Draining the Swamp: A Master Class
In 2016, an unlikely U.S. presidential candidate focused the nation’s divided attention when he promised to “Drain the Swamp.”
Turns out, appealing to Americans' inherent sense of freedom and independence was a winning formula. Long-suffering voters had indeed grown tired of slimy bureaucrats and slithering beltway insiders dictating their lives and selling their country down the proverbial tubes...
...from imposing onerous taxes to running up an eye-watering national debt in their name...
...from over-regulating their private and commercial lives to abridging their most basic civil liberties...
...from committing them to costly foreign entanglements and weaponizing their once-hallowed institutions, common sense Americans had simply had enough.
Americans declared as much at the ballot box, voting for Donald J. Trump, who vanquished Bill Clinton’s wife, the quintessential bog creature. Or so they thought...
Alas, what Mr. Trump encountered inside the deep state moat (I-495, aka the Beltway) was even more corrupted, sinister, gnarled, and devious than could have been imagined.
Now, eight years on, and as the 45th President again sets his sights on “enemies foreign and domestic,” he faces tremendous resistance from those who stand to lose the most: special interests, deep state puppeteers, globalist elites, invisible insiders.
Make no mistake: Trump winning the election on November 5 is just the beginning. It is only then that the real Herculean tasks begin, starting with clearing out those filthy Augean Stables...
Happily for lovers of liberty up and down the Americas, they – and Trump – have an important ally here in Argentina, in a president who has spent the past 9 months giving an absolute MasterClass on Draining the Swamp.
Welcome to the frontlines of what I’ve been calling “The Greatest Political Experiment of Our Age,” where the world’s first self-described libertarian president is taking his chainsaw to the bloated Leviathan and delivering power back to that long forgotten class: We, the People.
“Viva La Libertad, Carajo!”
(Posted on Javier Milei’s official X account.)
When I first began writing about Señor Javier Milei in these pages, almost two years ago, the brash econo-nerd was not yet even considered a political outsider. In fact, among those in the capital’s “cocktail class,” he was barely considered a clown. The “political caste” scoffed at him... the media mocked him... the celebrities jeered and shook their empty heads.
Still, I recognized the power of Milei’s ideas... ideas that I had been writing about and studying since I first moved here, back in 2010, when I was working with Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin on The Daily Reckoning.
Milei pounded the drum for ideas like Free Markets... Balanced Budgets... Austrian School Economics... Natural Rights and Limited Government...
... in a word, Liberty.
Yes, Milei wielded a mighty chainsaw, and I mean literally:
Sr. Milei proclaimed his trademark slogan, “Viva la libertad, carajo!” (Long live liberty, dammit!). He promised to hack back the wretched overgrowth of the Peronist kleptocracy, to oust the socialist political caste and to return the riches and opportunities of the nation to her hard-working people.
Milei won in the biggest landslide since Argentina returned to democracy 40 years ago. Clearly, Milei expressed an idea whose time had come.
9 Months On... Rebirth of a Nation
We know of no modern democracy, certainly none of this size—46 million people—that has voluntarily decided so dramatically to halt and reverse the insatiable growth of the bureaucratic state. This alone makes Milei’s political experiment worth watching for American citizens now facing a decision between the promise of government subsidies and controls on the one hand and precious freedom on the other.
With so much legacy bureaucratic state to hack back, and hyperinflation already knocking on the door, el presidente nuevo wasted little time once on the job. Within 48 hours of taking office, Sr. Milei’s administration had...
- Slashed the number of government ministries in half, from 18 to 9...
- Ended all state funding for “media” (propaganda) outlets...
- Halted all public infrastructure projects that are not already underway...
- Abolished entire divisions and subdivisions of the vast, administrative state...
- Ended all fuel and energy subsidies...
- Quashed meddlesome import/export regulations...
- And put tens of thousands of government workers, known here as “gnocchis,” on notice.
And that was just the beginning. Between the Decreto Nacional Urgencia (DNU - roughly similar to a sweeping Executive Order in the US) and the massive Ley de Bases (a historic legislative reform Act that passed the nation’s Congress a couple of months ago), Milei’s administration advanced literally thousands of reforms aimed at defunding useless government programs and derogating state power back to “we, the people.”
If our American readers here recall the ghostly voices of their own Founding Fathers, it is with good reason. Milei’s Ley de Bases was even modeled on the foundational work of Sr. Juan Bautista Alberdi, the 19th Century Argentine statesman (and great admirer of Mr. Thomas Jefferson) who wrote the country’s founding document, upon which the Argentine Constitution is based.
For those of us who care about facts more than feelings, early results have been astounding...
Drain That Swamp: The Chainsaw, So Far…
After taking his trademark motosierra (chainsaw; see photo above) to the rotten branches—shuttering ~50% of the federal government’s parasitic ministries and sacking tens of thousands of useless, bottom-feeding bureaucrats—Sr. Milei’s administration has so far...
- Reversed decades of national fiscal deficits, returning the national budget to the first surplus in a dozen years and posting 8 consecutive monthly budgets “in the black.”
- Announced a bill to criminalize seigniorage – printing money to fund government boondoggles and vote-buying scams... and jailing crooked politicians found doing so to fund the Treasury for political purposes...
- Deregulated health insurance...
- Announced the imminent sale of the state-owned air carrier, Aerolineas Argentina, long a sticking point with corrupt politicians and entrenched union bosses...
- Confirmed he will indeed dollarize the economy, as proposed during the presidential campaign...
On the deficit spending front, a favorite plaything of his predecessors and other spendthrift politicos the world over, Milei has remained steadfast in his “non-negotiable” commitment to balanced budgets. In September, he delivered the annual budget to Congress, announcing he would veto all spending bills that are not balanced with commensurate spending cuts.
“After years where the political class put restrictions on individual freedoms, today we come to put restrictions on the State,” President Milei told Congress in a nationally televised address. “This budget is going to change the history of our country forever.”
Milei even went so far as to propose returning the difference during the “years of plenty” to the people through lower taxes.
“And, for periods of abundance, such as the coming years, it will force the government to return excess revenue to society by lowering taxes. This means that, if this methodology is maintained from now on, we will not only be able to reduce taxes but also the size of the state, which is the real tax burden.”
(NB: As I prepare to click “send” on this note, the news is hitting the wires that Milei has just announced he will abolish AFIP, Argentina’s version of the IRS, to be replaced with a much smaller, simpler, fairer tax authority. Just another day in libertarian-land...)
Whipping Inflation
And as for the scourge of inflation, that “sneaky tax” robbing the poor and middle classes of the value of their hard-earned pesos, Sr. Milei’s administration has managed to lasso that bolted bronco, too.
From an eye-watering rate of 25.5% per month in December 2023 (when Milei took office), the rate has come down each quarter to where it is now solidly in the single digits. At 3.5% for September, monthly inflation is now at its lowest since 2021 (core inflation came in at 3.2%). Here’s the latest data, courtesy of the National Institute of Statistics (INDEC):
Making Argentina Great Again
Not surprisingly, international capital markets have responded to Milei’s fiscal and monetary reforms down here with a massive vote of confidence; Argentine stocks and bonds are already testing their all-time highs. And there’s plenty of upside for a country that has, for all intents and purposes, been seen as a no-go basket case among serious foreign investors for many decades.
Already, many high profile investors are queuing up to deploy capital in Argentina...
Guys like billionaire Wall Street legend Stanley Druckenmiller, who began buying companies here in May after he called Javier Milei “the only free market leader in the world.”
There’s also Silicon Valley icon and startup visionary Peter Thiel, whom Milei hosted at the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, a few months back.
And then there’s Mr. “Mega MAGA” himself, Elon Musk, who has been in something of an open “bromance” with Milei as the pair continue to discuss “active investments” in the country. (Musk has reportedly expressed a particular interest in Argentina’s enormous lithium reserves, a crucial component in Tesla’s battery packs.)
Trump, Musk... Milei
When it comes to draining swamps, President Milei is executing a MasterClass down here at the end of the world, a fact that is not lost on Donald Trump, who had this to say about Milei during a campaign speech in Virginia:
“He’s doing a good job over there, he’s cutting like hell, he’s getting rid of a lot of waste in a lot of things and I hope they do well, because it’s a beautiful country, but I really think they have a good head man right now, he’s a tough guy.”
They say it’s darkest before the dawn, and in no place is that truer than right here, in Argentina. But after 75 years of enduring the ravages of socialism, Argentina is once again roaring back to life.
When Sr. Milei spoke at his inauguration in December, he told those gathered, “I didn’t come here to lead lambs... I came here to wake lions!”
It all sounds very Trumpish (if that’s a real word, but you know what I mean). Indeed, the lions of liberty are not only stalking the Pampas of Argentina, but on the loose in the U.S. as well.
We shall see, right? November 5th is coming. Swamp creatures, beware.
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
