by WorldTribune Staff, January 29, 2024
Under state control, Argentina’s economy became a disaster area. Cleaning up that disaster area will no doubt cause short-term pain, but President Javier Milei said he will not waiver from bringing a free market economy to the nation.
“There is no Plan B,” Milei said on Tuesday in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “There is no room for feelings, for emotions. I can’t afford that luxury. There are 47 million people waiting for answers.”
After four months at the helm, Milei asserted that the measures he has implemented are already showing signs of success despite the nation’s inflation sitting at a staggering 211 percent, higher than Venezuela’s.
Milei predicted that “in two years we will have ended inflation, for sure.” The central bank has added $5 billion in the past month to foreign-currency reserves that were depleted under the system of state control.
“He has begun unwinding regulations that have long choked business, including price controls for food and restrictions on renting apartments that had created housing shortages. He has decreed hundreds of changes and has presented an omnibus bill to Congress to reduce the state’s role in the economy,” the Wall Street Journal report said.
Milei said the reforms his administration has implemented represent just “a quarter of the reforms we are proposing, and once these laws have passed, we are willing to push for more.”
Despite some protests, Milei remains popular, with 58 percent support, according to local pollster Poliarquía. A survey by Opinaia showed 70 percent of Argentines back his plans to cut public spending in a country accustomed to generous transportation and electricity state subsidies.
“The state is a coercive machine to steal resources from the private sector,” he said. “Therefore, I would never see the state as a solution to anything, but as the very source of the problem.”
Milei, 53, said questions about his ability to implement his program are “nonsense.” He said he would succeed where predecessors failed because he is a “hyperorthodox libertarian” economist.
“I am still an outsider,” Milei said. “The way I interpret my mandate is as a job. I was tasked with putting the economy in order.”
Milei said he sees the West as Argentina’s natural ally after his leftist predecessors had increasingly sided with U.S. rivals, from Russia to China to Venezuela.
“Argentina must return to the West at the same time that it has to point out to the West that it has strayed from the path, just as I did at the World Economic Forum,” he said, referring to a speech he gave earlier this month in Davos, Switzerland, which received praise from Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump.
Though he turned down an invitation to join the likes of China and Russia in the BRICS group of nations, Milei denies he has “blown up” ties with China, one of Argentina’s top trade partners.
“It’s true that I will not be allied with the communists,” Milei said of Beijing. “But you must separate geopolitical issues from our trade ones.”
Milei, who is due to visit Israel in February, has said there is a possibility that he would convert to Judaism, though he said complying with Shabbat on Saturday could conflict with his workload.
“It’s something that has to do with my spiritual life and because of the large amount of knowledge that I derive from studying, for example, the Torah,” he said.
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