Australia is heading Argentina's way.


Peronism, like our own modern Labor and Liberal parties, treats economics as an emotional or sentimental pursuit. Peronism put “fairness” — a terrifying word when spoken by social justice types — at its economic core. “The two arms of Peronism are social justice and social help,” President Peron wrote. “With them, we can give a hug of justice and love to the people.”

He gave them, through applications of Peronism that far outlived himself, hyperinflation and other elements of economic devastation—all in the name of fairness. For example, hugely expensive electricity bills were judged to be unfair. A sensible response to this might be reducing the cost of electricity production by smashing unions and such. But Argentina went with fairness instead, which means subsidies.

This causes absurd outcomes. “The average European spends around US$40 a month on electricity,” the Economist noted last year. “The average Argentine spends around US$5—eight times less.” But with all those paybacks flying around, Argentinian taxpayers are hammered each year by an electricity subsidy cost of US$12.5 billion.

Australia’s taxpayers are copping the same treatment thanks to our various governments’ also equating subsidies with fairness. Electricity bill relief payments of up to $500 were delivered last year by a federal government that by its anti-coal actions is causing those bills to surge. It’s a Buenos Aires squeeze play.
Tim Blair

Quote:


We should do something similar here. Politicians are public servants.

Jasin wrote on Apr 18^th, 2024 at 9:32pm:


Can you imagine the difference if AnAl took a commercial flight?

People would be telling AnAl to GFY

Quote:


Inflation down GDP up Argentina is going well after cutting government spending on woke crap

Baronvonrort wrote on Jun 30^th, 2025 at 11:57pm:




Adam Creighton

Thank goodness Argentina’s charismatic, libertarian President, Javier Milei, didn’t listen to mainstream economists. He appears single-handedly to have revived his nation’s economic fortunes, after decades of misery, by doing precisely the opposite of what some of the world’s most eminent economists advised.

If only his reforms would be a template for our own political and economic elite, collectively addicted to ever more intrusive regulation and public spending.

Ahead of his election in November 2023, 170 economists from around the world, including such luminaries as France’s Thomas Piketty and India’s Jayati Ghosh, warned Milei’s supposedly “extreme right” proposals centred on slashing regulation and public spending would cause “devastation” and “social chaos”.

“A major reduction in government spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict,” they wrote. His agenda was “fraught with risks that makes (it) potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people”.

Milei’s administration slashed the number of ministries from 19 to nine, including departments of climate change, diversity and “social development”, insidious fonts of ridiculous regulations the world over. The turnaround in Argentina’s misfortunes has been stunning, even surprising his supporters.

In the second quarter of this year the economy grew 7.6 per cent, practically all of it an increase in GDP per capita given the nation’s relatively slow population growth. Milei has managed all this without resorting to the tried and failed method of endless deficit spending, actually overseeing a budget surplus in 2024 of 0.3 per cent of GDP.

Yes, there has been the odd street protest organised by militant unions, but they appear to have ignored the fact the poverty rate has declined sharply too, from 53 per cent in the first half of last year to 38 per cent in the second half. Even UNICEF, hardly a hotbed of libertarian thought, conceded in May that 1.7 million children had been lifted out of poverty since Milei took office.

“The disgusting liberals, the politically correct people, the ‘cool’ leftists, the ‘sensitive’ ones, those who love the poor so much that all they do is multiply them; they all would tell us that we were going to generate an explosion of poverty … the ‘insensitive libertarians’ lifted more than 10 million people out of poverty,” the President said when that data emerged.

His angry, mocking tone is understandable in a nation, once among the richest in the world, that had fallen to well below 50th by the time he won office after decades of socialist meddling.

Perhaps the most extraordinary results have occurred in the housing market. Milei abolished rent controls last year amid predictable fears those nasty landlords would jack up rents. On the contrary, supply of rentable dwellings almost tripled and rents actually fell.

...
None of this is to smear all economists or economics; indeed, Milei was an economist himself. But it’s a reminder to beware conventional wisdom, and the inevitable tendency of economists in the modern era to have a bias toward bigger government, which often through academic grants, commissions and salary underpins their livelihoods.

freediver wrote on Jul 11^th, 2025 at 10:42am:


Yeah yeah - same old bollocks.

Why are employer groups in Unions?

Are they increasing poverty when the rationalise/downsize/offshore/introduce robot technology or submit claims to Fair Work against EBA negotiations?