I don’t care much for politicians. Most of them are just the bosses of a legal mafia. But there are a few exceptions.
My current Number One is Javier Milei of Argentina.
But first, a trip down memory lane…
In 1913, an Argentine bricklayer earned more than a French one. Buenos Aires had electric trams before most of Europe. The phrase “rich as an Argentine” was something people said in Paris back then.
Then Argentina spent 70 years proving you can, in fact, unmake a rich country—deliberately, democratically, and with popular enthusiasm.
They had turned to democratic socialism.
But in December 2023, a TV economist with unmanageable hair walked into the Casa Rosada holding a chainsaw.
Paying to be Poor
Here’s the thing about Argentina’s decline that makes it an object lesson for us: nobody invaded. There was no plague, no partition, nor any resource curse. Argentina had the grain, the cattle, the ports, and the schools. And entrepreneurs made the best of it.
What got introduced was Peronism. (Take note here, because this matters to the current Zeitgeist.)
Peronism wasn’t revolutionary. There were no gulags. They held elections. What Peronists did in power was subordinate the entire productive ecosystem of a nation to the political need to distribute favors. Price controls to make voters feel richer, tariffs to make a factory owner loyal, subsidies to make a union quiet, and a printing press to pay the tab.
Tax. Inflate. Transfer. Print money to buy constituency groups, then blame the consequences on “oligarchs” and “neoliberals.” Sound familiar? Repeat this for seventy years.
What nobody wants to admit is that Peronism is just Democratic Socialism.
And, as it always does, the bill came due. Since the rise of Peronism in the 1940s, Argentina has repeatedly defaulted. Currency devaluations were so routine that Argentines learned to think in dollars and treat the peso like a hot potato. By late 2023, inflation was running north of 200% a year, their central bank reserves were gone, and poverty rose above 40% in a country that used to feed the world.
The Knowledge Problem
So Javier Milei arrives on the scene. And the strange thing about Milei—the thing the international press could never quite digest—is that he didn’t just campaign on rock and roll and chainsaws. He campaigned on Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.
The Austrian School's economic argument is established, simple, and almost no one in power has ever paid any attention to it.
Hayek’s version goes like this: the knowledge a society runs on doesn’t exist in a committee or in the wisdom of a commissar. It is scattered across millions of people—what the guy in Rosario knows about his soil, what the shopkeeper in Córdoba knows about her customers this week. Prices are how that knowledge travels: information wrapped in an incentive. Freeze prices like Mamdani freezes rents, and you haven’t protected anyone. You’ve cut the accountability loop.
Planners aren’t evil; it’s just that the information they’d need can never be centralized.
From that insight, Milei insists on three commitments: Let prices tell the truth. Make property and contract ensure that people will build things that outlast an election cycle. And shrink the state, because deficits financed by the printing press are not a policy so much as slow suicide—a tax on everyone too poor to hold dollars.
Milei’s innovation wasn’t the theory. The theory has been sitting there since the 1920s, when Mises articulated the socialist calculation problem. Milei’s innovation was transitioning all at once, publicly—in a democracy—while telling voters it would hurt before it got better.
What Milei Did
Milei closed Ministries. Cut subsidies. And scrapped price controls. And the rent-control regime—the one that had stripped Buenos Aires of apartments—was repealed outright.
Then the numbers started to move. Five indicators, before and after…
First: Inflation. In December 2023, prices rose twenty-five and a half percent in one single month. But by mid-2026, monthly prints had fallen below two percent. Annual inflation plummeted from 211 percent down to 33. That is the difference between a country where restaurants reprint menus weekly and one where a family can actually plan a year ahead. Capital controls were removed, rental listings flooded back into Buenos Aires, and real rents DROPPED—which is EXACTLY what every housing economist predicted, and what no democratic socialist anywhere wants to hear.
Second—and this is the fuel behind the first—the Budget. Argentina ran a deficit of around three percent of GDP in 2023. After Milei, Argentina saw a primary surplus of 1.8 percent in 2024, followed by 1.4 percent in 2025.
That’s right: Back-to-back surpluses—the first time that’s happened since 2008—and Milei’s government is on pace for a trifecta. And get this: The central bank stopped printing money because it no longer needed to fund the deficit.
Third: Poverty. Official figures show poverty peaked at nearly 53 percent during the initial shock and now sits at 28 percent, with extreme poverty dropping from 18 percent down to 6. And that’s breathtaking if true.
Now, let’s look at two asterisks:
A) Market reforms hurt at first. That 53 percent peak happened under Milei due to his adjustments. And real people lost real jobs getting from there to here. But the pain was short-lived.
B) The poverty figures are the most contested of the set. Researchers argue that the household survey’s rising reports of non-employment income flatter the trend. A twenty-five-point move is hard to deny, but Milei’s critics at least deserve a hearing.
Now, when you consider the man hasn’t even been in office for three years, these results are stunning.
Fourth: Country Risk. This is the number almost nobody cites, and it might be the most revealing. It’s the premium the world charges Argentina to borrow money. In 2023, it ran north of 2000 basis points. Today, it’s around 600—a two-thirds collapse. Notice what that number is NOT: it ain’t produced by government statistics agencies, a minister, or a press office massage artist. Strangers with money, on aggregate, have decided Argentina is far less likely to default. You can’t spin a bond spread. It is the least sentimental opinion poll on Earth. And it made a big move in the right direction.
Fifth: Production. Now, go stand out in Patagonia. Vaca Muerta shale output is up over 30 percent year-on-year, pushing national oil production past 840,000 barrels a day. That’s a record. A country that used to import energy now exports it, swinging the current account to a multi-billion-dollar surplus and driving GDP growth to 4.4 percent.
Why It Matters
Look, I’m not here to canonize Javier Milei. He’s a mid-term politician, and history is unkind to people who declare victory too early.
What I care about is what his reforms are PROVING. Because the argument we always seem to be having—the one about free markets vs state intervention—usually happens in the subjunctive. Everyone gets to keep their ideological priors forever because nobody ever wants to admit the tests have been run (See 70s Sweden and 80s New Zealand).
But when it comes to democratic socialism, Argentina ran the experiment, and ran it long and hard. It wasn’t a city-state, island, or a special economic zone. Argentina is a large, indebted, deeply politicized country with a seventy-year debt-spending habit and a population that had every reason to turn their backs on Peronism.
Two lessons come out of Argentina’s test:
The first is that Argentina’s version of democratic socialism—Peronism—failed because the system ate itself. Promise more than the economy brings in, cover the shortfall with printed money, and that money devours the wages of the people you swore to protect. Inflation is the most regressive tax ever invented.
The second is that such failure is reversible and is quickly being reversed. That’s what I hope you’ll hold onto. 70 years of accumulated damage began to unwind in two and a half years—not because anyone found a clever new lever, but because someone stopped pulling the old socialist ones.
The knowledge and energy were already there—distributed among the people—in their heads, hands, and productive capabilities. It didn’t need to be granted. It needed to be unleashed.
From the Rooftops
So: shout out it! Peronism was the warning. It’s too easy to vote your way into ruin, slowly, sincerely, with a credulous majority behind you.
Javier Milei is living proof that the alternative exists. Reform is rough, but the pain is quick, and the results are impressive. Freedom works. Entrepreneurship works. While the US, mired in debt, is running toward democratic socialism—they’re running away from it in Latin America.
I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.
