The picture of Javier Milei presented here is complicated and not completely coherent because Milei himself is apparently complicated and not completely coherent:
A libertarian AnCap (anarcho-capitalist)? How does that work, exactly?
I wish the man good luck if he's serious about deeply reforming an entrenched socialist state. Bolsonaro made his own attempt in Brazil and got voted out for his trouble. I'm not sure the socialist dragon in Latin America can be slain, but American foreign policy should make it a top priority to help out any Latin American state that's openly willing to pull its head out of its own ass. Zooming back further, I'd say American foreign policy needs to be more consistent in general, with much less dictator-coddling (something both the US left and US right are guilty of) and more camaraderie with countries that share our values (e.g., former-Soviet states in Eastern Europe that remember what communism and socialism did to their social and economic health). Less China, more India, for example (which also means getting India to stop flirting with Russia). Anyway, here's hoping Milei in Argentina makes more progress than Bolsonaro in Brazil did, and here's hoping the Argentinian people understand that reforms will, at first, be painful, with results to be measured in decades, not mere years.
Hopefully, he will learn from the past, and the mistakes of rushing headlong into pegging the Argentinian currency to the USD. That was done 20 or 25 years ago when Argentina was facing a lot of the same types of problems as they have now.
ReplyDeletePegging to the USD did help tamp down on inflation (and will again if he follows through on it), but absolutely decimated their foreign trade. So, they traded one problem for another.
Brian
Whatever he chooses to do, he's got a steep uphill battle ahead of him.
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