For those who haven’t kept up with Argentina’s politics, they recently elected Javier Milei, a former professor of economics and a libertarian, as President. He won in a landslide on a promise to cut regulations, cut the size of government in half or more, abolish 11 major government departments, close the central bank and move the country to the US dollar, etc. He has already done a lot of it.
Anyway, he went to Davos to give a speech, and he basically called them out for being part of the problem. It was excellent.
Here is the text of the speed, from the WEF website. And kudos to them for allowing him to speak and not burying the speech somewhere.
And here’s a video of the speech, with AI being used to translate it to English:
I’m interested in hearing non-snarky opinions on this.
In other Libertarian news, here’s a paper from PLOS-1 which tries to characterize the differences between liberals, cnservatives, and libertarians. It’s quite interesting.
I’ll get the snark out of the way right off:
If he’s been teaching future economists in Argentine, then it’s no wonder that Rio de la Plata should be renamed Rio de la Caca, seeing how utterly shitty their economy is.
I managed to read about half of it, but he kept repeating himself so much, that I zoned out and gave up.
It reads like a speech at an election rally, is too long, for what substance it has. It worked in Argentina, which has been mis-managed since the country was founded, and mostly by regimes on the very far right. Milei is talking about how wonderful capitalism is, when left alone, and how we’ve expanded the global economy many magnitudes since the start of the industrial revolution.
Problem is, the bill is due. And the #1 item is climate change.
I feel sorry for Argentinians, who will once again be f*cked over by someone they elected.
And I cannot take someone, even a president elect and professor in economics, seriously who argues about economics like it’s a game of monopoly.
He couldn’t possibly do more danage than the Peronists have managed.
Look, I don’t agree with everything he said. The idea that there is no such thing as a market failure is just wrong, IMO. But he also said a lot of things right, that need to be heard.
But I suspect this isn’t the place to debate this. I shouldn’t have started this thread. It will not end well.
Becxause you want to understand how people think? Because knowing how your ‘enemy’ ticks is useful when formulating responses to them? Because even people you disagree with may have a valid point or two here and there? Because maintaining epistemic closure is a bad way to go through life?
We already have a thread about the far right takeover in Argentina, written by an actual Argentinian. I would suggest reading there.
To put it simply: the guy is not libertarian. He’s very much authoritarian. He is actively overriding the power of legislature to give himself more executive power. His attack on socialism is no more than the usual authoritarian scapegoating.
There’s a reason why I called it a far right takeover. The far right is not libertarian.
I think I’ve gotten the jist of Milei well before this thread was extruded.
Nah, not into picking corn out of stools, thanks.
Yeah, epistimic closure is perfectly fine here, especially when fully corroborated by CT’s post. (and thanks, CT, for taking one for the team)
Maybe if you quoted something he said that vaguely resembled sound policy, so that I wouldn’t have to wade through all that fun stuff, perhaps, then, you mighta gotten more traction with me.
That ‘policy’ alone should give pause to anyone who thinks that Milei is a sagacious fiscal leader. Pegging your currency to the American dollar is one thing; eliminating the central bank and irretrievably linking your economy to another nation which you have no real influence over is kind of like putting a leash on a tiger and then tying it around your waist. Of course, for Argentina it’s kind of an academic exercise because they’ve long forgone trying to maintain a stable and functional economy despite all of their natural resources and theoretical advantages, and most people prefer use the American dollar for savings and large purchases, so I supposed you can argue that Milei is just removing the robes but it is still a short-sighted policy with long lasting and essentially irreversible impacts. As for reducing regulations and “cut the size of government in half or more”, it is certainly the case that Argentina has a surfeit of bureaucracy that could do with a substantial amount of trimming, but this is more like whole limb amputation.
Sorry, I work as an interpreter, and I can tell you that the speech was delivered in English. No translation was needed. AI played no role at all in this.
As for the content… nah, I won’t go into that.
Here is what appears to be the same speech on the World Economic Forum’s YouTube page. In this version, he appears to be speaking Spanish with a simultaneous English translation playing over his voice.
Are you familiar with the Argentinian central bank? They are the cause of an endless series of hyperinflations that have impoverished the country. They are either incompetent or corrupt or fully captured by the Peronists who use the bank to bail them out.
This isn’t an argument against central banks in general, but the history of central banking in Argentina is terrible. By going t the US dollar, it takes the power away to print money to cover when bad policies cause poor economic results, and thereby imposes a measure of reality on people who think endless borrowing and spending is a good thing.
.
Nope. Here’s a link to the speech in Spanish with an english dub so you can hear his original speech:
So, instead of doing anything to fix the problem, just burn BRCA to the ground and let ‘the free market’ define fiscal policy? This has worked well where, exactly?
In a comparative perspective, Argentina’s institutional development differed from the United States, Canada or Australia in several key dimensions. After the 1853 Constitution, Argentina embarked on the path of institutional modernization associated with a rapid economic growth fueled by large-scale immigration from Europe and elsewhere. The 1853 Constitution enshrined universal suffrage which had been enforced in 1912 following Sáenz Peña Law. But compared to U.S, Canada and Australia, Argentina never finished the transition to the open democracy supported by the rule of law. When the military formally broke the constitutional order in 1930, Argentina embarked on the path of unstable institutional development frequent back-and-forth transitions between dictatorship and democracy. Instead of embarking on the path to sustained institutional development, Argentina underwent a tumultuous electoral fraud with a near erosion of the system of checks and balanced that precipitated the rise of populist leaders, like Juan Péron, to power. Unstable de jure and de facto institutional framework failed to promulgate growth-enhancing economic policies. Instead, it molded government-backed favoritism of dominant interest groups and encouraged pervasive rent-seeking instead of productive economic activity. On the balance, such institutional framework condemned Argentina to decades of stagnant productivity and poor economic growth.
This paper looks at 28 countries in the period 1850–2012 and constructs the latent indices of de jure and de facto political institutions using several existing datasets such as Marshall et al. (2013) and Vanhanen (2000, 2003). Deploying a structural model of long-run development with time-varying de jure and de facto political institutions and a series of time-invariant covariates, this paper estimates the contribution of de jure and de facto political institutions to long-run development conditional on the confounding effects previously identified in the literature. The counterfactual scenario is built by constructing an alternative de jure and de facto institutional series in the absence of institutional breakdowns. The synthetic control and difference-in-differences estimates suggest that had such breakdowns not occurred and had Argentina followed the institutional trends of its nearest-counterpart countries, it would be among the richest countries today.
As they said, it takes two to tango , and Argentina did move from right wing military dictatorships to populists like Peron that in reality tried to avoid socialism of the Marxist kind as he himself put it, and then back to right wing dictatorships. And both of them succeeded in corrupting the separation of powers and institutions.
In essence, it is more complicated than blaming the banks, it is really silly to ignore that what Milei is trying to do is yet again to break whatever institutions that can do good (as many do in developed countries) and only offer simple solutions. That are often wrong.
In that speech, Milei lost me when he just disparaged taxation as one of the roots of the failure he sees. As if it was not a component of developed nations that are doing better than the US too.
Mr. Justice Holmes said “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” Too many individuals, however, want the civilization at a discount.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
I agree that libertarians have a valid point or two here and there. But they rarely stop there. Libertarians, like communists, insist they have a single solution that will answer every problem.
Which is nonsense. Economies are very complex, especially the economy of an entire nation. So there will some situations where private companies are the best answer, some situations where government services are the best answer, some situations where more regulation is needed, and some situations where less regulation is needed.
It’s not just the bank. The bank was just a tool used by various governments in Argentina to cover their terrible policies. But the bank was, imo, co-opted.
Last year Argentina’s inflation rate hit 211%. As Stranger said, this drives people to using dollars for saving, so the economy is already a mix of dollars and pesos.
Who really gets hurt are the poor, who don’t have major savings or whose savings are in Pesos, or people on welfare who get money in Pesos. Argentina has a poverty rate of 40%. Most people get social assistance, but inflation kills its value along with the value of all other Pesos because the state can’t afford it and borrows money to maintain the rickety facade of a functioning system. The central bank accomodtes by printing Pesos when there aren’t enough buyers of the debt, which is a regular occurrance.
Argentina’s government has been corrupt for decades, and its institutions co-opted. But it has resources, educated people, and was once one of the wealthiest countries in the world. If any country was a good candidate for a great reset, it’s Argentina.
Yeah not going to discuss this in this thread, the other thread speaks for itself.
Wait for the results of the policies this idiot fascist is implementing and then we’ll talk, I will dutifully eat crow if he succeeds but I doubt it very much (mostly because these kind of thing has been tried before, most recently in 1974, 1976 and 1991-2001 and the results are always terrible)
, and Argentina did move from right wing military dictatorships to populists like Peron that in reality tried to avoid socialism of the Marxist kind as he himself put it, and then back to right wing dictatorships. And both of them succeeded in corrupting the separation of powers and institutions.