It’s easy to mock economists. Consider the supposedly prestigious left-leaning academics who asserted in 2021 that Biden’s agenda was not inflationary. At the risk of understatement, they wound up with egg on their faces.*
Today, we’re going to look at another example of leftist economists making fools of themselves. It involves Argentina, where President Javier Milei’s libertarian agenda has yielded amazingly positive results in just one year.
- Dramatic lowering of inflation.
- Big reductions in the burden of government spending.
- Rapidly achieving a balanced budget.
- Reductions in poverty.
- Rising levels of household income.
Some of us knew that good policy would lead to good results.
Others, like the editors at Bloomberg, perhaps did not expect such a quick turnaround. But, to their credit, they just acknowledged the amazing progress in an editorial.
Mile's Strong Start Has Proved Skeptics Wrong
The U.K.-based Telegraph leans to the right, so this headline can probably be interpreted as a victory dance.
How Milei's chainsaw economics proved his Left-wing critics wrong
But now let’s turn our attention to a group of left-wing economists who signed a letter in 2023 warning about horrible results if Milei won the election and had an opportunity to implement his laissez-faire vision. Here’s some of what they wrote.
As economists from around the world who are supportive of broad-based economic development in Argentina, we are especially concerned by the economic program of one of the candidates… Javier Milei’s economic proposals…are fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people. …
The program proposed by Milei would create more socio-economic inequality by reducing the role of the state in redistribution and social welfare. A major reduction in government spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality…reducing public spending would significantly reduce the ability of the state to meet the social and economic rights of citizens. …In short, Javier Milei’s…fiscal austerity proposals overlook the complexities of modern economies.
Wow, has any group of people ever been more wrong about anything?
By the way, 108 supposed economists signed the letter. That list includes two of the main apostles of class-warfare taxation, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman. Since we now know their policy analysis about Argentina was totally wrong, hopefully people will now be more skeptical of their horrible recommendations for the United States and the rest of the world.
One name missing from the letter is Joseph Stiglitz, which is surprising given his strident leftism. I wonder if he’s stayed off the letter because he now looks foolish given his past support for terrible policies in Venezuela and pre-Milei Argentina?
One final observation is that 11 of the 108 signers were from the nation’s worst economics department. Yes, I’m referring to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the same group that is infamous for providing advice to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
P.S. Every so often, economists make sensible observations, such as the 1,000-plus economists (noted in this video) who warned Herbert Hoover about the dangers of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. And I organized a letter in 2009 featuring several hundred economists warning against Keynesian economics and Obama’s faux stimulus.
*The bad monetary policy that led to rapidly rising prices actually began under Trump in 2020 and was continued by Biden in 2021.
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