Radical Common Sense

Plus balanced budgets, falling prices, husband daycare and other bright ideas...

(View from the Devil’s Elbow along Australia’s famous Great Ocean Road. Photo: Joel)

Every night and every day
The awfulisers work away,
Awfulising public places,
Favourite things and little graces;
Awfulising lovely treasures,
Common joys and simple pleasures;
Awfulising far and near
The parts of life we held so dear:
Democratic, clean and lawful.
Awful, awful, awful, awful.

~ The Awfulisers, by Australian cartoonist, Michael Leunig

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Apollo Bay, Australia...

Traveled into the future? Check. 

Set foot on home soil for the first time in six years? Check.

Followed dear reader’s advice and enjoyed a classic meat pie at Cafestation? Check. (And thank you, Mr. Powell!)

It’s been an eventful week for your peripatetic editor...catching up with family and friends... recovering from wretched jet lag and 14 time zone changes... and generally keeping an ear to the ground here in Terra Australis. 

We were warned before returning to this Great Southern Land that Melbourne, our first port of call, had “gone woke,” that the ordinarily sensible people of the Victorian capital had lost their marbles during The Covid, and that the city had been taken over by progressive loonies. 

And they were just the warnings from our Melburnian mates! 

Not to worry, we reckoned. As any Queenslander will tell you, Victorians have always been “mad as a cut snake,” to employ some local parlance. That’s why we love them. Besides, once you get out of the big smoke... shake hands with the locals... bend an elbow at the corner pub... people tend to veer towards radical common sense pretty quickly. 

Sleepy towns are, by definition, unwoke. And thank goodness. Here’s a sign we saw outside the local watering hole down here in Apollo Bay yesterday...

The Great Ocean Road Brewhouse is the southernmost pub on the Australian mainland and, as you can see for yourself, even down here, at this particular End of the World, all is as it should be. 

We’ll have more Notes from the road along the way... but let us return for a moment to our regular beat, the Greatest Political Experiment of Our Age. 

Theory, Meet Practice

As dear readers know, we’ve been covering the goings on back in our beloved Argentina, where the world’s first self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” president is busily hacking back the thorny brambles of the administrative state. We know of no other body politic on earth that has voted to so severely limit the powers of its own parasitic political caste. As a cheerful skeptic when it comes to all political “solutions,” we were naturally curious to see how the libertarian approach might work in practice. 

It is early days still, but after a few months on the job, Milei’s “extremist” policies (which essentially aim to derogate power from the state and return it to the long-suffering Argentine people...) appear to be paying off. 

Our sources on the ground in Buenos Aires tell us month-over-month inflation likely fell back to single digits during April, the first such reading in more than six months. Here’s a graph published by PriceStates (and reposted by Argentina’s Minister of the Economy, Luis Caputo), which has the country’s inflation rate closer to 5% m.o.m. (The red dotted line shows the official figures; the blue line shows PriceStats analysis.)

Falling Prices?

What does this look like in practical terms, for citizens struggling under the “print and spend” policies of previous, socialist governments? For one thing, it means disinflation (slowing price increases)... and even the beginning of deflation (falling prices) where they need it most... 

The graph above shows the weekly price trajectory of food and beverages at the grocery store. Note that Milei assumed office right around the December peak, when prices were shooting up by as much as 11.5%... per week. 

That we’re now seeing prices actually coming down in some areas of the economy (as you can see in the far right bar on the graph above) is indeed an encouraging sign for voters, especially given the hyperinflationary disaster the country inherited courtesy of the previous administration. 

Milei explained his crackpot recipe for keeping inflation in check during a speech a couple of weeks ago:

“If the state does not spend more than it collects and does not issue (excess money), there is no inflation. This is not magic.”

~ Javier Milei, 2024

Lower inflation also means Argentina’s Central Bank was able to once again ease rates, which in turn lowers carrying costs. Here’s Bloomberg: 

Argentina cut its key interest rate for the third time in three weeks as officials bet on a sustained slowdown in consumer prices and race to shrink the central bank’s interest-bearing liabilities.

Policymakers lowered the benchmark rate to 50% from 60%, according to a statement released Thursday that cited a significant easing in price pressures over recent months.

The Milei Effect

Sticking on the spending question for a second, Argentina’s lower house approved El Presidente’s budget-slashing Ley Omnibus earlier this week with a vote of 146-102. 

The Bill includes hundreds of policy reforms, which include allowing Milei to dissolve state agencies, radically overhaul and simplify the nation’s convoluted, over-regulated labor markets and even privatize a dozen publicly held companies. It will now move to the Congreso’s upper house, the Senate, for more horse trading, politicking and Faustian pact making. 

We’ll keep you updated as the Greatest Political Experiment of Our Time continues to evolve and take shape. Meanwhile, down here on this Great Southern Land...

“That fellow with the chainsaw you’ve got over there,” a sensible Melburnian remarked to us over the past weekend, “we need some of that gumption over here. Our state budget is shot to sh!t... the politicians are all crooked... and ordinary people are forced to pay for these idiots to ruin our economy.”

Whether the Milei effect has rippled across the Pacific Ocean and penetrated Australia’s “woke capital,” we’ll see for ourselves when we head back into the big city in the coming days. 

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

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Thanks again to our dear Notes members, old and new. We’re ever grateful for your generous and ongoing support. Owing to your support, we’re now #23 in World Politics here on Substack, a mighty run having only began our little project this year!

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