{"id":14722,"date":"2012-04-21T09:58:40","date_gmt":"2012-04-21T14:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=14722"},"modified":"2012-04-21T09:58:40","modified_gmt":"2012-04-21T14:58:40","slug":"argentina-canada-without-the-boring-politics-and-grey-politicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/04\/21\/argentina-canada-without-the-boring-politics-and-grey-politicians\/","title":{"rendered":"Argentina: Canada without the boring politics and grey politicians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/fullcomment.nationalpost.com\/2012\/04\/21\/robert-fulford-do-cry-for-argentina\/\" target=\"_blank\">Robert Fulford<\/a> sees lots of similarities between Argentina and Canada, except the one difference that makes <em>all<\/em> the difference:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In some ways it\u2019s much like Canada, a huge one-time colony with a talented population and endless natural resources \u2014 arable land, oil and gas and much else.<\/p>\n<p>Except it is not like Canada. It doesn\u2019t work. And the reason it doesn\u2019t work is that it lacks a reliable, careful government, not subject to sudden bouts of hysteria. Argentina has few of the boring politicians who irritate people like Sid.<\/p>\n<p>Public life in Argentina expresses itself through spasms of showmanship, braggadocio, paranoia and demagoguery. It\u2019s the land of the eternal crisis, where a military coup is never unthinkable.<\/p>\n<p>Argentina\u2019s many economic failures, generation after generation, are self-created, politically induced. In all the world there\u2019s no more obvious example of a nation that has squandered, through flawed governance, the riches provided by nature.<\/p>\n<p>This week Cristina Fern\u00e1ndez de Kirchner, President of Argentina, and the widow of the last president, announced she\u2019s grabbing YPF, the country\u2019s biggest energy company, taking it from Spain\u2019s Repsol. Cristina, as she\u2019s usually called in Argentina, thinks she can run YPF better than the Spanish. Of course the Spanish are furious and will sue as well as blacken Argentina\u2019s name wherever possible. What Cristina has announced is a brazen, heedless act, with nothing to recommend it but high-handed nationalist fury.<\/p>\n<p>Yet Cristina believes that when you encounter economic trouble, the best course is to strike out against something foreign. At the moment she\u2019s also making anti-British noises, agitating to annex the Falklands Islands, which Argentina seized in 1982 and had to give back when it lost the war with the U.K. Somehow the Falklands (called the Malvinas in Argentina) are linked with the oil-company seizure as nationalist issues. A T-shirt has appeared on Cristina\u2019s supporters: \u201cThe Malvinas are Argentine, so is YPF.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Fulford sees lots of similarities between Argentina and Canada, except the one difference that makes all the difference: In some ways it\u2019s much like Canada, a huge one-time colony with a talented population and endless natural resources \u2014 arable land, oil and gas and much else. Except it is not like Canada. It doesn\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[465,6,25,53],"tags":[492,807,493,335],"class_list":["post-14722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americas","category-cancon","category-economics","category-politics","tag-argentina","tag-expropriation","tag-falklandislands","tag-spain"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3Ps","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14723,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14722\/revisions\/14723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}