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this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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The Argentinian economy will not do better, only the wealth of the neocolonial compradors will, and the wealth of their Global North capitalist masters.
Hard to call that worse than the mess they are in
They should have played hardball with the rapacious IMF instead of licking its boot.
ugh welcome to earth where the only way to have a healthy "economy" is for people to suffer. but we cant seem to just live in peace and help eachother out without monetary benefits. so people are forced to suffer because of greedy bastards.
LETS GO WE NAILED IT GUYS
They privatized many of the highways and you have to pass through toll booths every so often as ownership changes. These people provide no service, there are just taking the money. Same with much of the transit—many buses and trains are privately (mafia) owned.
Yeah, because Friedman's free market shock doctrine shit just isn't working.
Free market regulating itself is the next bullshit argument
The historical record shows that there are no maybes about this. It’s obviously not an “interesting experiment.” There’s no sense in giving these rhetorical inches while they’re taking miles.
While that isn’t what I was talking about, Weimer Germany is the canonical example of a similar situation, but there are many examples.
What I was talking about is the historical record of neoliberal shock therapies, which Naomi Klein documented well.
Shock therapy in Russia after USSR breaking up, maybe?
That was more extreme, since it was not a transition from left-wing liberal democracy to right-wing liberal democracy, but from bureaucratic planned economy to a pretense at liberal democracy.
Still some examples may apply.
Say, if things state-owned or state-managed in Argentina now get privatized, one can look at the specific mechanism and whether it'll be similar to what happened in Russia.
I guess the right wing theory is that the president makes Argentina a great place to do business, business people rush in, and wealth trickles down.
But, that "trickle down" idea doesn't ever seem to have actually worked anywhere. Maybe the best Argentina can hope for is that at one point when the economy is booming, the working people suddenly form or join unions and the companies decide it's too risky / expensive to leave, so they negotiate with those unions.
OTOH, these days it's so easy to move corporations around to wherever the laws are the most corporation-friendly. So, even if somehow the new president does make corporations want to do more business in Argentina, it's hard to see how the people of Argentina will really benefit.
It might, or it might not. The thing with inflation is that it's based on people's expectations as much as anything else. People have to believe that inflation will go away before it goes away.
The new president has one thing going for him, which is that he's not a continuation of the previous administration. That means there's a chance that people will believe that he's actually making serious reforms. If they'd stuck with a prime minister who was the finance minister when the inflation was going nuts, I don't think anybody would have believed that things were going to improve, which meant they wouldn't improve.
If you look at Switzerland, it does, just takes long.
That's not what's happening in Switzerland. Switzerland just has a weird niche as a tax haven.
I meant "last few centuries" by "long", in that context your answer is invalid.
In that case, by the standard of the last few centuries, the Swiss are especially poor.
You forgot the context, that of change.
Ah, you mean world war 2.
Uh, I saved this comment of yours for that one sentence.
My views are rather libertarian, but I wouldn't trust most of the real life libertarians (too trusting into thousands of shitcoins or excited with reading sci-fi and busy writing and discussing articles about mechanisms of anarchy in the ancap meaning of the word).
However, if it comes to you voting for the "right wing nutjobs", please remember that GOP in USA is not libertarian in any way, no more than Ukraine's ruling party which uses the word sometimes.
Well, for the next 10-20 years I doubt I'll have the option of participating in a real vote, not without a revolution. So wishing you well and wishing Argentinians well, what is described should work in theory, but it's just too sharp a turn.
They are in a solid chummy political party with neonazis and monarchists for years. This alone should tell you what kind of libertarians they really are.
Spoiler alert: it never did.