Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, just took to the Argentinian airwaves to tell the nation that, with his signing of a Necessity and Urgency Decree (DNU), a form of executive order, he was overturning about 350 socialist economic policies that he and others have characterized as dragging down the Argentinian economy.
The DNU targeted policies affecting a huge swathe of the Argentinian economy. Everything from import to price controls, health care, landlord and tenant policies, and many other issues were covered. Milei, explaining the importance of the policies, said that Argentina needs a “shock stabilization plan” to dig its way out of the issues imposed on it by decades of socialist policies.
Particularly, he argued that Argentina needs to take desperate action to avoid a financial catastrophe, one that could result as it stares down a terrible economic crisis fueled by the aforementioned socialist policies and huge amounts of lavish government spending, corruption, and skyrocketing inflation. Argentina’s long-running inflation issue had escalated dramatically and run into the range of 160 percent in early December.
In the video message broadcast to the Argentinian people, in which he was flanked by his ministers, Milei said, “We designed a shock stabilization plan that includes a fiscal adjustment plan, an exchange policy that adjusted the exchange rate to the market value and a monetary policy that includes the destruction of the central bank.”
Continuing, Milei argued that the past government created the horrible situation and that dramatic action is necessary to stave off disaster, saying, “We are making our maximum effort to try to diminish the tragic effects of what could be the worst crisis of our history, the product of decades of governments who insisted on using failed recipes.”
Then, he argued that the decades of socialist policies are the reason for Argentina’s woes, not the hardy and entrepreneurial Argentinian people, saying, “As we have been saying for months, the problem is not the chef, it’s the recipe. Those ideas that failed in Argentina are the same ideas that have failed far and wide on the planet. Where they were intended, they have failed economically, socially, culturally, and, on top of that, they have cost the lives of millions of human beings.”
Milei then named the socialist menace, saying, “This doctrine that some call leftist, socialism, fascism, communism – and which we like to catalog as collectivism – is a way of thinking that dilutes the individual in favor of the power of the state.”
Making a powerful defense of individualism and explaining why the sort of mindset and policies established by socialism are evil, Milei said, “It is the basic foundation of the caste system. It is a doctrine of thinking that is partially based on the idea that the reason of the state is more important than the individuals that comprise the nation. That the individual is only recognized if he submits to the state, and therefore citizens owe veneration to its [the state’s] representatives the political caste.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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