During Argentina’s presidential campaign, I repeatedly wrote here on TGP how infuriating it was to be witnessing MSM treat Javier Milei’s absolutely mainstream, no-nonsense economic ideas as ‘dangerous’, ‘radical’ and out of bounds, while the horrible Peronists who left 40% of Argentineans under the poverty line were treated like the ‘sensible’ option.
This upside-down view of the world displayed by the media remains the standard approach as Milei kicks off his government, however cracks in the narrative are already quite visible.
Daniel Hannan has an excellent article out in the UK’s Conservative paper Telegraph about Milei’s speech in the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.
Hannan notes how the former economics professor ‘made no attempt to meet his audience half way’.
Milei warned them that Western values had been betrayed by ‘those who want to belong to a privileged caste’ and told it to the faces of the members of the caste.
During 40 minutes, he presented the theory and practice of why state intervention tends to make people poorer.
Hannan writes: “There is nothing pro-market about Davos. Here are the directors and lobbyists of Atlas Shrugged brought to life: woke, subsidy-hungry, pleased with themselves, ambitious, conformist, reluctant to express a view until they have a sense of the room. Had the WEF existed in the late nineteenth century, it might have included a few economic liberals, for free markets were then in fashion. But our own age is corporatist, managerialist and high-spending, and delegates duly parrot those orthodoxies.”
Communist, fascist, socialist, social democratic, Christian Democratic, progressive or populist, these are just different stripes for the same lust for collectivism.
“Because he dislikes state interference, Milei is dismissed as a loon. He is ‘radical’ (New York Times), ‘extreme’ (El País), ‘populist’ (Le Monde), ‘far-Right’ (BBC). Yet the classical liberalism he espouses is as undoctrinaire as any world-view can be.”
His reforms mainly involve politicians surrendering their privileges.
One undeniable economic fact that Milei slapped on the globalist faces is that ‘over the long term, countries with lower state spending and lighter regulations outgrow those with more intrusive governments’.
“As Milei reminded his audience: “Socialism always and everywhere makes people poorer. It has failed in every country where it has been tried. Failed economically, socially and culturally. And it has murdered more than a hundred million people”.
Argentina had pro-market governments until 1916, and it was one of the wealthiest places on earth. A century of socialist, military and Peronist statism followed, bankrupting the country.
Hannan ends on a carefully hopeful note. “Unlike most British commentators, I have spent time with Milei. He comes across in private as he does in public: clever, demotic, mercurial, driven, eccentric. I worry about his ability to withstand the Peronist backlash. But I have no doubt that, if he is allowed to implement his program, he will reverse a century of decline in Argentina.”
Read more:
Elon Musk Praises Argentina’s Milei Pro-Capitalism Speech in Davos, Posts Erotic Meme in Celebration
