3 ms·

The argentine government is currently balancing meeting its current fiscal needs with avoiding the money printing scheme. That means it needs to attract buyers

The argentine government is currently balancing meeting its current fiscal needs with avoiding the money printing scheme. That means it needs to attract buyers for its bonds instead of using the printing press. That means markets must be confident of Argentina's continued recovery, or investors wont be willing to pay sufficient prices for those bonds to sell. The reason Milei went to the US is because Argentine bond prices collapsed following a victory of the Peronist (that's the former ruling, socialist party) in Buenos Aires. With low bond prices, there was no way to continue that program, so Milei went to the US. On the other hand, this latest electoral victory has restored market confidence, and Argentine binds have strengthened. These problems have much less to do with libertarianism per se than the practical problem of funding a massive welfare state without utilizing a destructive amount of money printing. Milei is walking a tightrope of unwinding this system slowly. The problem is endemic to having a massive welfare state than it is to libertarianism, and it is one reason why libertarians (also, bog standard neoliberals) are critical of having a massive government. When the government has an extremely large balance sheet, so large that its taxation and redistribution schemes are negative sum, it is only a matter of time before the whole thing comes crashing down. That's where the economy was headed before Milei. The collapse was avoided, albiet narrowly, but that doesn't mean everything is suddenly normal again. The road to recovery will be a long one. To use your car analogy, the previous peronist parties set up a 1000 mile family trip, bought a quarter of the gas, and then when has started running out wrote a bunch of gas IOUs and pretended that the IOUs were a substitute for real gas. The responsibke adult comes in, and is desperately trying to find ways to trade IOUs or anything else that's available for some gas so that the family can survive and get home. That means that the family might even have to skip a meal or two, which is painful in the present. But it's all a sacrifice in service of ensuring the family's survival over actually starving in the desert when they realized IOUs don't power cars.

kragen 1y ago
Technically Perón was more like a Fascist than a Socialist, modeling his dictatorship fairly closely on that of his friend Mussolini, but especially in later years Peronism adopted Socialist political positions to an even greater extent than the earlier Fascist parties had. Still, the right-wing death squads hunting down and killing Socialists in Perón's later years were Peronists. So were their victims, but Perón ultimately backed the former rather than the latter. Kirchner-era Peronism, though just as thoroughly based on social-justice rhetoric as Perón ever was, never approached its level of state enterprises like the Justicialist car and IAPI; despite renationalization of Aerolíneas, YPF, and the pension system, there was no Kirchnerist equivalent of Airbus, Ariane, or Systembolaget. So recent Peronism is far less Socialist in practice even than current France and Sweden, much less Bolshevik Russia.

kragen 1y ago

Technically Perón was more like a Fascist than a Socialist, modeling his dictatorship fairly closely on that of his friend Mussolini, but especially in later years Peronism adopted Socialist political positions to an even greater extent than the earlier Fascist parties had. Still, the right-wing death squads hunting down and killing Socialists in Perón's later years were Peronists. So were their victims, but Perón ultimately backed the former rather than the latter. Kirchner-era Peronism, though just as thoroughly based on social-justice rhetoric as Perón ever was, never approached its level of state enterprises like the Justicialist car and IAPI; despite renationalization of Aerolíneas, YPF, and the pension system, there was no Kirchnerist equivalent of Airbus, Ariane, or Systembolaget. So recent Peronism is far less Socialist in practice even than current France and Sweden, much less Bolshevik Russia.