Liberty Fights Poverty

Millions of Argentines escape destitution... millions more remain behind...

“My contempt for the State is infinite.”

~ Javier Milei

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

“Good news! Good news!” announced no newspaper salesman. Ever.

Meanwhile, here at Notes H.Q. in Buenos Aires...

The poverty rate is falling in Argentina, dear reader, following on the heels of collapsing inflation. Only, you wouldn’t know it to read the popular press.

Back in February, local establishment newspaper La Nación ran the following headline (all quotes translated from the Spanish):

Poverty reached 57.4%, the highest value in the last 20 years, according to a report by the UCA (Catholic University of Argentina)

The numbers are indeed shocking. So shocking, in fact, that one might wonder how a once-rich nation ended up mired in such a pitiable state in the first place.

Naturally, the blame was laid not on the preceding 75 years of collectivist nonsense, government ineptitude and failed socialist economic policies... but on the shoulders of the newly elected president, Javier Milei, who had been in office all of... 2 months.

Again, from La Nación:

According to the UCA, the increase [in the poverty rate] is directly related to the devaluation promoted by the [Milei] Government last December, which increased the values ​​of the basic food basket and the total basket.

The article went on to note the truly lamentable reality that poverty “reaches 27 million Argentines,” the worst rate in a generation. Continued the paper:

This figure would be the highest since 2004, when poverty reached 54.8% of the population. This was at the end of the crisis of 2001 and 2002, after which the indicators fell.

The headline figure was so troubling – not least because it represents real people in the real world suffering real pain – that you might think hyperventilating journalists would be motivated to investigate the actual root of such evil.

Hmm...

Root Causes

Might 25.5% month over month inflation have had anything to do with such a sorry blight?

How about capital markets choked with decades of stifling regulations?

Or powerful mob unions preventing freedom of movement in the coagulated labor market?

Or harsh capital controls chaining peso-holders to their vaporizing currency?

Or “own goal” trade tariffs, which made foreign goods exorbitantly expensive to import (when they were not outlawed entirely)?

How about state-funded universities churning out Keynesian economists and Marxist sociologists by the tens of thousands?

Or government-owned media outlets, piping “The Message” into millions of homes around the country, brainwashing generations of people into believing The State was their redeemer rather than, as was actually the case, the millstone around their necks?

Or a million other top down, “government-knows-best” controls, edicts, laws, taxes, regulations, decrees, mandates and para-market proscriptions from on high?

There are many ways to stifle prosperity, hamper markets and drag human beings asunder, into the vile morass of poverty and abjection. And the Argentine State tried them all!

But that was February, when the country was still in the immediate aftermath of a landmark election... and the early stages of the economic “shock therapy” which so many free-market advocates (including these humble pages) cheered and so many entrenched parasites in the political caste feared.

The Good News

Fast forward to today and the same paper, La Nación, ran the following headline just this week (Dec 5):

According to the UCA, poverty reached 49.9% in the third quarter and affects 23.2 million Argentines

To those dear readers keeping score at home, that’s a drop of 7.5 percentage points... or a 13% overall reduction in poverty (from 57.4% to 49.9%). Strange, therefore, that La Nación chose not to lead with a more cheerful headline, something like, say...

Poverty in Argentina Declines by ~4 Million During Milei’s First Nine Months in Office

Or...

Free Market Reforms Reduce Poverty by Nearly 4 million in Argentina

Or (our personal favorite)...

The Greatest Political Experiment of Our Time Delivers: 4 million Argentines Liberated From State-Induced Poverty

Indeed, the paper declined even to mention that the projection for December is lower still, a fact that Señor Milei added personally on X:

[Translation: Incidentally, they also fail to clarify that the projection for December is downwards with 41.7%.]

But who wants to know about millions being freed of their State shackles, liberated from the chains of government-guaranteed poverty, freed into a future of their own making?

“They are not journalists,” as one Argentine opined poetically on X, “they are mercenaries; they are not independent, they are paid trolls of a rotten system; in short, they are a vital part of the State Party.”

Thus do the embedded interests prove, yet again, that they are not so much friends of the poor, per se, but friends of poverty itself.

When people are desperate and confused, they cling to the illusion of safety and protection as promised by the State. When they are free and see clearly that their lives are in their own hands, there is nothing they cannot achieve.

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

Cheers,

Joel Bowman