A Tale of Two Shutdowns (Part II)

And the "Natural Economy" panacea for Acute Statist Syndrome...

(Vineyards grow beneath the Andes Mountains in Mendoza, Argentina)

“If you cut off that natural force, and substitute a paid bureaucracy, you are like a fool who should pay men to turn the wheel of his mill, because he refused to use wind or water which he could get for nothing. You are like a lunatic who should carefully water his garden with a watering-can, while holding up an umbrella to protect it from the rain.”

~ G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

It’s almost over, patient reader. That is to say, there’s a light at the end of Government Shutdown Tunnel. Only problem is, it looks to be coming from an Amtrak train.

Here’s how shame-free newswire, Reuters, reported on the unfolding melodrama...

US Senate passes bill to end government shutdown, sends to House

WASHINGTON, Nov 10 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Monday approved a compromise that would end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, breaking a weeks-long stalemate that has disrupted food benefits for millions, left hundreds of thousands of federal workers unpaid and snarled air traffic.

The 60-40 vote passed with the support of nearly all of the chamber’s Republicans and eight Democrats, who unsuccessfully sought to tie government funding to health subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year.

A follow up article, from the same misty-eyed mob, described how duty-bound representatives “braved” real world conditions to do what millions of honest Americans do each and everyday: their job.

Members of the House of Representatives headed back to Washington on Tuesday, after a 53-day break, braving the congestion at the nation’s tangled airports for a vote that could bring the longest U.S. government shutdown in history to a close.

With nearly 1,200 flights canceled on Tuesday due to the shutdown, lawmakers including Republican Representatives Rick Crawford of Arkansas and Trent Kelly of Mississippi said they were carpooling to the Capitol, while Representative Derrick Van Orden said he was making the 16-hour drive from Wisconsin on his motorcycle.

There you have it, dear reader. Carpooling... motorcycle diaries... waiting in lines. Incontrovertible proof that congressmen are flesh and blood human beings, just like the rest of us!

Private Markets > Public Folly

To be sure, nobody wants to see millions go without food... or employees going unpaid for services rendered... or deep blue skies, free of the crisscrossing contrails of modern commerce...

Which is why we advocate for private markets over public folly. If government shutdowns expose anything to the general population, it’s precisely the goods and services that ought not to be entrusted to the state in the first place.

Imagine private enterprise shutting up shop for 53 days because of some internal squabble over how best to get the job done... or not. What would become of your regional bank... your local carwash... your favorite restaurant... if the management simply decided to down tools “until further notice.”

Now picture members of the board returning almost two-months later, expecting a Veteran’s Day ticker tape parade... only to discover the raining paper is shredded contracts, pink slips and eviction notices... with two new banks, new carwashes, new restaurants where their businesses once stood.

Alas, this “market feedback loop” is skipped when governments are closed involuntarily, when hissy-fitting politicians toss their toys out of the stroller because they don’t have the permission slips (known in a democracy as “votes”) to get their pet legislation over the line. And it is the common citizen, who is first deprived of a superior, market-based alternative, then shackled to the state’s ersatz, sub-standard counterfeit, who ends up paying the price.

As a concerned reader wrote, after Part I of this Note...

“There’s no upside to creating dependency and then cutting off food aid to children cold turkey. There’s being hard-nosed, and then there is deliberate cruelty.”

Our reader is correct, of course, insofar as government dependency is routinely exploited by lawmakers – on both sides – to get what they want. Such hostage games are cruel and contemptible, yes... though hardly surprising, given the players.

And yet, as long as free people cede power to their political overlords, the best we can hope for is for them to ignore an opportunity to exploit the masses, or suffer a sudden change of heart. The former remains unlikely on psychological grounds, the latter on purely biological ones.

But before surrendering our best hopes to heartless psychopaths, perhaps we might first ask if there is a better way? Is there by chance a natural resource which, crowded out by greedy snouts at the public trough, is going underutilized?

Patent Leather Politicians

We are reminded here of the old metaphor about committing our infants to public schools and then, when they invariably learn to walk those same walls, concluding that in the absence of government schools human beings should all be found slithering around on their wretched bellies, unable to take to their very own legs.

“But without the government...?”

Such feeble mindedness belongs similarly to Chesterton’s lunatic, “who should carefully water his garden with a watering-can, while holding up an umbrella to protect it from the rain.”

Since time immemorial, man has endured endless lectures from those who would sell him on “public walking schools”... “rainproof watering-cans”... and other such scandalous, state-sponsored superfluities. What man really needs from his government, more than all the food stamps and welfare checks and public disservices put together, is for his congressmen to take his patent leather loafers off his throat.

Happily, there is an experiment in voluntary government shutdown going on down at this End of the World. And the results thus far are enough to wake your elected representatives from their baby-like slumber (which might be why they don’t want you hearing anything about it).

Shortly after taking office in December of 2023, Javier Milei, a self-described “mole inside the government,” has been rooting out “waste fraud and abuse” on a scale that would make the most ardent DOGE supporter blush. The following chart, shared by the Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger, shows the deep cuts made to government payrolls since January 2024.

The Natural Economy

The dark blue represents central and regional administrative roles, gray is for security and military personnel, and the light blue for state “businesses.” The total, as of the end of September, is almost 60,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, what we might call the “natural economy,” that is, the market for free and voluntary exchange, a market truly “of the people, by the people and for the people,” is roaring back to life.

According to the National Institute of Statistics (INDEC), the third quarter of this year saw the Argentine economy hit record breaking export volume... 5.1% higher than the previous quarterly record (Q2, 2010), up 12.9% year-on-year, and higher by a whopping 23.2% vs. the same quarter for 2022. (Export levels seen ticking up on the gray line; prices falling as per the yellow line.)

Oil production in Argentina, meanwhile, reached its highest level in over 20 years in August, with a production of +831,000 barrels per day.

Here’s the Buenos Aires Times with the latest...

Argentina set for century-high oil output, record gas production

Rosario Board of Trade report highlights Vaca Muerta’s role in driving production and widening of energy trade surplus.

A study by the Bolsa de Comercio de Rosario (Rosario Board of Trade, BCR) forecast that the country is on track to record its highest oil production level of the century to date, as well as record gas production in 2025

The BCR report highlighted the boost in “unconventional oil and gas production” provided by the Neuquén basin, in particular shale-rich Vaca Muerta, this year. It noted that “national gas and oil production grew by four percent and 11 percent respectively when comparing January to July this year with the same period in 2024.”

Hmm…

Inflation down... productivity up... and private enterprises leading the way. Turns out there is a better way forward... and it’s underway, right here at the End of the World.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Readers may have seen the word “bailout” plastered all over the Legacy Media outlets during the run-up to the recent midterm elections here in Argentina.

The US Treasury had, indeed, provided a $20 billion currency swap facility to help stabilize the peso (which had suffered a crisis of confidence after a surprise Peronist victory in a minor provincial election put the fear of collectivism into the hearts of investors).

And yet, a currency swap line is not a bailout... or even close.

Here’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent giving an Economics 101 lesson to the talking heads on MSNBC yesterday…

But why would establishment media, the propaganda arm of the managerial class, want to obfuscate the truth, you wonder? Why promulgate a false narrative, going so far as to claim that Argentina received a gimme at the expense of American taxpayers, when in reality the US Treasury made money?

You know as well as we do, dear reader. An experiment in liberty cannot be seen to succeed, lest the idea catches on elsewhere.

If you’ve had enough of the mainstream claptrap… and you value the work we do here at Notes From the End of the World… feel free to join our growing community of freedom lovers, independent thinkers and radical libertarians right here.