Milei shows how to actually drain a swamp
One of the first things I learned about “conservatives” in Washington DC was that they weren’t really interested in cutting government. Though they would criticize “big government Democrats”, in the end the Republicans spent with nearly as much abandon. There was no real discussion of fighting crony capitalism, or dependence on the state, because the Republicans by and large benefited from the crony system (and it was not as bad then as it is today) and were addicted to government spending just like their Dem “opponents”.
Post September 11th, 2001 the Republicans were more than happy to expand the state. Hello Department of Homeland Security! The Patriot Act, which was the metastasization of the surveillance state as we now know it, passed with almost unanimous “small government Republican” support.
Post 9-11 one never heard any real talk of cutting agencies, or scaling back outdated defense projects, or dismantling the New Deal and it’s ongoing legacy. No, we heard about “compassionate conservatism” from George Bush II who also in his final presidential days, as the world stared down an economic crisis created by economic interventionism, said, “I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system”.
This is truly one of the most stupid statements ever made by a president (officially). He was of course trying to justify the market interventionism, the bailouts, that were happening on his watch. And we are willing to bet that despite his Yale MBA, Bush really didn’t realize that it was economic meddling that got the world into the Great Recession in the first place.
Bush was and is of a feather. The “conservatives” of a generation ago weren’t liberty oriented. They went along with the expansion of the state, sometimes dragging their heels, but always in the end going along.
But as the Boomers pass from the scene a new generation of ACTUAL small government leaders is emerging.
The most important of these at the moment is Javier Milei the president of Argentina.
As you can see in the attached video below he shares a love of what we call “sustainable economics”.
A large welfare state is fundamentally unsustainable. In the medium to long run it will start to fall on itself. If large numbers of people are employed in make-work government (and government reliant) jobs, someone has to pay for those jobs. It is the actual organic economy that does this. It is the people doing business, inventing things, investing their money, who create real wealth who pay for the government jobs and programs.
If these programs become too big eventually they start to cripple the organic economy. The make-work job holders, the big-time crony capitalists, the people perpetually on welfare of one kind or another are net draws on the economy. If the state is too large the system will implode, one way or another. A large state that robs the productive part of the economy and continues to grow as it robs is unsustainable fundamentally.
Of course a system with a large welfare state (and we are absolutely including corporate welfare in the welfare state) can continue on for a long time. We have. Argentina did.
Argentina is ahead of us on the unsustainability curve. We’d be wise to listen to Mr. Milei and to embrace a philosophy of small government that functions well but in a very limited way before we in the US face an existential crisis.
But there are still too few people in power who would dare to publicly embrace such a philosophy. Things aren’t bad enough yet.
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Read the full transcript of president Javier Milei’s interview with Time
