This did make us giggle Mr Chakrabortty. So there is that
Aditya Chakrabortty wants us all to know that the policies of Sr. Milei in Argentina are a disaster and that shows that the free market is all wet, even all wrong, in fact.
Farage, Trump, Musk: your boy Javier Milei just took one hell of a beating. Why so quiet?
The specific policy being that of the fixed exchange rate which is the one that all the free market types have been sucking teeth over and muttering, well, we’d not wholly advise that, no.
No mention of other issues, like how abolishing rent control increases rental housing supply and brings down rents, or how reducing the budget deficit - and money printing to pay for the spending - reduces inflation or any other of the varied successes which have led to substantial economic growth. No, just the one issue to be taken as the exemplar for them all.
But if we switch our view from one of discussing economics to one of discussing politics then that’s all fair, fine and dandy. The aim here is to find some reason why free markets and less government are bad, that’s been found and there we are.
But this did make us giggle:
“We are seeing in real time how a government can melt in front of our eyes,” Alejandro Bercovich, a leading Argentine TV and radio journalist told me this week. “I never thought they would collapse this quickly.”
Ah, yes, Sr. Bercovich. Who Wikipedia describes as:
Alejandro Bercovich (13 de abril de 1982) es un economista, periodista kirchnerista y presentador argentino.
A “Kirchnerist”. An out and proud supporter of the previous government and that decades long mismanagement of the Argentine economy. Akin to asking Owen Jones whether Kemi, or Nige, might have even the one useful economic policy. Or, come to think of it, asking any Guardian journalist whether anyone to the right of Zack Polanski - which, we should all agree, is a lorra lots of people - has anything useful to say on the economy.
So, well done there Mr. Chakrabortty. It’s rare to see a good joke smuggled into the opinion pages of The Guardian. Plenty of bad ones, obviously, but good are rarer.
Tim Worstall