The last century has been a total and unmitigated disaster for Argentina. The two options Argentinians had in this election were:
More of the same by the guy who oversaw inflation reaching 160% (100% chance of things getting worse)
A total wild card (99.9% chance of things getting worse)
Unsurprisingly, they went for the latter. I don’t think anti-libertarians get to gloat in this context, given it’s the Argentinian establishment which has overseen one of the most remarkable examples of total state-collapse and economic failure in modern history.
That’s bad math. Yes, if you put the same people in office. There’s nearly 100% chance that they will continue doing what they have been doing. Good or bad. But if you put a lunatic with a grudge against reality in office. Who is aligned, or would align himself with the people who caused the problem before. You have 150% chance that things will get worse.
I don’t actually know anything. But casually to me it looked like a choice between 160% chance of it getting worse and a 300% chance of getting worse. And it’s not very surprising at all in these circumstances many go for the latter for all sorts of reasons (and delusions). But I don’t actually know anything.
Hong Kong which currently lives under an authoritarian regime, or South Korea which is a somewhat participatory executive democracy birthed from the corpse of an authoritarian regime?
Neither is a hot spot of libertarianism. South Korea is peak neo-liberalism.
To be fair USSR after communism was leagues better than USSR before communism ever could have been. But it’s not exactly proving much pointing out that an extremely unequal authoritarian regime is worse than a more equal but still authoritarian regime.
I don’t think the comparison works anyway because this is a true example of exactly what most libertarians have wet dreams of, while with communism people try to use e.g. the USSR and PRC to discredit leftism as a whole (especially socialism) even though any leftist worth their salt would realize authoritarianism is bad and creates a dangerous hierarchy, which is why Marx and Engels specified their ideologies to be democratic.
What % of countries failed via communist policies vs countries that failed via libertarian policies? The top countries are liberal capitalist democracies. Anyone still simping for communism in 2023 is 9/10 times a brainlet child loser who lives in the west, never having suffered in a communist shithole, and decided to hang all their failures in life on being a victim to their country’s cApiTaListiC liBerAlisM.
If your country failed/is failing, it’s hard to hang it on capitalism when, again, all top countries are liberal capitalists. It’s more likely due to corruption/mismanagement than capitalism. And no matter how much it’s failing, it’s not failing at a soviet famine or great leap forward level is it?
Communism is bad for the people who want money. Capitalism is bad for everyone except the person who wants to hoard money.
this is just a cringe and childishly reductive statement that means nothing.
Is liberal capitalism how you describe centuries of colonial rule in Asia, Africa and the subsequent wealth drains?
Are you sure you’re not misattributing their success to capitalism and ignoring the centuries of colonial wealth that flowed to the EU nations? Whenever I mention this in a EU space or those with westerners I get heavily downvoted. It looks like Europe doesn’t want anyone to remember their Dark Ages through colonial periods.
Europeans just don’t want that closet of skeletons to be opened.
Are you sure you’re not misattributing their success to capitalism and ignoring the centuries of colonial wealth that flowed to the EU nations?
Are you sure you’re not ignoring all of the countries that are dominating out there that didn’t participate in colonial shenanigans and were even victims of them? Are Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Ireland, South Korea, Taiwan, etc… ex-colonialist powers currently benefiting from the past profits of exploiting others? Tankies like to pretend the West only prospers exclusively from colonialism yet conveniently forget that the communist shitholes they simp for participated in just as much or even worse colonialism than the West (see: Soviet Union). The truth is liberal capitalist democracies are just better. Yes, we should implement many socialist policies, and many of these countries do. But to pretend that communism is a better path is just braindead ignorant childish thinking.
You might have had a point if A. I was simping for communism rather than pointing out hypocrisy. B. Your typical liberal democracy is in line with what Libertarian political parties actually want. The US, and it’s various industrialists, have tried, over and over, to implement Libertarian party regimes and have never gotten it to work for a single city, let alone country.
They all either rapidly fall apart as no major business, even ones that show interest in the project, want to operate in a system where there is so little to insure that contracts will be honored, among other issues. The others rapidly turn into police states where the company owners dictate literally every aspect of your life because they own everything. They then create a system where you are always in debt to the company to prevent you from packing up and leaving, when people get tired of it and start leaving. It doesn’t even have as good a track record as the Soviets.
Milei — who has been described as an anarchocapitalist — set out to reduce the government’s involvement and oversight in many aspects of Argentina’s economy, including announcing that he would privatize many state-owned companies, would decrease labor protections and remove regulations that limit the amount of agricultural and productive land that can be owned by foreign companies.
Argentinian should just bear it for a bit until multinational corporations swoop in and buy various assets dirt-cheap. Imagine all the future profits! /s
Here’s one bit of context. Under the other candidate, the one this guy Milei ran against, who was the economic minister of the previous government, in September inflation reached 124%.
In case you were wondering why Milei won.
You also need to know the bigger history of Argentina’s last century of economic decline.
Argentina is taught as a case study in undergraduate economics courses in ‘how not to manage an economy’.
Holy yes, that’s a whole lot to unpack here. I understand the situation a bit better now. What a shitty choice for an election xd
On the plus side, I understand the Argentinean memes now that pop up then and there—their game is on point. (South American/Latin American meme culture, in general, is on top of things and much more represented among all age groups.) Kudos to them, still keeping humor alive despite the situation.
Yeah it’s a nasty choice. I legit think it was: guy who already screwed the economy (100% chance of things getting worse), guy who’s madder than a box of badgers but wants to try something different (99.9% chance of things getting worse), so let’s hope for that 0.01%.
They are chanting against the IMF… why?, I thought…
oh…
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 9 (Reuters) - A U.S. delegation gave its support to Argentine President-elect Javier Milei over talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and developing its lithium sector during a meeting in Buenos Aires on Saturday, a White House official told Reuters.
Juan Gonzalez, adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden and the National Security Council’s Western Hemisphere senior director, said the talks, a day ahead of Milei’s inauguration, were “very positive” and focused on the country’s embattled economy.
From everything I’ve heard about the election in Argentina, it was the meeting of “Anything is better than this” and “it can always get worse.” The former won, and proved the latter correct.
We had the same in the UK with Brexit and Boris. We assumed that because everything is shit, backing people looking to do drastic changes that experts agreed was horrific was worth it. It wasn’t, and now people are even poorer…
No, the current policies are just getting reality and practice closer together.
IRL their money was ALREADY devalued soooooo much, he didn’t do anything to change that, just adjusted it to reality.
Subsidies on imported oil is CRAZY for a bankrupt country. YOU GUYS HAVE NOT UNDERSTOOD WHAT IT’S LIKE TO HAVE DECADES OF 100% OR MORE INFLATION PER YEAR.
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