{"id":96646,"date":"2025-07-18T03:00:51","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T07:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=96646"},"modified":"2025-07-17T09:32:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T13:32:14","slug":"argentinas-self-described-anarcho-capitalist-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/07\/18\/argentinas-self-described-anarcho-capitalist-president\/","title":{"rendered":"Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president"},"content":{"rendered":"

J.D. Tuccille<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Drawing on official data, Reuters reports<\/a> 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<\/a> 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<\/a>. By contrast, Canada’s economy grew at an annual 2.2 percent<\/a> in the first quarter and the U.S. economy shrank a bit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In equally encouraging news, Argentina’s “monthly inflation rate has fallen below two per cent for the first time in five years,” according<\/a> to the Financial Times<\/em>. That’s still high in North American terms, but Argentina’s governments have a history of wildly expanding the money supply<\/a> to pay off debt and finance expenditures, resulting in inflation rates in the hundreds and even thousands per cent per year<\/a>. 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 \u2014 even if it meant adopting the U.S. dollar<\/a> as the country’s official currency.<\/p>\n

Importantly, the poverty rate in Argentina has also fallen<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

This wasn’t supposed to happen. In a November 2023 open letter<\/a>, 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”.<\/p>\n

The economists \u2014 including such academic luminaries as Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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 m\u00e9lange<\/em> 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.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/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":[465,25,84,28,53],"tags":[492,660,320,165,1530],"class_list":["post-96646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americas","category-economics","category-government","category-media","category-politics","tag-argentina","tag-deregulation","tag-freetrade","tag-inflation","tag-javiermilei"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-p8O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96646","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=96646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96647,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96646\/revisions\/96647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}