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Posted on 04/11/2026 5:41:23 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Javier Milei slashed poverty, tamed inflation, and turned a supposed “bloodbath” into a case study in market reform.
We were promised an absolute bloodbath.
During the 2023 election in Argentina, politicians, academics, journalists, and commentators lined up to denounce populist candidate Javier Milei and his plans for “shock therapy,” symbolized by the chainsaw he had taken to brandishing ominously on the campaign trail while shouting, “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” (“Long live liberty, damn it!”)
Just days before Argentina went to the polls, more than a hundred economists, including superstar Thomas Piketty, published an open letter. They said a win for Milei would “inflict further devastation and social chaos” on a country that was already devastated and in chaos. His plans for dollarization and severe cuts to public spending would “increase already high levels of poverty and inequality and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”
Milei’s proposals, the esteemed number crunchers said, were not a “radical departure from traditional economic thinking” as he claimed but a return to “laissez-faire economics . . . fraught with risk that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people.”
Others were blunter in their predictions. There were claims Milei would “bring back a modernized version of the brutal fascist regime of General Jorge Rafael Videla,” which ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 and was responsible for the disappearance of at least 30,000 people. Members of the Peronist government shouted in unison, “If Milei does what he has said, there will be dead people and blood.”
It was even claimed that Milei would start harvesting the organs of Argentina’s poor to give to rich donors after comments he made about the need for a “free market” in organs.
A self-described anarchist-capitalist, Milei had simply called for a reduction in red tape and for people to be able to buy and sell organs without the involvement of the state. But everything he said was seized upon by his opponents as evidence of his desire to take his chainsaw not just metaphorically to the social fabric and the economy but quite literally to the bodies of the Argentine people themselves, tearing them limb from limb to be devoured by his vampire billionaire friends.
A bloodbath, like I said.
Milei, of course, took it all in his stride. The former tantric-sex guru with the wild hair and even wilder eyes cared little about the opinions of a man—Thomas Piketty—he had already called a “turd” and a “criminal disguised as an intellectual,” or of people he derided as “communist pieces of sh-t.” Nor, it seems, did the Argentine electorate care very much—or at least enough of them to guide the wild man to a historic win.
More than two years after Milei became president, we now have a pretty clear idea of who was right and who was wrong.
This week, in response to new figures from Argentina’s statistics agency, The Washington Post declared, in an op-ed, “Free market Argentina proves capitalism is the answer to poverty.”
The new figures show Milei has reduced the country’s poverty rate from 53 percent to 28 percent—a massive reduction.
By drastically cutting state subsidies and laying off 60,000 public-sector workers, Argentina achieved its first-ever fiscal surplus in 123 years. Inflation collapsed from an insane 200 percent to 33 percent. Growth is at 4.4 percent and predicted to outpace the average rate in Latin America over the next two years.
There remain significant challenges, of course. A poverty rate of 28 percent and inflation at 33 percent are still bad and too high; they’ll need to be brought further under control. Milei also faces a “battle” over unemployment. With his cuts to public-sector jobs, the unemployment rate now sits at 7.5 percent. The Post is confident, though, that “market forces” and an “expanding private sector” will soak up the laid-off workers. Massive deregulation—Minister of Deregulation and State Transformation Federico Sturzenegger has cut more than 14,000 regulations so far—“will stoke private investment and growth.”
The Washington Post is right: “It is rare that we get to witness such a radical experiment in real time.” Milei has provided inspiration to insurgent right-wing parties across the Western world, including Reform and Restore in the U.K., both of which are looking to make serious cuts to government spending and also to break the overweening power of civil servants and bureaucrats. The enormously bloated public sector will be a major barrier to implementing a genuine right-wing agenda in the U.K.
Milei was also an inspiration for DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—in the U.S. Who can forget the golden chainsaw he gifted Elon Musk with at CPAC in 2024? Or the boyish glee with which the CEO of X, Tesla, and SpaceX swung it around on stage?
With everything that’s happened since, and with current events in the Middle East, those heady days, so full of promise, feel like decades, not just a few years, ago.
Nevertheless, despite receding from view since Musk retired as its leader last May, DOGE continues to cut government waste. As of January 1 this year, DOGE claimed to have made an estimated $215 billion in savings, or $1,335 per U.S. taxpayer. This included the termination of more than 13,000 contracts, massive grant rescissions and lease cancellations, a 9 percent reduction in the federal workforce—some 320,000 workers—and a whole raft of measures targeted at pretty much every department, wing, and branch of the federal government.
DOGE has now been disbanded as a centralized agency, although it’s still due to exist, in reduced form, until July. Its principles have been incorporated into agencies and the Office of Personnel Management, and the Trump administration continues to pursue broader policies of government reform.
Whether this attempt to routinize the operations of an extraordinary agency—conceived in an extraordinary time and led by an extraordinary man—will succeed or whether old habits die hard remains to be seen.
As Milei’s radical experiment in reintroducing free-market principles to his own communist-stricken nation continues at a pace, calls to dust off that golden chainsaw and to find a man crazy enough to wield it are likely to grow.
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Imagine that. Free markets reverse the damage caused by communism.
Milei didn’t tinker—he amputated the tumor of big government. And the results are screaming in the face of every socialist, communist, and globalist shill who spent decades peddling the fairy tale that “unfettered capitalism” starves the masses while central planning lifts them up. The communists can’t spin this. Their holy trinity—state control, wealth redistribution, and “solidarity” through coercion—has been exposed as the poverty factory it always was.
A planned economy is the only way we can achieve Equity.
In a capitalist economy some people get rich and others live in poverty.
That is not Equitable.
A planned economy is Scientific, follow the science.
If lots of people live in poverty in our Scientific economy don’t let that worry you. We are just working toward Equity. Eventually everyone will be in poverty and we will have reached Equity.
/S
Behind that wild man is a genuine thinker. I’m impressed with just how smart Javier Milei truly is.
Which gives new meaning to the phrase “criminal underclass”!
Nidal Malik Hasan. Islamic nutjob. Killed 13 and injured 32 people at Foot Hood in 2009. The POS is STILL waiting to be executed!
An inflation rate of 33% with only 4% economic growth and a poverty rate of 28% may be an improvement for Argentina but it is not a victory. The road back to economic stability and true prosperity is a long one, as the Great Depression of the 1930’s demonstrated in the United States.
At 33% inflation with 4.4% annual growth the savings and income of the people is still declining at a precipitous rate. The situation is analogous to traveling down a highway at 65 mph, seeing brake lights ahead, slamming on the brakes to slow down the vehicle. If you don’t hit the brakes soon enough, you will slam into the car ahead at a speed less than 65 mph which will still result in injury or even death.
Unfortunately memories of the Great Depression have faded in the United States. Our lawmakers have abandoned fiscal responsibility, silver coinage, and the gold standard backing our currency. Our politicians will not even conduct an audit of the alleged gold reserves at Fort Knox, much less provide an accounting to the American people. Continuous wars, corporate graft, money laundering to political entities, outright fraud, and the cost of the welfare society is sending us down the road Argentina followed. In addition the financialization of the economy, by destroying the industrial base and turning the economy over to Wall Street speculators, has only accelerated the travel down the road to the next Great Depression in America. The Iran war, which will be funded with more debt, is just another push on the accelerator.
Thomas Piketty—he had already called a “turd” and a “criminal disguised as an intellectual,”
The Peronist and Kirchnerites were just so corrupt, so bloated, and so inefficient, Argentina would very naturally get a huge economic boost by simply eliminating their worst practices.
Like in the USA, the real long-term challenge will be legally and within rule-of-law, challenging the socialists entrenched, deep-state power.
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