In November of 2023, more than a hundred economists (including some of the most credentialed names in the field) signed an open letter warning that electing Javier Milei would spell "devastation" for Argentina.
Milei won anyway.
This week, Bloomberg reported that poverty in Argentina has fallen to its lowest level since 2018.
Yep. The guy the experts said would devastate the country just oversaw the single biggest reduction in poverty Argentina has seen in years, and he did it by doing the things every respectable economist said were insane.
He cut government, slashed spending, got the state out of the way, and let markets actually function.
To understand how dramatic this is, let me offer a little context on where Argentina was when the best and brightest in the field of economics offered their warning about Milei.
This is a country that had been printing money to cover its debts for so long that inflation had climbed above 200%. (!!!) Grocery prices were doubling so fast that people who were getting paid on Thursday were spending everything by Friday because the peso they held on Saturday was worth less than the one they'd earned two days earlier.
The government had tried price controls, capital controls, and subsidy programs. They’d pulled every lever the interventionist playbook offers to “control” an economy. Of course, each intervention made things worse.
By the time Milei took office, Argentina was in genuine freefall.
What he did was not complicated. He cut the number of government ministries nearly in half. He eliminated subsidies. He stopped the money printer. He balanced the budget (something Argentina hadn't managed in over a century).
He did it fast, and it was painful. The people who'd signed that open letter (and the media outlets that ran it) spent the next several months pointing at the short-term pain as proof they'd been right.
They weren't right, and the data is now showing the truth.
Of course this isn't the first time government interference in the market has caused untold harm—not by a long shot.
Remember when Venezuela implemented price controls on food to make groceries more "affordable?" Shelves were empty within months and people resorted to eating zoo animals.
Or how about when Zimbabwe printed its way to prosperity and ended up with hundred-trillion-dollar notes that could barely buy a loaf of bread?
Remember when the smartest people in every room told us that the 2008 bank bailouts were absolutely necessary, and that letting those institutions fail would cause irreversible damage, but failed to notice that the people who caused the crash got bonuses while everyone else lost their homes?
Pepperidge Farm remembers. And so do I.
The pattern is so consistent it's almost boring at this point. The consensus by so-called “experts” is almost always wrong. The market always works when it is left alone. The state always makes any problem worse. The only thing surprising is that the people who were wrong write papers explaining why they were actually right, and get invited back on television to make the next (wrong) prediction.
Frédéric Bastiat touched on this more than 150 years ago in That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen.
His original argument was about the unseen costs of government intervention—how when the state spends, subsidizes, or controls, you see the immediate effect, and it often seems good. But what you don't see (yet) are the businesses that never opened, the investments that never happened, the prosperity that was strangled before it even had a chance to take its first breath.
The seen is the government program. The unseen is everything it killed.
Argentina has shown us the other side of that coin. The seen was pain—real, immediate, undeniable hardship as the government stopped propping everything up all at once. The unseen was what was coming. The inflation that would stop, the businesses that would form, the wealth that would begin to build because a paycheck would actually be worth something by the end of the week and, most importantly, the human flourishing that inevitably follows when people are finally left alone to make their own decisions.
The economists who signed that letter only looked at what they could see, and unfortunately for the rest of us, most economists today see things through a Keynesian lens.
The good news is that you don't have to wait for economists to figure it out. You can teach your kids the truth right now, at home, before the Keynesian consensus gets to them first.
In fact, we wrote a book for exactly that reason. The Tuttle Twins and the Messed Up Market walks kids through what happens when governments try to control economies, and, even better, what happens when they don't.
It's based on Ludwig von Mises' Human Action, but Ethan and Emily make it considerably more entertaining than Ludwig did.
Really, that's what all of our books do. They take the ideas that actually shape a free and flourishing life—sound economics, individual liberty, how markets work and why governments fail—and make them accessible to kids in a way that feels natural and fun.
Right now you can grab one of our best-selling bundles for your family (or for someone else's kids who could use it) and if you use code EASTER you’ll get an additional 20% off.
Let’s face it. None of these lessons are coming home in a backpack. Schools don’t teach time-tested principles that lead to freedom, peace, and prosperity. But that’s okay, because parents have always been the ones responsible for passing down the things that matter most anyway.
We’re just here to give you the best resources to help you in the vital work you’re doing.
— Connor
