The Invisible Hand Wreaks Havoc
“My contempt for the state is infinite,” Argentinian president Javier Milei recently said in an interview for the Economist Magazine. The Latino Reagan-reincarnate known by supporters and detractors alike as “The Madman” has taken a chainsaw to one-tenth of Argentina’s bureaucracy with the aim of “making Argentina great again.” The veteran foreign correspondent Jon Lee Anderson notes in his scintillating profile of Milei that “while inflation has declined to less than three per cent, the poverty rate has grown roughly eleven points, to fifty-three percent.” Yes, Milei has irrevocably changed Argentina, for the better or worse remains to be seen.
Milei’s daring vision is influenced by two major heterodox schools of economics: the Austrian School (Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard) and the Chicago School (Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas, the namesakes of Milei’s four cloned English mastiffs). Both schools rejected Keynesian government economic intervention in favor of an anarcho-capitalist, libertarian approach that was radically laissez-faire. For example, in Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom, he argues that economic central planning via socialism inevitably leads to fascist totalitarianism such as in Nazi Germany. What Hayek and his intellectual acolytes fail to comprehend, however, is that sometimes the government is better suited than the private sector to enact sweeping positive changes.
Take, for example, the issue of private equity buying up hospitals and nursing homes in the United States at the expense of the sick and elderly as well as the underpaid healthcare workers who care for them. The plethora of left-wing commentators delving into the issue perhaps fail to state the obvious point: Why the hell is private equity allowed to run healthcare facilities in the first place? It seems elementary to state that hospitals and nursing homes should be led by the pursuit of wellness rather than the pursuit of profit. And yet, we still have a failed system that is only growing worse in the aftermath of the pandemic as our vampiric plutocracy continues to feast itself upon our diseased body politic.
This dynamic is already underway in Milei’s revolution. After vetoing an eight percent cost-of-living increase for pensioners, Milei’s police brutally shut down elderly protesters with pepper spray. Anderson quotes one woman (notably, a former nurse’s aide) who says: “The problem is, [Milei] doesn’t leave his circle – he doesn’t see.” While Milei pretends to be a “man of the people,” his policies are devastating to Argentina’s most vulnerable citizens. All this being said, Pablo Touzon noted how the Argentine left created Milei. It is incumbent on them to now vote him out.
