This week, I visited Buenos Aires, Argentina, to speak about free markets and socialism at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It was a fitting location: Argentina is now Ground Zero for the revitalization of capitalism in the West. In a time when the right often laments “late stage capitalism” in terms reminiscent of Noam Chomsky, while the left laments the very existence of billionaires in the manner of Stalin targeting the kulaks, Argentina’s experiment in liberty represents an audacious foray into the world of economic dynamism and innovation.
Argentina has been, for decades, a basket case. In the early 20th century, thanks to a plethora of natural resources and a burgeoning Western constitutional structure, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries on earth on a per capita basis. But from the 1940s on, Argentina began to pursue a policy of nationalist socialism: interior redistributionism and external protectionism, along with corrupt expropriation of property.
The result was decades of stagnation.
Dictator Juan Peron declared himself in favor of a “social market, putting capital to the service of the economy and the well-being of the people” — pretty words that should sound familiar to economic populists of the left and right, and that should scare the hell out of everyone, given that Peronism led to the complete economic meltdown of the country. In fact, between 1980 and 2023, Argentina was one of the few countries in the West that saw a relative decrease in living standard: The time it takes to work to buy basic goods actually increased during that period.
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