

August 9, 2024

Rare signs of growth in the Argentine economy

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

It looks as if Argentina is managing a trick that Justin Trudeau can’t manage — growing the national economy while keeping inflation down:

Javier Milei, 8 October 2022.
Photo attributed to Vox España via Wikimedia Commons.

During his first year as president, Javier Milei has been waging a bitter but largely successful campaign against inflation.

Now, Argentines received more welcome news: their economy is growing again.

“Economic activity rose 1.3 percent from April, above the 0.1 percent median estimate from analysts in a Bloomberg survey and the first month of growth since Milei’s term began in December,” Bloomberg reported on July 18. “From a year ago, the proxy for gross domestic product grew 2.3 percent.”

The positive economic report, based on data from the Argentine government, is a surprise to many.

The 2.3 percent year-over-year increase defied expectations of a decline of similar magnitude, Bloomberg reported. As Semafor notes, the Argentine economy was projected to have the least economic growth of any country in the world in 2024, according to the International Monetary Fund.

A “Wrecking Ball”?

Argentine economists I spoke to said that the numbers are encouraging, but the country’s economy is far from being out of the woods.

As most people know, Milei inherited an economic mess decades in the making. When the self-described anarcho-capitalist assumed office in December, Argentina was suffering from the third highest inflation rate in the world — 211 percent year over year. The poverty rate was north of 40 percent, and Argentina’s economy was declining.

With his country’s economy in a full tailspin from decades of Peronism, Milei proposed a series of economic reforms dubbed “shock therapy” that consisted primarily of three components: slashing government spending, cutting bureaucracy, and devaluing the peso.

Critics warned that these measures would be disastrous, and many took it for granted that the remedies would deepen Argentina’s recession.

The former head of the International Monetary Fund’s Western Hemisphere Department, Alejandro Werner, said Milei’s strategy could tame inflation, but at great cost.

“A deep recession will also take place,” Werner wrote, “as the fiscal consolidation kicks in and as the decline in household income depresses consumption and uncertainty weighs on investment.”

Felix Salmon, the chief financial correspondent at Axios, concurred, comparing Milei’s policies to “a wrecking ball”.

“Milei’s budget cuts will cause a plunge in household income, as well as a deep recession,” wrote Salmon.

Despite these warnings, Milei delivered his “shock therapy” plan in the first few months of his presidency. Tens of thousands of state workers were cut as were more than half of government ministries, including the Ministry of Culture, as well as the Ministries of Labor, Social Development, Health, and Education (which Milei dubbed “the Ministry of Indoctrination“). Numerous government subsidies were eliminated, and the value of the peso was cut in half.

Even before Milei’s policies were given a chance to succeed, many continued to attack them.

“Shock therapy is pushing more people into poverty,” journalist Lautaro Grinspan wrote in Foreign Policy in early March. “Food prices have risen by roughly 50 percent, according to official government data.”

Yet the official government data Grinspan cited was a report from December 2023, before Milei had even assumed the presidency.

Contrary to the dire predictions, the results of Milei’s policies have been better than even many of his supporters had dared hope.

During the first half of 2024, inflation cooled for five straight months in Argentina, the Associated Press reported in July. Though consumer prices were up 4.6 percent in June from the previous month, that’s down from a 25 percent month-over-month increase in December, when monthly inflation peaked in Argentina. Meanwhile, in February the government saw its first budget surplus in more than a decade. And just days ago, an economic report was published showing a massive decline in poverty in Argentina.

Many doubted that these successes were possible, and the conventional wisdom said that wringing inflation out of the economy and slashing government spending could only be achieved at great cost: a deepening recession.

July 19, 2024

Argentina’s decades-long struggle with inflation

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Marcos Falcone provides an update on President Javier Milei’s ongoing efforts to drag the Argentine economy back from hyperinflation:

As Javier Milei rose to power in December of last year, Argentina suffered from an annual inflation rate of over 211 percent, only behind Venezuela and Lebanon. Having risen consistently for over two decades, a combination of perpetually unbalanced budgets and investors’ distrust made money creation (and thus inflation) almost unavoidable.

In that context, Javier Milei’s first promise in his inaugural address was to avoid hyperinflation. In order to do that, his highest priority was to balance the budget so as to stop monetizing the deficit. And indeed, after just one month, the government announced in January that Argentina achieved its first financial surplus in 16 years. In successive months, the budget has been kept balanced.

Quick action seems to be causing quick effects. Indeed, inflation has plunged from 25 percent in December to an expected 4 percent in July. This is happening in a context of price readjustments, with prices like rent going down (after the government repealed rent control laws) and energy and transport prices going up (as the government is cutting subsidies). Even the IMF has admitted that inflation is falling faster than expected. In fact, inflation is coming down so fast that banks have started offering mortgages for the first time in seven years. This signals that the market expects inflation to stay down.

Milei told Argentines that the process of defeating inflation would hurt—and it has. The downside of the government’s economic plan is that the country has entered a recession which is likely to last until at least the end of the year. Amid some layoffs, the country’s industrial output is decreasing. The spending cuts that allowed the country to balance the budget have resulted in less income for provinces and specific groups like retirees.

July 4, 2024

Argentina’s inflation rate

Filed under: Americas, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As you may have noticed, my interest in Argentinian affairs increased a lot with the election of Javier Milei as President. His first six months in office, while turbulent, do seem to have the economic indicators moving in the right direction for ordinary Argentines:

Argentina’s inflation rate has recently dropped to its lowest point since January 2022, registering a monthly increase of 4.2 percent in May according to the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC). Although annual inflation has slowed for the first time since mid-2023, it still stands at 276.4 percent, one of the highest rates globally.

When Javier Milei assumed the presidency in December 2023, monthly inflation had skyrocketed to an unprecedented 25.5 percent. Within five months, Milei’s administration managed to reduce this figure by more than 20 percentage points. Despite the persistently high annual inflation rate, the trend indicates potential stabilization of the Argentine economy.

Javier Milei’s reforms have been described as aggressive. In his inaugural speech, he emphasized the need to clean up the economy before implementing his promises to dollarize and close the central bank.

To achieve a zero deficit, Milei enacted a 35 percent reduction in public spending. He achieved this by closing half of the ministries and secretariats, suspending public works for a year, reducing subsidies for energy and transportation, canceling government advertising, and maintaining the 2023 budget for 2024 despite an inflation rate of 300 percent. Essentially, the government drastically cut its expenditures.

These measures, although unpopular, yielded results. Milei’s government not only avoided a deficit, but achieved a surplus, and most importantly, inflation began to decline.

Following the inflation story in Argentina recently brought to mind Henry Hazlitt’s famous 1978 article “Inflation in One Page“. As the title suggests, Hazlitt summarizes the causes and remedies of inflation in a brief and simple explanation. He argued that inflation is a consequence of government monetary policies, specifically excessive money printing due to unbalanced budgets caused by extravagant government spending.

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