Milei gets down to business: economic reforms in Argentina
Who predicted a year ago that this would be happening in Argentina? I certainly didn’t.
Milei gets to work:
Argentine lawmakers took a first step Friday toward approving President Javier Milei’s sweeping economic, social and political reform package, which has sparked angry opposition protests.
The bill won the “general” approval in principle of the lower house of Congress, whose members will examine the plans of libertarian and self-described anarcho-capitalist Milei in detail next week.
Shortly before the vote, the 53-year-old political outsider said on social media that lawmakers had “the opportunity to show which side of history” they wanted to be on.
“History will judge them according to their work in favor of the Argentines or for the continued impoverishment of the people,” a presidential statement said.
Milei won a resounding election victory in October, riding a wave of anger over decades of economic crisis in the South American nation, where annual inflation stands at over 200 percent and poverty levels are at 40 percent.
I make no predictions about how this will go, but I wish him well. He’ll need it; he will be bucking a great many vested interest groups.
Best of luck to him and to Argentina.
Milei is a great, great man. He can save Argentina from its chronic Peronism
Recall that the Broadway show years back was “Evita’, about Peron’s wife.Done by Leftists who made millions, seen by millions of sheep. Who was Evita? a scheming prostitute who died of well-deserved, earned cervix cancer while still young.
self-described anarcho-capitalist Milei
Ha! That’s a new one for me. I’d guess that because the theory behind Marxist anarchism is a tearing down of the capitalist power structure in order to liberate the individual, one can invert the definition of the problematic power structure and retain the liberation part of the theory. So the anarcho-capitalist sees the government power structure as the problem?
I make no predictions about how this will go, but I wish him well. He’ll need it; he will be bucking a great many vested interest groups.
The military had been interfering in politics since the 1930 coup. After the 1976-83 run, a triple-headed disaster of economics (military took over in part to solve economics…oh well), Falklands/Malvinas war and killings and torture, the military had lost all credibility. Which meant that the military was no longer a force in politics.
Peronists have been the dominant force in Argentine politics since the 1940s. The stagflation which has characterized Argentina’s economy for the last 15 years suggests that the big-government class of Peronista rentiers do not have a lot of support- or a lot less than they imagine. There is a reason why Milei has been attacking big government.
Time will tell.
self-described anarcho-capitalist Milei
A comment I made at Grim’s Hall, Anarcho-Capitalism in Argentina addresses anarchy in Argentina. (I have edited in places to improve punctuation and for more clarity.)
Grim’s article linked to an article in Jacobin: The Face of Voter Disaffection in Argentina Is an Anarcho-Capitalist With Sideburns , which is worth looking at. (A high school peer and teammate occasionally writes for Jacobin. A brilliant guy, but stuck in 1960s radicalism. Like the Bourbons, he has forgotten nothing and also learned nothing.)
This is South America and the reason why so many view a contract as simply a piece of paper is because Argentinian society never embraced the cultural meme that a man’s word should be his bond. If you can’t trust a man’s word, either a contract is just a piece of paper or you end up in an overly litigious society. Which is what the English speaking West became as that meme died away.
Ultimately, Milei will be as successful as the number of guns in support of him.
I wish him well also. Argentina Is an example of a country that has all the resources necessary to be a wealthy and productive country.
The people are a blend of Europeans and the natives who were indigenous to the country. There are quite a few people of Germanic descent in the mix. They have hard working people who know how to get things done. But when the government interferes in the economy, hard work doesn’t always pay off. 🙁
The dream of an egalitarian society became entrenched there in the 1930s. That dream has been the source of Argentina’s economic woes for lo, these many years. My guess is that Senior Milei may make some headway, as many people are desperate for change. However, the egalitarian dream is deeply embedded there, (as it is elsewhere in South America) and it will return at some point. (I hope I’m wrong.)
A beautiful country with magnificent geography, it’s a wonderful place to visit. If you can go, do so. It’s worth the effort, and they can use your Yankee dollars.
Trump thought he had a tough road, if this guy succeeds it will be a miracle!!
For starters, they need to attack inflation. That doesn’t require legislative action. It requires the central bank stop pumping up the monetary base.
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@JJ —
Americans are propagandized to believe that everyone south of our borders is “brown/native” but this isn’t actually correct. There’s a saying in South America that the farther south you go, the whiter it gets. The entire countires of Chile and Uruguay are both listed as over 90% white, as are the 2 southernmost states of Brazil.
According to a 2019 study by a Mexican university, Argentina’s demographics are:
89% White
7% Mixed (White/Native)
4% Asian
My wife lived in Mendoza in northwestern Argentina for a couple of years about 30 years ago. She has told me that there was a local holiday celebrated annually to commemorate the extermination of the last native person. I don’t know if that’s still celebrated, times being as they are, but then again, it’s foreign country and they do things differently there, so anything’s possible.
pkudude99
Another variation of this is the Argentine saying that “South America begins north of Córdoba.” (city in northern Argentina).
My initial guess is that she may have been referring to the Conquest of the Desert, where Argentine troops conquered the lands south of Buenos Aires circa 1870-1880.. As Mendoza was founded in the 1500s, the area around Mendoza wasn’t associated with the Conquest of the Desert. Moreover, Jesuits had great influence in 17th and 18th century Mendoza. Jesuits were not the Indian-killing type. Look at their missions in Paraguay. So, I don’t know what your wife was referring to.
@JJ —
“Americans are propagandized to believe that everyone south of our borders is “brown/native” but this isn’t actually correct.” – pkudude99
I’m sorry that my comment gave that impression. Italians, Spaniards, Germans, French, and other Europeans are the main “white” groups represented in Argentina today. And you’re correct that the Mestizo population is a minority.
However, some gene studies show that Amerindian DNA is found in 27.7% of the population and 63.3%
have European DNA.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Argentina#Ethnic_groups
also:
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-is-the-ethnic-composition-of-argentina.html
I would call the immigrant population mostly Mediterranean in origin with smaller numbers of northern Europeans. Along with some mixing of the earliest immigrants with the native population.
Javier Gerardo Milei:
Ethnicity: Argentinian [Italian, possibly Dalmatian/Croatian, and other] He certainly looks Italian to me.
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I don’t recommend “anarcho-capitalism” as a serious philosophy or form of (non-)government, but it may provide the “shock therapy” that Argentina has needed for years.
Maybe they’ve seen what the Western world has been coming to and took the last available off-ramp.
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Grim’s article linked to an article in Jacobin: The Face of Voter Disaffection in Argentina Is an Anarcho-Capitalist With Sideburns
Reminds me of the Babylon Bee article:
Ted Cruz Grows Out Mutton Chops In Preparation For Civil War.
(“Mutton chops” = connected sideburns and mustache, or a full beard minus the goatee)
I know, I know, speeches can matter a lot, and probably more in Argentina than here. But I hated the whole “right side of history” trope when Obama was smugging at us. I don’t like it any better from the political right.
I’ve been to Chile and I would characterize it as similar to Mexico in that there are indians and Spanish and all the mixes in between. In addition, there is a double handful of northern Europeans thrown in along with a handful of east Asians. Very interesting place.
@Gringo — I dunno what she was referring to either, as I’ve never been able to independently find out about any such holiday. But she’s told me several times, so it seems that whatever it was left an impression on her. Of course, she’s also prone to exaggeration and misinterpreting something said into the worst possible way, so there might have been some holiday celebrating the local culture that she “mental-gymnasticed” into something far worse inside her head.
@pkudude99, from further reading about the Conquest of the Desert (Carolyne R. Larson (Ed.)), I found out that while Mendoza had Spanish inhabitants from the 16th century, it was not far from the frontier of settlement demarking Spanish and Indian lands. There were occasional Mapuche Indian raids into Mendoza. During the Conquest of the Desert, several expeditions into the “Desert” began in Mendoza.
As such, some sort of commemoration in Mendoza of the Conquest of the Desert is plausible. I stand corrected, though like you I didn’t find any official holiday noted.
When I was working in Salta, far from Patagonia, I heard a story about the Conquest of the Desert from a fellow expat who had married an Argentine. Don’t know if that tale was from history taught in school, or a tale handed down. It wouldn’t surprise me that your wife had also heard stories about the Conquest of the Desert- perhaps stories handed down from participants, given the proximity of Mendoza to the area in question.