One of the mysteries of life is why a large cross section of the population is opposed to freedom. When given the choice of liberty and independence they resist.
They demand more government programs. More government intervention in the economy. And more meddling in their lives.
Like pigs rolling around in their waste, this is where they find comfort. The recent election of Zohran Mamdani, an ardent socialist, as Mayor of New York, bears this out.
On rare occasions, however, when the failings of big government have stacked up to utmost misery, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that more government is not the solution; that, rather, it has been the problem all along.
Argentina, after a near century of big government madness, has happened upon one of these rare occasions. The public has finally awakened from its collectivist hangover. In fact, this was recently reaffirmed by the outcome of the Country’s midterm election.
In today’s guest article, Joel Bowman, our man on the scene in Buenos Aires, Argentina, updates us on the latest happenings with President Javier Milei’s ongoing experiment with libertarianism. After giving it a read, please head over to his website and subscribe to his newsletter so you can continue to follow what’s going on in real time.
Enjoy!
MN Gordon
P.S. We have no financial arrangement with Bowman and do not profit from publishing his work. We merely find his observations and writing to be valuable and believe that you will too.
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Chainsaw First
A nation awakens from its collectivist hallucination…
“An hallucination continues for as long as it is not contested.”
~ Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé (1935)
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina…
Limited government… balanced budgets… free markets…
Zero-deficits… plummeting inflation… lower taxes…
Laissez-Faire… individual rights… live and let live…
Turns out these “loco” concepts… and plenty more besides… actually resonate with decent, honest, real world people.
Who’d have thunk?
As patient readers are no doubt aware, the great libertarian experiment continues apace down here at the End of the World.
Having witnessed almost two years of Javier Milei’s “Chainsaw First” economic policies, during which the self-described anarcho-capitalist slashed the putrefied state from halo to culo, Argentine voters handed his La Libertad Avanza (LLA) party a thumping mandate in the midterm elections this past weekend. (Catch up on the Peronist post-mortem in Monday’s Note.)
But wait! How ever could this be?
Concept Inflation
After all, isn’t Milei a “far-right” lunatic… a fascist who wants to close hospitals and shutter universities and trip-up cripples in the lunch queue… an “authoritarian” whose policies have resulted in misery, poverty and widespread societal collapse?
In a word: no.
Only a directionally-challenged mainstream journalist could fail to see the gaping difference between a limited government libertarian and what they reflexively call “far right authoritarianism.” (Because for them, of course, there is no such thing as “left wing authoritarianism.”)
And yet, what kind of cart-before-horse authoritarian derogates political power away from the state? What brand of “far right” (or “far left”) dictator holds free and open elections… promotes individual liberty over centralized authority… recognizes private property as sacrosanct… dismantles the propaganda arms of state media… and, perhaps above all, rejects the very notion of a state managed economy in favor of free and voluntary markets?
The answer, of course, is not a very good one!
Indeed, what might history’s actual dictators, who at least went to the trouble of stomping their jackboots on the face of humanity, have to say about such careless concept inflation?
Joseph Stalin presided over ruthless political purges, ran forced labor camps (gulags), engineered famines (notably in the Ukraine), and held mass public executions. By the time he died, at the ripe old age of 74, Stalin’s iron-fisted regime had buried between 15-20 million of his soviet comrades.
Mao Zedong, meanwhile, spent over a quarter of a century starving, torturing and murdering his political enemies. Between his Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and his notorious political purges, like the “Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries” (1950-53) and the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” (1957-59), the Chairman is thought to have caused the death of some 70 million Chinese workers, peasants and pesky intellectuals.
Then there’s Pol Pot, who was evidently absent from class when his schoolmates studied the failed agrarian reform programs of Stalin’s Soviets and Mao’s CCP. By attempting to erase “modern society” altogether, Pot wiped out almost a quarter of the entire Cambodian population.
Suddenly, shuttering federally-funded DEI programs and closing wasteful and demonstrably corrupt government bureaus is tantamount to – what? – mass starvation… political purges… actual genocide?
What an age of overfed problems we suffer, dear reader, when a “fascist” is the guy who cuts the line at Starbucks. Such is a kind of oppression our ancestors could only dream of.
Real Growth
Meanwhile, as petty insults and breathless name-calling die a slow death, an incredulous populace, fed up with media “narrative” and popular press propaganda, look again to the real world for their truths.
And there, before their very own eyes, they see cracks and fissures beginning to appear in the edifice. Previously unexamined “truths,” proclaimed from on high by a modern day cabal of rogues and knaves, that curious gallery of media “elites,” academic halfwits, corporate stooges and celebrity sock puppets, are suddenly called into question.
Here in Argentina, at the outset of Milei’s experiment in everyday smaller and smaller government, members of the voting public were bombarded with endless doomsday predictions.
The economy would “collapse” without robust, counter-cyclical public spending… greedy capitalists, forever putting “profits before people,” would come to “eat the poor”… and the forsaken proletariat would be driven further into beggary as private industry ground to a halt…
… and on, and on, ad nauseam.
And yet, to the delight of hard working citizens… and the dismay of thick-skulled media… no such catastrophe has come to pass. Quite the contrary…
The latest data from INDEC (Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics), released just this week, shows that real salaries – in both the public and private sector – continue to outpace inflation. On average, salaries rose by 3.2% for the month of August, more than one full percentage point above inflation (which came in at 1.9% for the same month).
With the sole exception of March, salaries have risen faster than inflation every single month this year, indicating robust economic growth even as Milei’s “zero deficit” promise means budgets remain balanced. Since the beginning of 2025, salaries are up 27.6%, handily beating inflation, at 19.5%.
Private > Public
Astute readers will note that, continuing a growing trend, the strongest real wage growth shows up in the “sector privado no registrado.” (Private, unregistered sector.) These are jobs in the “informal” market – often part time or seasonal and with more volatile wages – which tend to “firm up” during periods of sustained economic growth… such as the country is now enjoying.
What does that mean, exactly, for the man on the street?
When Milei unsheathed the chainsaw and slashed the number of government ministries in half last year, axing 55,000 “gnocchis” along the way (with plenty more pink slips promised), many “experts” claimed he would tank the economy… as if real prosperity ever depended on tax-and-spend public redistribution programs, like the mythical ouroboros feasting on its own tail.
In reality, to the extent that the labor force has migrated from the public to the private sector, the economy has flourished. Guided by superior market information – supply, demand, momentum, velocity, trend, price, volume, etc. – the economy is in the process of transforming from an ossified organ of the state, a vestigial instrument of misguided, collectivist policy, into a dynamic powerhouse, now the fastest growing economy in the entire western hemisphere.
What to do, then, when the policies that inspired such a dramatic transformation are heralded by the long-enduring public?
More free markets, not less. More dynamic enterprises, not fewer. And deeper and deeper cuts, guaranteed.
So a nation wakes, as if from a collective hallucination… and sees before it a future brimming with potential and prosperity. VLLC!
Next week, we take a look at a plan scheduled to go before congress in December that aims to migrate 100,000+ jobs from the public to the private sector. How will it work? Can it even be done?
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World…
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
founder of Notes from the End of the World
P.S. For all of Bowman’s latest musings head over to his website. While you’re there, subscribe to his newsletter for all his latest findings as they’re reported in real time.
