The People vs The Rats
Never mind 'right' versus 'left' here we have a new paradigm...
“The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.”
~ Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944)
Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...
They say you can leave Buenos Aires for two weeks and return to find everything changed... or leave for twenty years and return to find everything the same.
After almost four months abroad, we arrived home last week to find evidence of both. More on the Paris of the South (and the Greatest Political Experiment of Our Age) in a moment, but first...
We enjoyed a delightful weekend catching up with dear friends. Over juicy roast bife de lomo and an unprintable quantity of rich, velvety malbec we relaxed into an unhurried dinner.
After the important, private subjects – births, deaths, marriages and assorted family matters – the conversation turned to the familiar, age-old bread and circuses, over in the public domain...
“La Casta”
“What surprises us about the news in America,” ventured one Argentine friend, “is how anyone there still takes it seriously. It seems like such obvious theater. The lies, the fake stories, the name calling. The cast. The plot. The chorus. It almost seems... scripted.
“One candidate calls the other ‘weird,’ and it’s all over the news, like it’s a matter of national security. The other is ‘fact checked,’ but everyone knows the ‘fact-checkers’ are as crooked as the politicians they’re supposedly ‘checking.’ How can anyone trust any of them? From where I sit, admittedly at some distance, it all looks like one giant telenovela [daytime soap opera].”
“I don’t pay as much attention as I probably should,” chimed another friend, “but the news moves too fast these days anyway. It seems like only yesterday that the ex-president, Donald Trump, was shot. I mean, actually shot. In broad daylight. A most unlikely story, by the way. Lots of red flags. And then, just like that, it’s like the whole thing never happened. It’s old news. Gone. Ciao. Now, all the chatter is all about this new woman, Kamala Harris. It’s impossible to keep up!”
“I don’t know much about her, either,” added a third friend, “but I know she was Biden’s vice president, that she was deeply unpopular, and that nobody, not even her own party, wanted her as their candidate. But if you see the papers today, she’s supposedly leading in the polls. One story I saw even predicted she could win in a landslide. Imagine such a thing! In a few weeks, she goes from being the least liked vice president in modern history... to winning the election in a landslide? It’s all so... unbelievable.
“Our media lies to us too,” relayed the first amigo. “Just like our politicians, who are perhaps the biggest liars in the world. But everyone knows it. We accept la casta [political cast] for what it is: a group of parasitic bureaucrats trying to get rich at everyone else’s expense. They’ve designed a whole system, riddled with corruption, to siphon off the wealth of this country. To rob us blind. It’s been that way here for 75 years. It’s all we’ve known. It’s what we expect...
“In America, though, it seems as though people really believe their government is there to save them, that their senators and congressmen will descend like angels from heaven to deliver them from evil, forever and ever, amen. Maybe it works that way there. And God bless them if it does. But it’s not the case in this country. Here, it’s not so much ‘right’ versus ‘left,’ but the people versus la casta...”
Rats Atop the Pyramid
On Monday of this week, as if to prove our dear amigos’ sorry diagnoses, the Argentine senate voted to award itself a handsome pay raise. Boosting their own salary from 7 million pesos to 9 million pesos per month (~$5,300 to $6,820), the “political caste” stuffed their own trough with a 28.5% pay increase.
To give these numbers some “local perspective,” this new salary means Argentine senators will now earn twice as much as the average “upper class” household per month... and 17 times more than the average “lower class” household. From La Derecha Diario:
[Translation: Social Pyramid. Senators now earn double the average of the upper class. The percentages above represent the portion of the population occupying each economic strata. The amount, in pesos, shows their monthly household income. At today’s rates, those monthly amounts equal, from bottom to top: Lower class (poor), $212; lower class (not poor), $606; lower middle class, $681; upper middle class, $1,363; upper class, $3,636... Argentine Senators, $6,818.]
And this, at a time when ordinary Argentines are shouldering the burden of a deep recession left over from a government that took the nation to the very brink of hyperinflation.
The Rat’s Nest
President Javier Milei, who came to office in December of last year and has been lassoing runway inflation back to “first world” levels ever since, quickly admonished the murine politicos...almost all of whom have voted against his economic reforms at every step.
Here is a snippet of Milei’s statement on X (translated from Spanish), in which he called the senate pay increase a “betrayal of the Argentine people”:
I express my utmost repudiation of the shameful salary increase that has just occurred in the Senate. Recently, they had increased their salaries to 7 million pesos, but it seems that this is not enough: today they increased their salaries to 9 MILLION...
While millions of compatriots are struggling to get by after the economic catastrophe caused by Sergio Massa, the Senate should have empathy with the Argentines and not make fun of them by increasing their salaries every month. It seems that they do not understand that the salary they receive comes from the taxes paid by all Argentines.
Charging 9 million pesos in this context is more than a mockery, it is a betrayal of the working people. Once again, the political caste refuses to give up its privileges while the people suffer the consequences. I repudiate each and every one of the signatures that led to this waste in favor of the politicians and against the Argentines.
Meanwhile, the salaries of the Executive Branch – including ministers, secretaries, undersecretaries, and the president himself, who also voluntarily surrendered his own government pension – have remained frozen since the very day Milei took office on December 10. Why? Milei:
“Because this administration understands that the effort must be made by the politicians, not by the working people who pay the taxes.”
Speaking to an audience in the province of Corrientes after the news, Javier Milei told voters: “El congreso es un nido de ratas. (Congress is a rat’s nest).”
Which prompts us to propose a new paradigm:
It’s not ‘right’ versus ‘left’... it’s the people versus the rats.
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. Good news, dear readers! From the East to the West… in Americas North and South… from one “End of the World” to another… the message of free markets, free minds and free people is taking hold.
Everywhere, people are beginning to see the mainstream media for the government propagandists they are… and trust in legacy outlets is plumbing historical lows.
A national Gallup poll from 2023 found that the share of respondents who said their level of trust in the media was “none at all” reached 39%, while those who trusted the media either “a great deal/a fair amount” dipped to just 32%.
A further 29% said they trusted the media “not very much,” meaning 68% of respondents fell into the “not very much/none at all” trust in media segment.
And that was before the whole “this is the best version of Biden ever” saga, the “bloodbath” hoax and the “Joyful Kamala” campaign shenanigans.
Meanwhile, independent sources – such as these humble Notes From the End of the World – continue to reach a larger and more engaged readership than ever. Over the past year alone, our audience has grown to include subscribers in all 50 US states and 133 countries around the world.
Of course, this is only possible through the generous support of our dear Notes members, to whom we are forever grateful. If you enjoy the work we do here, and would like to join our growing community of readers championing free markets, free minds and free people, please consider becoming a member here, today. Cheers!
Rats nest it is! Lest you Argentines think Americans believe their media, I can speak for myself. I can only take peeks at the spectacle. I've read many books about communist Russia and China and it looks to me like the political rats in America have begun to completely control the media just as in those communist countries. It has gone so far as to make people afraid to speak out. I don't know who answers surveys or how "they" get their polling numbers. I don't answer surveys and don't know any friends who say they do. We are all careful what we say at the Mahjongg table, lest we offend a friend! Good for President Javier Milei! How did he escape the gene pool?
Why do we continue to feed the rats?