Assessing Javier Milei, the World’s Best Leader: Part IX

I only share longer videos when there are very important points to be made (such as the rise and decline of New York City or Trump’s foolish protectionism).

But I hope people will be patient enough to watch this 29-minute video.

I’m a Milei fan because he has done exactly what is needed, which is to dramatically slash spending in Argentina.

And, unlike what we see in Washington (where a less-than-planned spending increase is counted as a cut), he’s imposed genuine reductions. Regardless of how you measure.

• In nominal terms.
• in inflation-adjusted terms.
• As a share of GDP.

For today’s column, though, I’m going to focus on the international impact of Milei’s libertarian revolution. For readers who are pressed for time, please watch between 17:00-22:00 and from 25:00 to the end.

Axel Kaiser (who I interviewed back in 2021 about developments in his home country of Chile) discusses how Milei can serve as a role model for the rest of the world.

That’s similar to the position outlined by David Harsanyi in the Washington Examiner back in January. Here are some excerpts from his column.

Almost all problems in modern Keynesian fixes are prominent features of governance in the modern West. Governments are always bragging about spending their way out of economic tribulations (tribulations they usually instigate.) If a person suggests that free-market economic policy would have been more beneficial in the long term, they are forced to rely on a counterhistory. This is one reason why lots of elites are rooting against Milei, who argues that most of the West’s economic ills lie in Keynesian economics. They want him to fail. …most panic-inducing cases of “austerity” are just minuscule reductions in the trajectory of spending growth. Not Milei’s plan, which entailed shutting down 13 government agencies and firing over 30,000 public workers — around 10% of the federal workforce. That is an unrivaled political revolution. Argentina’s federal budget was reduced by 30%. Even if the Department of Government Efficiency accomplished everything Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are talking about doing, they wouldn’t come close to 3%, much less 30%, in spending cuts. There has likely been no comparable austerity program in any Western economy. …Milei is a genuine and welcome threat to the world order. The difference between Milei and many other nationalists on the world stage is that he’s not using his position to transfer state power from left to right but rather diminishing the power of the state and cutting off the source of its control over citizens. How many world leaders have ever done that — not many, if any.

Axel and David are right.

Milei is the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher of the current generation.

Except he is being much bolder and doing much more (in large part because Argentina at the end of 2023 was in much worse shape than the U.S. and U.K. in the 1970s).

It’s almost surely not an exaggeration to say that Milei’s continuing success is vital for the trajectory of global economic liberty. He has he ability (I hope!) to trigger a bigger and better version of the “Washington Consensus.”

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Image credit: World Economic Forum | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.