Thing Finder: Offbeat Humor - "More than 100 economists warn electing Milei would spell "devastation" for their credibility"
Trust the Experts! At least, who the left tell us are experts
Michael A. Arouet on X - "Argentina’s economy when Javier Milei became president vs. today: GDP growth: from -1.6% to +5.2% Inflation: from 211% to 31% Poverty rate: from 42% to 32% Sorry comrades “economists”, free market works, and it works fast."
ShellBanger on X - "Breaking 🚨🇦🇷 | Argentina Outgrows China: 5.8% Annual Growth Beats China’s 5.4% in First Quarter"
Students For Liberty on X - ">be Argentina >try all kinds of socialism
>become the first nation to stop being rich and go back to the 3rd world
>elect the crazy libertarian promising chainsaw public spending
> immediately start growing faster than China
>fenómeno barrial"
ShellBanger on X - "🚨BREAKING: Argentina’s Poverty Rate Drops from 54.8% to 31.7% in 18 Months Under Javier Milei"
Steve Loftus on X - "An awful lot of the "he is a mad man, he's going to crash the economy" people have been very quiet for a while now. It seems sound right-wing monetary policy works after all."
The remarkable triumph of Javier Milei - "It’s possible that no politician has defied the expectations of the chattering class as successfully as has Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei. Expected to remain in political obscurity, he rose to lead a political movement. Anticipated to lose a presidential election to a candidate from the country’s dominant authoritarian political party, he won. And predicted by a cabal of academic economists to lead Argentina to ruin with free-market policies, he instead turned around the long-suffering country, resulting in lower inflation and rapid economic growth. Argentines have decades of experience with making bad choices and suffering their consequences, but this time they may have broken that unfortunate pattern by electing leadership that wants the state to take a back seat to individuals and private effort. Drawing on official data, Reuters reports 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 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... In equally encouraging news, Argentina’s “monthly inflation rate has fallen below two per cent for the first time in five years,” according to the Financial Times. That’s still high in North American terms, but Argentina’s governments have a history of wildly expanding the money supply to pay off debt and finance expenditures, resulting in inflation rates in the hundreds and even thousands per cent per year. 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 — even if it meant adopting the U.S. dollar as the country’s official currency. Importantly, the poverty rate in Argentina fell to 38.1 per cent of the population by the end of 2024, down 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. This wasn’t supposed to happen. In a November 2023 open letter, 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.” The economists — including such academic luminaries as Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh — 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. 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 mélange 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. From time to time, non-Justicialist officials — and Justicialist president Carlos Menem — sought to undo some damage done by statist policies, which fuel spending, debt, inflation, and cripple private efforts to generate prosperity. But, mostly, the country’s officials, through both democratic and military governments, presided over the decline of what was once one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. German broadcaster Deutsche Welle noted in 2020 that “rich like an Argentine” was a common saying at the end of the 19th century, but that “in an unprecedented fall, Argentina went from ranking among the world’s top economies to one at the very bottom of the list.” Maybe that’s why Argentines were willing to take a chance on a wild-haired economist who cloned a beloved dog and promised to take a chainsaw to the country’s bloated government. After all, there’s only so long you can keep digging before you hit rock bottom. Upon taking office, Milei cut tens of thousands of public employees from the payroll, consolidated government ministries, and privatized state-owned companies. That meant smaller government and a reduced burden for taxpayers. The Milei administration also scrapped most price controls, including those restricting residential rent. In the capital of Buenos Aires, that brought hundreds of thousands of rental units back to the market. According to The Wall Street Journal, “many apartments long sat empty, with landlords preferring to keep them vacant, or lease them as vacation rentals, rather than comply with the government’s rent law.” The flood of apartments returning to the market did what price controls never could, achieving a “40 per cent decline in the real price of rental properties when adjusted for inflation.”... Surveys show that about three-quarters of Argentines want to stay on the free-market path chosen by Milei and his allies... That’s not to say that Javier Milei’s efforts have reached their conclusion or that the tribulations of the people of Argentina are finished. The country’s unemployment rate has risen, foreign currency reserves are rising but remain low, and the same can be said of investment. Argentina spent decades accumulating self-inflicted wounds and will be a while healing. But for the first time in a long time, Argentina appears to have a future, fuelled by renewed faith in free markets and personal liberty."
Clearly, Argentina only became poor because they didn't have enough left wing policies
Basil the Great on X - "🚨JAVIER MILEI STORMS TO VICTORY IN ARGENTINA The polls were lying The media were lying They said he would lose They said he would struggle He's won in a LANDSLIDE Argentina rejects communism ✊ AFUERA‼️"
From October
Rent control - "From Argentina we learn that my controversial views on Rent Control — that we should retire it, “with extreme prejudice,” and snuff it along with everything like it — is actually being tried by the government of the “dangerous” Javier Milei... I read (in John Loeber) what the terrible consequences of Milei’s reckless act has been. “Rent has dropped by 40 percent in real terms, and the supply of rental properties in Buenos Aires has increased by over 300 percent.” The Argentine economy is meanwhile growing at around 8 percent. America’s will grow at 4 per cent, once Trumpery is fully engaged. Our Canadian economy is, of course, contracting. It is true, I adore Trump, but only half as much as I love Javier Milei"
Milei has given Britain a serious economic lesson - "One country in an even deeper hole than the UK is Argentina. Once one of the world’s leading economies, successive popular despotisms and military coups down the decades led to rampant corruption and financial collapse... Far from turning his country against him, President Milei’s party La Libertad Avanza won a resounding victory in mid-term elections at the weekend, beating off a challenge from Peronists. He has shown that governments trying to get to grips with soaring welfare budgets are not automatically punished by voters, as our politicians appear to believe. Indeed, the Tories won a general election in 2015 against expectations after a period in which public spending rose more slowly after years of purported “austerity”. Mr Milei appeared on stage with a chainsaw to illustrate his seriousness about cuts. His government has managed to cut monthly inflation sharply, from 12.8 per cent before his inauguration in December 2023 to 2.1 per cent last month, while also securing a fiscal surplus. He said as the votes were counted: “Argentines showed that they don’t want to return to the model of failure.” Milei is showing the way other nations will have to follow if they want to avoid bankruptcy."
How austerity proved to be a winning ticket for Javier Milei - "Barclays analyst Ivan Stambulsky noted that almost half of voters, on an admittedly low turnout, had opted for “macroeconomic prudence” over a return to the spendthrift Left-wing parties. “In our view, this is another clear signal that voters remain wary of a return to large fiscal deficits and an economy riddled by administrative controls,” he said... holding the peso within a price band – and at an artificially high rate that stopped imports from triggering inflation – came at a cost. Argentina had to repeatedly use its central bank’s dollar reserves to buy pesos and stop the rate from falling. This led markets to question whether the peg was sustainable – particularly as Argentina would need those reserves to help meet $45bn in debt repayments because of foreign creditors by the end of 2027, including $8bn by January next year. Investors began selling off the peso and government bonds. This threatened a doom loop as Milei was forced to spend more of his reserves to support the currency. This could push Argentina back into the kind of debt default crisis that has chequered its history. Meanwhile, Milei was facing a series of political scandals and setbacks."
Jack Mintz: Argentina's election result is clearly Liberalization 1, Socialism 0 - "His party bested the socialist Peronist party by a wide margin: 41 to 34 per cent, relying on substantial support from low-income Argentinians fearing a return of the stagflationary Peronist economy. After the win, the Merval stock market giddily rose 22 per cent, while the peso was up four per cent against the U.S. dollar and the price of dollar-denominated government bonds maturing in 2046 rose 11 cents to 67 cents on the dollar... This was not an easy win for Milei, whose tough medicine led to an economic downturn last year. But the Peronist policy record was far worse. From 2012 to 2022, Argentina’s per capita real GDP fell almost seven per cent, while year-over-year inflation reached 250 per cent at the end of 2023. As the peso repeatedly fell, fear of a currency crisis drove so many people to cash in pesos for dollars that the central bank ran out of foreign currency. To reverse these trends, Milei cut spending sharply enough to produce a primary budget surplus — revenues net of non-interest expenditures — something not seen since 2010. Market-based policies encouraged investment, reduced labour rigidities and trimmed a bloated federal civil service. The personal income tax base was broadened and the cost of complying with corporate taxes reduced. Pension benefits were indexed for inflation. Product market regulations were removed and social assistance programs and energy subsidies better targeted. Some import tariffs were reduced though many remain: taxes on international trade account for 16 per cent of government revenues. The reforms have led to dramatic economic improvement. Poverty rates are down almost a quarter and last month inflation was “just” 32 per cent on an annual basis. That’s still too high but two-digit inflation is better than three. After declining three per cent last year, per capita GDP is expected to grow almost five per cent over the next two years."
What to make of Javier Milei's early successes - "My take is that Milei’s reforms are mostly good. But I also want to wrestle this discourse under control before it fuels further populist nonsense. I don’t claim any great expertise on Argentine politics, but I think it’s important for everyone to understand the following:
Argentina has experienced a lot of individual quarters of solid economic growth during its 100-year experiment in structural economic decline — there’s a lot of game left to play.
Milei’s successful stabilization of the short-term macroeconomic situation is largely the result of a completely conventional mainstream Neo-Keynesian economics framework endorsed by the IMF and other boring institutions.
After talking nonstop about replacing Argentina’s peso with the US dollar during the campaign, Milei simply has not implemented his signature campaign initiative.
The most interesting lessons to learn here are about the relationship between the populist style of politics and the actual practice of policymaking... “Argentina needs spending cuts” was not some kind of outlier notion that defied conventional wisdom. It’s true that the Guardian ran that letter from 100 economists. But there are a lot of economists in the world. The American Economic Association has 23,000 members, and most economists aren’t American. Thomas Piketty is famous, but he’s an outlier in the economics profession in both his methods and his views. The Guardian writeup of the letter also touted Branko Milanović and Jayati Ghosh as signatories. These are, again, smart people, but also self-conscious left-wing outliers in the field. It’s just not the case that the conventional wisdom among economists held that spending cuts were a bad idea for Argentina... Beyond the chainsaw stunts and populist atmospherics, Milei’s actual policymaking has been fairly conventional, albeit drastic. He has not tried to do what Massa was proposing and sugar-coated austerity with a lot of gradualism or elaborate efforts to shield the poor from hardship. Low-income Argentinians whose living standards had been ravaged by inflation ended up even worse off last year in the face of spending cuts. The unemployment rate rose. In exchange for his decisiveness in this regard, he secured IMF support for a bailout/loan package, which has made it easier to continue financing the now-smaller budget deficit. This austerity imposed very real costs on people, but also had a lot of benefits. The central bank is no longer printing money to cover the deficit. This has helped bring down inflation. It also means that since Argentina is no longer relying on funny money, the government has been able to relax currency controls and the use of dual exchange rates. Along with exchange rate liberalization, he’s also cut tariffs. Argentina’s inflation is still incredibly high by American standards... Argentina suffered a massive depression from 1998-2002 because a prior political regime insisted on pegging the peso to the US dollar as an anti-inflation measure. The peg required constant balanced budgets regardless of the macroeconomic situation and, like the gold standard in 1929-1933, meant that a negative shock to aggregate demand turned into an endless downward spiral... while it’s great that Milei has shifted Argentina from an inappropriate to an appropriate macroeconomic regime, that’s happened twice already during my lifetime, and both times, it’s created a very real economic boom that eventually petered out. What neither Menem nor the Kirchners was able to do was consistently change macroeconomic postures in correct ways, or generate sustained long-term productivity growth. That earlier leaders failed doesn’t mean that Milei will. But he hasn’t yet succeeded where his predecessors have failed... The lesson of Argentina is that one of the richest countries in the world at the start of the 20th century lost that status thanks to generations of bad technical choices and has struggled to get itself back on track. This lesson deserves to be taken seriously."
Of course, left wingers claimed that what Milei was doing was radical and cruel, even though it was pretty standard economic theory
Ruth Geye on X - "everyone talking about how freezing rent on stabilized units is bad because it will disincentivize maintenance live in a completely different universe where landlords “do maintenance”"
Hunter📈🌈📊 on X - "We actually do have empirical studies on this, a lit review of 112 published studies found 110 in agreement that rent control reduced quality of housing."
Burnside on X - "In 2008 the GDP of the EU was 10% larger than that of the US, it is now 33% smaller. The EU's criticism of the US comes from a position of colossal, entrenched institutional failure. It can't defend itself, hasn't given birth to a meaningful new company in 30 years and has invited the third world to destroy its culture."
Michael A. Arouet on X - "„They've gone from 90% of the GDP of America to 65, that's not because America did anything bad to them, It's their own bureaucracy, their own cost.“ Says the CEO of the most important bank in the world, not a politician. Get your act together Europe."
Rohit Ahuja on X - "Dimon is 100% right on the bureaucracy cancer killing Europe, but he’s polite enough not to say the quiet part out loud: the EU’s regulatory state is now so suffocating that even its own companies (ASML, LVMH, Novo Nordisk) are begging for relief or moving investment elsewhere. Europe went from 90% of US GDP to 65% in less than two decades while running lower deficits and debt-to-GDP. That’s not “bad luck”—that’s self-inflicted regulatory suicide."
THE ISLANDER on X - "The Financial Times finally said the quiet part out loud: Germany is collapsing — and the EU helped push it off the clif Steel plants are closing. Car factories are shrinking. Business leaders are openly furious. The so-called “sick man of Europe” is sick again, but this time, the disease isn’t inefficiency. It’s economic suicide engineered by unelected EU elites and enforced by obedient puppets like Friedrich Merz. Merz wants €500 billion to rescue industry, but from what? From policies his party endorsed. German output is crashing. Energy prices are unlivable. Bureaucratic strangulation kills investment. And while Merz beats the drum for a forever war in Ukraine, what was Berlin’s lifeline... Nord Stream, blown up, sabotaged with a shrug while Brussels and NATO pleaded the fifth. The U.S. may have benefited, but the executioner stood in Brussels. Ursula von der Leyen and the Eurocrat caste led the charge: de-industrialize Germany, sanction Moscow, and send tanks to Ukraine while the German worker foots the bill. For what? Kiev was always going lose. Yet EU elites demand more tribute... more weapons, more factories shut, more pain.
And now? German steel production down 12% 2 million fewer cars made than in 2017 Green levies and gas rationing U.S. tariffs slap Germany while Berlin stays muzzled
The result: revolt. In NRW, a once CDU heartland, AfD now surges. Germans are waking up. They see who hollowed out their economy. It wasn’t Russia. It was their own leaders in Brussels and Berlin, marching to Davos drumbeats. Germany isn’t “testing Europe’s patience.” Europe’s elites tested Germany’s limits, and they snapped them."
THE ISLANDER on X - "Germany, the country that once engineered the EU's industrial rise, is now reduced to begging China to design its cars, buying American gas at four times the price, and watching its own flagship companies jump ship. And the elites in Berlin and Brussels? They’re too busy kneeling at the altar of Green ideology and Russophobic psychosis to notice the powder keg they've created. Germany’s ruling class sold the entire nation on a fantasy: that you can shut down nuclear plants, throttle your own industry with extortionist energy prices, sever your biggest trading partner, and still remain an economic power. It keeps getting darker, with Volkswagen cutting 35,000 jobs, Mercedes offering half-million-euro severance bribes, Bosch downsizing, Porsche shrinking, and the WELT report showing a 15.4% collapse in job openings, including a 39% wipeout in management roles. When German elite allowed the destination of Nord Stream with humiliating political cover, if not literally, it blew up its own economic model. Cheap Russian energy was the foundation. Remove that, and you remove everything. The “Green transition” didn’t replace it, it simply poured gasoline on the fire, and gave the demolition a moral vocabulary. Now, under the guise of saving the planet, Berlin is euthanizing its industrial base one factory at a time while pretending China’s 600 coal plants don’t exist. And inside this ideological fog, a darker truth hides, that Germany didn’t pivot away from Russia because it was rational. It commited seppuku because it was afraid. Afraid of Washington. Afraid to admit that partnership with Moscow, not obedience to NATO, was the real key to its prosperity. This is the psychosis at the heart of the German collapse, a political class that would rather destroy its own country than accept a multipolar world where Russia is not a caricature, but a sovereign Great Power. The same pathology that drove Berlin to cheerlead for a suicidal proxy war, sending Ukraine into the trenches to “weaken Russia”, is now accelerating the hollowing out the nation. Germany outsourced its courage to America and its reason to EU high priests. WELT’s latest reporting just confirm that, even R&D jobs have collapsed by a third. The very sectors meant to “build the future” are being gutted while Merz lectures the world about innovation. Volkswagen even admitted that China no longer needs Europe to design new models — the technological centre of gravity has officially shifted East. This is where Europe ends up when virtue signaling replaces strategy: persecuting farmers, censoring dissent, arresting citizens for memes and waving rainbow flags over rusting factories. And Brussels isn’t governing, but administering a slow euthanasia. Leaving Germany, once the engine of Europe, being preserved like a historical relic while pretending it’s still relevant. The great irony? The multipolar world isn’t killing Europe. Europe is killing Europe. Germany’s future was never threatened by Moscow. It was threatened by its own ruling class. An elite that worships ideology over industry, hysteria over prosperity, and Washington over Berlin. They sacrificed their automotive crown jewel on the altar of a Green religion run by the WEF, hedge funds, and lobbyists, a protection racket masquerading as salvation. And now, as WELT quietly reports the historic colapse, a 15.4% contraction that exposes the lie of “green growth” — the same elites pretend nothing is wrong. They call the patient healthy as the vital signs flatline. Europe thinks it’s punishing Russia. But Russia didn’t lose its industries. Russia didn’t lose its energy security. Russia didn’t outsource its future. Russia didn’t destroy its own prosperity to satisfy Washington’s neurosis. Only Europe did that. Germany submitted to the humiliation. Germany wasn’t defeated by an external enemy, it was defeated by the very elites sworn to protect it, and history will remember that betrayal long after they’re gone."
Left wing ideology destroys the country
Meme - Devon Eriksen:"The wealth that billionaires have is the valuation of companies they built. It isn't taken from me. The money that that governments give to welfare bums is extorted from me and everyone else under threat of violence. I hope you have enjoyed this lesson in elementary economics for retarded ten-year-olds."
Secular Talk (KyleKulinskiShow@bsky.social): "8 men have more money than four billion people combined. A single parent on food stamps isn't the reason you're broke."
Jay Parsons on X - "The Washington Post editorial board just came out strongly against rent control. "Capping prices is a textbook policy failure that leaves renters in every community which tries it worse off than they would have been otherwise." 💯"
Moses Kagan on X - "Something I've had to come to grips with: Those pushing strict rent control don't actually care if rent control "works", in the sense of "accomplishes its aims in a net socially positive manner, after accounting for negative externalities and second- and third-order effects".
It's: "We want whatever we can get for ourselves, and f everyone else, including the future"."
Joe Rogan Podcast News on X - "Bernie Sanders: "City-sponsored grocery stores will save society money.""
Hunter Ash on X - "This attitude comes from never having a real job. I was a socialist as a kid. I assumed insurance companies were greedy and evil, raking in profits. One of my first real jobs was for a car insurance company as an actuary. It was company policy that we targeted a 4% profit margin. If it was higher, people got yelled at because it meant our prices were too high, so we were uncompetitive. Also, a huge amount of our overhead was dealing with regulators. Thousands of hours of highly-paid human time were spent haggling with each state’s insurance commission. Their goal was to make sure we didn’t gouge customers with rate increases. But we didn’t want to do that anyway! We wouldn’t have done that if we could, because it’s bad business. So all that time was a total waste. The insurance regulator’s salaries are 100% waste. They provide zero real value. And the time our employees spent talking to them was a waste. I assume the same pattern holds across the entire economy. Trump asked why we can’t have 20% growth rates. This is why."
