Where Is Our Javier Milei?
The new Argentinian president is a radical, a far-right outsider and a right-wing reactionary, if the press is to be believed. But he’s not at all the demon that the mental-case media claims he is. Javier Milei is the type of elected official – note that we didn’t say “politician” – that this country needs. In fact, every nation on the planet could use a Javier Milei.
“No country declined as rapidly or as severely as Argentina,” Investopedia said a year ago in a post explaining the country’s relationship with socialism. “In 1989 the average inflation rate in Argentina approached 5,000%, and in March 1990 it peaked at over 20,000%.”
Also mentioned were the country’s sovereign debt default, as well as its “political corruption and an irresponsible monetary policy.” Our friends at the Committee to Unleash prosperity tells us that 45% of Argentina’s “46 million people are in poverty and the economy is on the edge of hyperinflation” and that “over the past 50 years government spending as a share of the economy has almost doubled.”
All of these problems in what was once one of the 10 richest countries on Earth, overflowing with natural resources, have been caused not by not enough government intervention into the economy and daily lives but by too much.
Will the U.S. first have to sink to the depths of Argentina before we have a free-market champion step in? We’re not there yet, but three years of economic “stewardship” under the Biden White House has taken us dangerously close to a wreck.
For good reason “voters are “feeling horrible” about the economy under Biden. According to Fortune, a “big part” of the stock market is “unconvinced economy is going anywhere” because there is “weakness underneath the hood.” In its most recent report, the Conference Board said the leading economic indicators declined “again in October.” It forecasts “that real GDP will expand by just 0.8 percent in 2024.” The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank expects “slower GDP growth” in 2024, and noted that “inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target” even as it grip “appears to be breaking.”
The truth is we’ve always had an underperforming economy, even in the Kennedy and Reagan boom years. Prosperity invariably has been strangled by taxes far in excess of what’s been needed to generate revenues for the proper size of government. Regulation has curbed innovation, business growth and job creation. The constant expansion of government has crowded out private sector investment, which drives economic progress.
If we are to reach our economic potential, we need our own Javier Milei, a fearless and authentic public servant who will stand up to the real radicals and refuse to surrender an inch of ground. Deep tax cuts. A no-compromises deregulatory schedule. A disassembling of the ever-metastasizing bureaucracy. Greater individual freedom.
Milei, often described as a libertarian, has a hard road ahead, but he burst through the gate by issuing an executive order that cut the Argentinian government from 21 departments to nine. He has “vowed to introduce a nationwide school voucher system,” says the Cato Institute, “wants to end this monetary and fiscal insanity with policies that are not radical but logical,” according to the Mises Institute, and “cut excessive political expenditure, reduce taxes, open the economy, and allow free trade and investment to flow back to Argentina.” He is a firm defender of property rights and is determined to liberate, says Fortune, “the economy from the clutches of ‘freeloaders.’” A smart man, he opposes Keynesian economics.
Milei also announced cuts in subsidies and vows to cut spending by 5% to slash Argentina’s crippling triple-digit inflation, part of a sweeping program to shrink government and expand the nation’s troubled private economy.
The wild-haired Milei represents, say E.J. Antoni and Peter St Onge of the Heritage Foundation, Argentinians who “have had enough socialism and want their country back.” When sworn in, “some of the assembled lawmakers chanted ‘Liberty!‘” reports PBS. Imagine lawmakers doing that in our country.
Milei’s agenda is not “outlandish” and “radical,” as PBS, which believes the natural and ideal state of man is to live under the boot of government, characterizes it, but a step toward the restoration of liberty. We pray that the U.S. does not have to fall as far as Argentina has before we have our own Milei-ist revolution.
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