Argentina elects 'shock therapy' libertarian Javier Milei as president
Argentina elects 'shock therapy' libertarian Javier Milei as president
Milei is pledging economic shock therapy, including shutting the central bank, ditching the peso and slashing spending. His challenges will be enormous: Empty coffers, a $44 billion debt program with the IMF, 150% inflation and more.
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Javier Milei is:
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Against abortion (except when mother's life is in danger)
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Against sex-ed and wants to eliminate it (says it deforms people's minds)
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Denies climate change (says it's an invention of socialism)
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Anti-vax (But got vaxxed in Nov 2021 because otherwise he would not be able to work in other countries)
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Wants to fuse the departments of Social Development, Health and Education into a single department of Human Capital.
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In favor of Austrian school of economics - Wants to remove the central bank
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Adopt the US dollar
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Homosexuality is a personal choice and compares it to zoophilia
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In favor of drug legalization and to opening up immigration as long as it doesn't cost the State.
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In favor of people paying for sex
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In favor of gun ownership without governmental limitations
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Wants to freeze relationships with China, Russia, Brazil because they're communists.
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Wants to align with the US, particularly Trump's party.
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Against the Pope because he represents evil on Earth, and because it promotes communism which goes against the holy scriptures.
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In favor of animal cloning
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In favor of organ selling
Good luck Argentina
Sounds like he made his own conservatism, with hookers and blow?
No, that sounds like traditional conservatism. Conservatism has no redeeming qualities, but they can buy good PR easily.
Me: wow most of these not surprising but yeah they’re fucked.
Against the pope because communism is against scriptures: fucking lol what.
The anti-abortion one is the one I don't get. After all, why shouldn't a landlord be able to kick out a non-paying tenant?
If you cut a libertarian a fascist bleeds
I've seen more than a few libertarians who are only libertarian because they're also misanthropic. They'd love heavy government control, but they don't trust anybody enough to have power over them, so they choose libertarian ideals. It's a strange chain of logic, but I guess it's logical.
Misanthropy doesn't make much sense as an argument, either for regulation or against it. You can say people suck so they shouldn't be in charge of regulating anything, but you can just as easily say people need to be regulated because they suck.
That's. That's quite a platform.
Adopt the US dollar
In favor of drug legalization and to opening up immigration as long as it doesn’t cost the State.
In favor of people paying for sex
In favor of animal cloningGood here? The rest is an interesting mix of outrageous and/or bizarre stuff.
Excuse me does he think zoophilia is a personal choice?
And yeah good luck Argentina. I’m sure you’ll have positive results from this
I don't think they mean that as in "is up to the person but overall okay" but more so as in "is something that isn't determined by anything other than conscious decision making"
His actual quote (translated to the best of my ability) is:
Homosexuality is fine, who am I to tell someone who can they have sex with? If they have consent I don't care if they want to have sex with an elephant. Good luck proving they had consent, but if they do I can't object.
Actually no, he does mean it in a sense such as: "the government shouldn't interfere in people's life projects. If you want to be with a man or a woman that's your right. Heck even if you wanted to be with an elefant that's fine with me as long as you have the elefant's consent"
Here's the actual source: https://youtube.com/shorts/FZp6zbQ-goE
Even the video caption misrepresents his words imho. You can turn on translated captions.
As I said in another post, Milei is in the bottom right quadrant of the political compass. It's a big mistake to directly compare him to neo conservatism.
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Ancaps are for selling children (doesn't matter the reason). Non-human animals are already commodities for sale, so zoophilia wouldn't be an issue.
What is the rationale behind switching to the US dollar? I sort of get why US libertarians are opposed to fiat currency (they don't want the Fed to have the power to interfere in markets), but Milei just wants to switch to a fiat currency that someone else controls? What makes him think that would end well for Argentina?
Argentina's runaway inflation is caused by the central bank printing money (to finance the government's out of control spending). The rationale for dollarization is to remove the ability for the government to do this. It's not an inherently crazy idea, since (i) there are smaller Latin American countries that use the dollar, and (ii) the dollar is already used de facto for many purposes in Argentina because of how debased the peso has been. But there are lots of practical problems; notably, Argentina simply does not own enough dollars in the entire country to keep the economy running normally if they switch (whatever "normally" means for an economy like theirs).
Argentina’s runaway inflation is caused by the central bank printing money (to finance the government’s out of control spending)
Macroeconomists don't really agree that that issuing money in and of itself causes inflation, but it certainly can lead to it in some cases. Instead, if you issue money you need to spend it on something that increases the productivity of your economy, otherwise it can lead to waste and inflation down the line. You can actually use money issuing to fight inflation if you spend the money you issued on addressing the problem at hand - for example, the supply side problems we faced following the pandemic that caused the inflation we're at the tail end of right now.
By adopting the US dollar, Argentina would effectively give up monetary autonomy to the US central bank (so, just another central bank outside of their control). In fact, the US central bank could decide to issue money in a positive way as mentioned above, without any of that having a similarly positive impact on the countries that depend on the US dollar.
Money & Macro (PhD Joeri Schasfoort) has made multiple videos on the topic, but here are two (the first one short, the second one a deep dive) if you want to hear this side of the story told in greater depth:
You might be confusing debt issuance with money issuance.
Governments often issue debt to fund various kinds of spending. And despite concerns about debt levels, they can have a pretty fuzzy relationship with inflation; Japan has public debt of over 200% of GDP, and an underinflation problem.
But issuing money for the purposes of government spending -- the monetization of fiscal policy -- is almost always a bad idea, outside of wartime. The practice is behind every single episode of hyperinflation in economic history. And governments know this. Fiscal monetization is only resorted to by countries that have exhausted their ability to borrow; if cutting spending isn't politically feasible, the remaining resort is monetization. That's basically how you get to Argentina's situation.
As for giving up monetary autonomy, it is indeed a serious drawback to dollarization. But this is a second order problem compared to the kinds of problems facing Argentina, like findng a guy bleeding out after a road accident, and worrying about his obesity.
You might be confusing debt issuance with money issuance.
Nope. Let me quote Joeri from his second video (19 minutes in):
Let's tackle the one that the internet loves the most first: money printing. To view money printing as the source of all price inflation actually has a very long tradition in economics. The most prominent economist to support this idea was Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman (11:49) who said that. [...]
Crucially, Friedman inspired economists often assume that velocity and production are roughly constant. Remember that clip from Peter Schiff arguing that stimulus checks for people at home would be inflationary? Crucially, he made the implicit assumption there that this didn't prevent a further collapse of production.
"Everything is getting more expensive. And if people think that is transitory, it is because they don't understand the problem. In fact, they don't even understand inflation or where it comes from because inflation is about money. You are inflating the money supply. That's what's being expanded and none of this is transitory because these deficits aren't transitory. The money printing isn't transitory. It's here to stay. — and that means prices are going to continue to go up because we continue to destroy the value of the dollar as we expand the supply"
Sounds pretty convincing right? However, the monetary theory of inflation has almost completely disappeared from universities. Why? Well, because the data doesn't support this simple explanation in most economies. For example, check out this graph of the CPI for Europe and compare it to the graph of central bank printed M1 money supply... You can clearly see that the money supply has accelerated while price growth has slowed. To a less extend this disconnect also exists for the USA. But, if you really want to see this simple theory fail, you only need to look at Japan. Even if we take into account the more expansive M3 money supply measure, which include money created by private banks, and compare it to the CPI. You can clearly see that while M3 kept going up, the CPI had its ups and downs. What can explain this disconnect?
Pointing to Japanese money supply versus inflation is irrelevant because Japan doesn't fund its fiscal deficit via monetization. It issues debt, just like every other non-basket case economy on Earth.
The distinction is important. Debt is tied to a promise to repay later. Monetization has no such promise, so it's functionally equivalent to issuing debt and then immediately defaulting. So long as lenders believe debt will be repaid, the effects are different from monetization.
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Which other countries use it in Latin America? There are places which have used it relatively successfully, and de facto usage at least gives people more confidence.
Ecuador, El Salvador, and Panama.
It's because every time the argentinian government needs to pay something, and don't have the cash to do that, they print some billions and pay it. By literally printing monopoly money in huge quantity, they're devaluing their currency every time they print a batch.
The rationale is that if they're using the us dollar, the inflation will stop because it's controlled externally
But by using the us dollar, every time the argentinian government needs to pay something and doesn't have the cash to do that, need to borrow some heavy debt (at insane interest rate given their history where they didn't repay previous debts)
And would need an huge quantity of them in a short time to exchange and dispose the pesos from people and banks
If it was as easy as "just don't print monopoly money" they would have solved it.
Maybe it would be easier to just stop printing money than officially switching to a different currency
Politicians here don't hesitate on printing money to pay for things. Always have, and probably always will. He wants to take that possibility from their hands.
like zimbawee i think foir make a "stability" in the curency. (still worth nothing)
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that's not really politics, it's about his personal council of cloned dogs. Argentinians do not realize how fucked they are going to get.
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He apparently had his dogs cloned (or so he said on the record for a book)
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Nothing inherently. Nature even does it sometimes, although it's rare with larger complex organisms.
The problems with cloning arise when it happens in bulk. Instead of a single creature with a genetic abnormality or vulnerability to disease, you now have a whole population with those weaknesses. Look up monocultures or monocropping to read some horror stories. True cloning of e.g. livestock could take those issues to the extreme.
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Milei is a whack job that makes Trump and Bolsonaro look like good, sane leaders.
Wow that's quite the spread of ideas!
Some of those I'm on board for.
Others make me wonder what stone he slimed out from under.
Doesn't matter. It's all words until he's I power and does / doesn't do anything.
All the personal liberty stuff is great, we need more of that around the world.
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