Milei offers blunt market-only proposals. He advocates the destruction of public health, eliminating central and public banking, in fact, if Milei has his way then everything public must go including any money to promote scientific research useful to the nation which is channeled through the “CONICET” research agency. The state must go except security and a (hands off) Ministry for Economics. Milei argues that through the elimination of state control of pretty much everything the magic hand of the free market will be given free reign.
Eliminating the central bank and the Argentine currency entirely and using the US dollar instead will be the magic (he says) to eliminate inflation too. Milei and his followers somehow fail to notice that this was not the case when Menem and Cavallo (both idols of Milei) effectively dollarised in the 1990’s. Experience shows that even a liberalised Argentine economy had higher inflation that in the US, a nation with the sole capacity to print US dollars, precisely because of the lack of real competition in Argentina. His evangelists say dollarisation will bring inflation to zero, in fact what happened in the 1990’s is that inflation stayed stubbornly high at 7% in foreign currency terms. Clearly this is not hyper-inflation (nor the current rate of 110%) but is still significantly higher than elsewhere and reduces international competitiveness. Argentina in 2000 was a very expensive place to live in and to do business.
None of this should surprise anyone who has analysed other ultra-liberal candidates such as Trump, Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage etc… Milei doesn’t have a single new idea in his head, he is simply a frontispiece, a voice for a 1930’s economic dogma which favours the ultra rich who don’t want to pay for state services, but this time with a different hairstyle.
Milei’s 19th (and early 20th.) century economic dogma is that of Mises and the Austrian school of economics. In Argentina Milei and his ultra-liberals raise Juan Alberdi up on a pedestal too (as the Argentine Mises). His ideas favour the ultra-rich who do not want to pay for state services which they say they don’t use as they have the money to pay for private alternatives in health etc… Not only does Milei offer the poor nothing (except a channel for their anger at an economic system which is badly administered by both UP and PRO) but he advocates taking away their health, education and several important other services.
Milei is just a different hairdo advocating ideas that have never been implemented successfully in any country.
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