- he doesn’t have anything like a majority in the Argentine congress (in either house). I don’t know Argentine law and would welcome comments from someone who actually does but it would surprise me if this is something the president can do unilaterally.
- as a practical matter, Argentina itself does not have enough dollars to make this happen. You need a ton (more than that…) literally of physical currency to make this work. I don’t think their reserves are sufficient to cover it. (You need many additional tons of coins to make it practical too…)
Separately this is generally not a great idea economically. You do kill inflation in Argentina (replaced with American inflation but that is extremely low and stable by Argentine standards). But you have no control over your monetary policy or your exchange rates. If your economy is export driven to (e.g.) China, you now have to worry about the dollar-yuan rate, which is not under your control.
Of course this is also Argentina which is a particular basket case economically so I won’t rule out the possibility that this could be better than what they have now (or would have had under the loser in this election). But my guess is this would be worse if implemented.
For a country which produces a large number of really outstanding economists (including great macroeconomists!) Argentina is surprising disaster.
Well, a good example is given by Yanis Varoufakis (which is, ironically, an economist himself) in his book "adults in the room".
In this book, Varoufakis, which was Greece Finance Ministry at the time, explains how he was tasked to negotiate with EU institutions and IMF to alleviate Greece debts. While he proposes restructuring plans after restructuring plans, nobody even try to argue with him on the plans. They all say that there should be a strong austerity, it is the way to go. At one point, he managed to get a glimpse of what is presented to him as a very complex economical model that he (phd in economy) could not understand and, by looking into the code, discover that it is utterly stupid: the whole agenda of austerity is based on the fallacy that you could raise taxes without affecting consumption.
You could say that my example is only saying that there are good and bad economists and that things go wrong when politicians listen to bad economists.
Well, it turns out that politicians only listen to bad economists (because that’s what they want to hear) which make any influential economist a bad one (because you can’t really make a career as a good one who say things like "give more money to the poor" or "tax the rich").
Varoufakis is an exception here but not so much: he was quickly removed from office once people understood that he would not agree to become a bad economists to stay in power.
I took a couple of courses in economics at Uni, because you are forced to do a few electives. The micro economics looked similar to physics applied to money to me, meaning it was mathematical models applied to very simple situations. It was interesting but the world is not simple. They term their attempts to expand it to real world models macro economics. That worked about as well as using physics to predict the weather which is to say not bad, but you wouldn't bet your life on the predictions. The math and logic was pleasingly
rigorous, but the models were either too simple or beyond the most powerful computer.
That was Uni. Then I started read pieces by "economists" in the popular press. They written "pop science" style, where the science being discussed is economics. But where pop science is often a genuine attempt to educate, these articles by "economists" were invariably little better than opinion pieces. To this engineer they often read like near pure bullshit. Worse, after a while, it because obvious it was paid by the word bullshit. As in, if you look at the job description for "Chief Economist" at a bank it reads like a PR position, not someone paid to predict economic outcomes.
I do feel sorry for the academic discipline. The tarnish painted by the brushes held by the colleagues paid by politicians and PR services reeks, which in turn means they go through life wearing the snide comments you see about their efforts here. Balancing that is things like the current interest rate. If I believe what I read, the worlds reserve banks kept interest rates low because the worlds top economists told them the COVID cash bazooka would not lead to inflation. WTF? I have no idea if this was just another case of economists saying what they were paid to say, or it really was the underlying academic consensus. But the independent reserve banks acted on that advice, and if they can't pick the paid bullshitters from the those doing true research then I've got no hope.
I’ve also taken a few economic classes during my engineering degree and the math was, most of the time, trivial. But they were proud of it and applying like physics, like you said. The basic hypothesis is "people will act rationally in their own interest".
Well, they just forgot one aspect: people are not rationales. They never are. The whole advertising business relies on people not being slightly rationale at all. There’s no even a point in making people rationales. And this is not always bad: people will sometimes act kindly despise their own interest.
The whole "people act rationally for their own selfish short-term interest" is what gave us most economical theology from Smith to this day (cheers to Ayn Rand for writing the fairy tales about it). It’s mostly as reliable as astrology: sounds mathematics applied on a completely false hypothesis.
And, yes, politicians have been using it exactly like astrology with similar results because one of the key principle is that it justifies the existence of rich people (those are who acted the more rationally and thus are rewarded. Did I say that everyone acts rationally? Well, yes, that’s the hypothesis. Don’t try to confuse me).
Just to highlight how far fetched mainstream economical "science" is, just consider that there is a new field called "behavioral economy". Behavioral economy introduces a whole new paradigm: "what if, instead of assuming that people are rational selfish, we actually observes and make theory from observations".
Which is, you know, what we call "science". And, unsurprizingly, every behavioral economist start to say thing like "hey, if we tax the rich, it works!" "hey, we can help the poor by handing them money". "hey, we should not let banks create money and then hand them the money they created and lost themselves".
It’s a bit like a few astrologists started to consider "what if really tried to look at the starts?" and invented astronomy. But every king, every government was laughing at them for being young and naives.
The error was that somewhere along the way between Aristotle and modern times, humans went from being seen as rationally-capable to rationally-driven. Nobody seriously disputes that we are capable of rationality; it is just that we are still driven more by instinct and emotion in our default modes.
>The basic hypothesis is "people will act rationally in their own interest"
This is, as we all know, true to the "first order" approximation. We know it in business - you get what you incentivise - it's behind Goodhart's law (when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure).
It is however, an incomplete description of human behaviour, again, as we all know. But since "second and higher" approximations of human behaviour are hard to model... they don't do it.
And just so you know, it's just as easy to do bad, "left wing", Lysenkoist economics.
Several countries already use the dollar like El Salvador, Cambodia, Ecuador, Panama. Cambodia and Panama use local currency in sub $1 amounts only, and El Salvador and Ecuador were exclusively USD until E.S added BTC, but I know from locals there that it's rarely used and USD is still king. Argentina wouldn't be the first but it would be the biggest. My question is what happens when/if a country this big tries to dollarize? Will there be a huge demand affecting USD rates? Would we just ship them container loads of banknotes? Does the US even want this and can US officials just say no?
Totally not expert opinion on the Euro question: I had the same thought and as with USD there are countries that singlelateraly adopted the Euro. The Euro also seems similarly stable. The only differences I see are:
Pro-Euro: Euro already is controlled by a wider range of countries and there is some incentive to match monetary policy to accommodate those wider circumstances. So a policy is less likely to just support a single countries unique situation and conflict with Argentina's situation.
Pro-USD: USD is already more widespread in South America and actively being used in Argentina right now. This advantage is very practical and concrete right now and trump's all else
> Pro-USD: USD is already more widespread in South America and actively being used in Argentina right now. This advantage is very practical and concrete right now and trump's all else
this needs to be repeated. USD is already the way of doing business in the ARG, and this is essentially just calling it what it is.
this is also seen as a way to stabilize the back-and-forth economic choices that make the currency terrible.
makes sense in theory, but they're an export economy, and a strong USD will make it hard sell beef and mining products.
I'd add that the US is generally quite in favour of dollarization even though the Fed only cares about the US and the EU is only in favour of countries adopting the Euro via it's accession process and adopting its macroeconomic rules. Certainly the ECB has no incentive to consider Argentina's economy when making monetary policy decisions, and if anything might take the opposite stance that it's a competitive threat to Eurozone trade.
I presume by Fed you mean the not-government 'federal reserve' which is a contractor to Congress which tinkers with monetary policy and sets the price of money. Federal Reserve quietly provided bailouts to Europe in 2008.
New York Times article,
'“an open facility where European banks could come and get dollars.”
So began what would become the biggest United States government bailout that most people do not know anything about.'
But they did so because the European owned banks were active in the US serving US customers (and solvent enough to repay) which is why they had the dollar obligations they needed to borrow to meet in the first place.
Argentina or Panama having a bit of an economic slowdown whilst the US is growing nicely isn't the Fed's problem: the monetary policy decisions will only take into account to the monetary policy needs of the US, and it's not particularly in the interests of the Fed to bail out Argentine bank reserve shortfalls unless the contagion is likely to hit the Us either.
There is also something to be said about who is the larger trade partner. If you do more trade with the US than the Eurozone, makes more sense to choose the dollar.
An Argentinian could probably explain this better than I can, but there's already a parallel dollar economy in Argentina. These "blue dollars" have a semi-official exhange rate and everything.
The Blue dollar refers to the grey market exchange rate currently hovering around 950 Argentina Pesos to 1 US Dollar. The official exchange rate is set at about 350 to 1. It is actually quite hard to spend US dollars directly in Arg. However it is common for both foreigners and Argentines to use grey market money changers at the blue rate. Argentines are only allowed to purchase a limited number of US dollars at the official rate each month so if they want to travel or protect the value of their savings from the extreme inflation they need to use the grey market to do so. The Blue dollar exist because the current government artificially pegs the peso at the lower rate.
Not an argentinean, but I don't think that's the right way to look at it.
You can exchange dollars in any country and in many you can directly pay in stores if the storekeeper is flexible. You wouldn't call that a parallel dollar economy.
The only additional point in Argentina is thay they have an official exchange rate that is way way different from the true exchange rate (ie the one that arises from demand and supply). That's why you can exchange dollars through the official channels and get, say, 500 pesos, or you can exchange from an unofficial one and get 1000 pesos
Euro is far, also Euro is far more left leaning (I guess) than the US (even democrats in the US would be considered right form the center in Europe). But the real issue would be the lack of currency reserves - least I'd think Argentina might have more Dollar notes than Euro ones.
The Euro and the eurozone (and the countries represent by) are related, along with its monetary policies. Similar to the USD (the dollar) - US is part of the name.
The elected president is on the quite right side of the spectrum, so associating with any left wing policies/countries would be very unlikely, given Argentina's currency dropped massively during the last years. He won vs a candidate who used to be a financial minister overseeing several hundreds percent inflation.
Clearly, a left-leaning currency is one supported by an economy based on facts, and a right-leaning currency is supported by an economy based on feelings.
If we are to go in such technicalities, Ecuador is closer.
The distance - far/close matters when it comes to the trading partners more than anything. The US and Brazil being the biggest ones[0], and the trade is in USD.
How does Europe being left leaning matter? The exchange rate is basically as stable as USD... Or do you mean it's just because of the strong Milei's ideology?
Nothing to do with the EUR/USD rate, of course. I very much doubt the 'new' president would even hear anything left leaning, he is considered rather radical.
> even democrats in the US would be considered right form the center in Europe
That used to be the case but it is true no longer, current 'Democrats' (between quotes because the DNC seems to be as democratic as the DRC from what I've seen) are comparable to centre-left parties in north-western Europe. The more activist wing of the 'Democrats' is comparable to socialist and communist parties in e.g. Sweden and the Netherlands.
I've been in favor of abolishing the minting of physical US pennies, but I suppose this is one argument against it: other countries that use the dollar might actually find pennies to be useful.
The good thing for Americans about coins is they are minted and issued without incurring debt. Notes are printed, sold to 'federal reserve' for pennies per sheet, then loaned into circulation which increases the debt which Americans then pay or will pay.
Notes as money is bizarre share-cropping, and USA people would be reasonable to advocate for coins in larger denominations like 10 50 and 500 to avoid borrowing notes into existence.
All money is debt. Money is synonymous with debt. Everything you call money, including coins, notes and numbers in a proverbial spreadsheet is a record of a liability of some entity (i.e. debt). Coins and notes are liabilities of the central bank
US coins are not debt. Coins are minted and issued as fiat then sold at face value to 'federal reserve'. Modern US notes are debt, which is why the paper has the word 'note'. Compare that with earlier paper dollars which had the word 'certificate' as in Silver Certificate - they were backed by metals.
The coins are bought with newly created money which creates the necessary liability side of money creation. All that happens is the fed spreadsheet asset is swapped for a physical token with the same asset value. What most people think of as money is the asset associated with an asset-liability pair.
Even if it's not recorded as such, money is always a liability to its issuer, otherwise there would be no point issuing it.
> The coins are bought with newly created money which creates the necessary liability side of money creation.
Not in USA. US coins are fiat without a liability. This leads to people every few years thinking they discovered that coins are just fiat and then recycling the idea of minting some $1 trillion coins and paying off the federal debt. It is technically possible, there would be no debt for the coin issuance, and would likely lead to nobody willing to purchase future USA debt issuances.
Really bizarre are the gift shops at the US Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing where they have tours to watch the printing presses. They sell to tourists uncut sheets of dollars that they print. But they first buy the sheets at face value plus the printing costs from 'federal reserve' who bought the sheets at pennies per _sheet_ that Treasury just printed.
"When purchasing the notes, the BEP authorizes the Reserve Banks to charge Treasury's general account for the face value of the notes plus the cost of printing."
> money is always a liability to its issuer
No, though prove me wrong and show us the coin liabilities on USA balance sheet somewhere.
Since taxes can be paid in coin, it's clearly a liability to the treasury regardless of whether it's recorded on a balance sheet as such.
In practice a coin is a token that represents a liability at the Fed much like a deposit. That token can be used to claim an actual deposit at the Fed (by agents, not little people, obviously).
I'm not aware of a law that requires a coin be bought by the fed at face value. It just seems to be the historical norm. If you're aware of such a requirement please let me know.
In summary, the coins are not the "money", they're just tokens that for historical reasons the fed buys from the treasury at face value and can record at face value in their balance sheet. It could in principle just as easily be the case the fed is not required to balance with anything from the treasury (e.g. not T-bills) against new money creation - they're just forced to hand over the deposits to the control of the treasury. The net effect would be exactly like the coin case (hence the trillion dollar coin nonsense).
The difference is US dollar notes have a liability which is paid to banks 'federal reserve' and coins do not have liabilities so coins don't cost USA when issued. Coins are just issued. Notes (paper dollars and electronic) are loaned into existence and USA pays interest to federal reserve for the USA's own money.
Like a credit card, national debt pulls foward spending at the price of paying interest to bankers.
Breaking glass windows also increases growth (or GDP) because it forces spending to replace the broken windows. Similar GDP increase when USA builds missiles to blow up bridges (over there somewhere) and later provides funds to US contractors to rebuild those bridges. GDP number go up, along with debt and interest costs.
Montenegro uses Euros (always did) and they seem to be doing just fine.
U.S. won't say no because for U.S., it means in effect getting a no-interest, indefinite duration loan from Argentina (free money).
It lasted about 10 years and was eventually abandoned. TLDR: "Simply put, the dollar peg overvalued the peso in the rest of the world, especially against a weak euro and the Brazilian real, reducing Argentina's competitiveness and compounding the account deficit."
> Separately this is generally not a great idea economically. You do kill inflation in Argentina (replaced with American inflation but that is extremely low and stable by Argentine standards). But you have no control over your monetary policy or your exchange rates. If your economy is export driven to (e.g.) China, you now have to worry about the dollar-yuan rate, which is not under your control.
"generally not a great idea economically" is true, but this specific case is one of the few where it could be a fantastic idea.
Control over one's currency > pegging to or using USD >>>> historic Argentinian monetary policy. If (1) is impossible, then (2) would represent monumental improvement over the status quo.
> Separately this is generally not a great idea economically. You do kill inflation in Argentina (replaced with American inflation but that is extremely low and stable by Argentine standards). But you have no control over your monetary policy or your exchange rates. If your economy is export driven to (e.g.) China, you now have to worry about the dollar-yuan rate, which is not under your control.
I am not a economics person by any sort, but why does that matter? If China is buying say minerals at $4 a ton or something, versus 1415.41 Pesos how does that change. If US is strong and the Yuan dips, it now costs X% more to convert to $ then before, that just means you decrease price of export by X %? If we are speaking entirely on a 1 to 1 partner.
But on the plus side it also opens you up to buyers who trade in USD, they no longer need to trade to a bunch of Peso first. And since most export companies probably already accept USD for trades, I don't see what the negative is.
- as a practical matter, Argentina itself does not have enough dollars to make this happen. You need a ton (more than that…) literally of physical currency to make this work. I don’t think their reserves are sufficient to cover it. (You need many additional tons of coins to make it practical too…)
Why do they need reserves? Abolish all federal obligations. Let the exporters accept only USD for their goods and allow them to figure out how it gets distributed through the Argentinian economy.
A possibly good example to look at is Indian in 2016. In 2016, India abolished bank notes of certain denominations that formed the majority of value of bank notes in circulation.
Note, India has its own currency and was able to print alternative notes. However, because the government, against all the advice from its economists decided to do this in secret, it did not have enough of the new notes to replace the old notes for at least a few months after making this decision.
This simple act, which only involved replacing old notes with new ones, in a currency that the Indian government controlled, led conservatively to tens of thousands of deaths, arrested economic growth in a fast growing country immediately, destroyed hundreds of thousands of businesses, and set the economy back conservatively by 5-10 years, although the significantly reduced growth in the subsequent years since (at least until the pandemic...it's likely the pandemic where India enforced amongst the strictest lockdowns in the world would have reset the economies in both cases) probably has a continued compounding effect on economic growth.
Of course, a large part of the damage to India was a result of the massive size of the informal sector relative to most other countries in the world and Argentine may not be anything like that, but I think it's a very relative comparison as to how easily such a transition can go bad if not handled extremely carefully.
> This simple act, which only involved replacing old notes with new ones, in a currency that the Indian government controlled, led conservatively to tens of thousands of deaths, arrested economic growth in a fast growing country immediately, destroyed hundreds of thousands of businesses, and set the economy back conservatively by 5-10 years, although the significantly reduced growth in the subsequent years since (at least until the pandemic...
So the moment they announce this, everyone in Argentina has no money (except USD they're already holding)? Who would trade a single dollar for any amount of pesos?
Argentina has different exchange rates for locals and foreigners. There is also a black market rate. Locals who have access to the black market want tourists to pay in dollars as it is the best deal.
If Argentina actually had honest exchange rates they would have about the right reserves. However they are using a false rate for most and so switching will force them to use the real rates which would devalue specific things. (They have export restrictions on many products because they can't control the exchange rate)
> it would surprise me if this is something the president can do unilaterally.
This is Latin America we are talking about.
To be clear, I do generally agree with your comment. Just saying, don't be surprised.
Argentina is a country with great natural and people resources that was utterly decimated by a legacy of mismanagement and corruption going back to the Spanish era. Not something that is easy to fix.
On top of that, when over 40% of the population works, in some way, for the government the problem is much harder to fix. A huge percentage of these people are nothing less than parasites, in that they do nothing of value to anyone. How do you take a parasite whos skill set amounts to moving sheets of paper from one pile to the next and turn them into useful members of society? How do you do that when your industry has been decimated and you haven't fostered a more productive culture? It's nearly impossible.
The problem with people who don't have context on Argentina talking about Argentina is that it really shows when they just use general theory to the specific case without acknowledging context.
Acknowledge the contact political printing and chaos, poverty and institutional collapse that being able to control the currency has, ans you'll come out with the conclusion that USD as the currency, which what has been used de facto and aggressively attempted to stop by the gov, would be the ideal solution if achievable.
If you don't mention peronism in your analysis or inflation or debt or the transition to democracy it's very hard to see how you're qualified to speak and be at the top of HN about this.
But I guess I have to thank that it's the typical "he's a crazy organ salesman!1!1!1"
I am not an Argentinian but I know that country reasonably well. USD is _already_ a de-facto second currency over there. Because of rampant inflation Argentinians keep their savings in USD. You cannot walk a couple of blocks in Buenos Aires without running past semi-official "dollar blue" exchange office. I think Argentina already has enough green bucks to cover circulation.
I've read from multiple sources that they don't have the assets but couldn't they sell off state industries to gather enough assets? I thought one of the new President's plans was to privatize everything there.
Is this from personal knowledge? If so, can you explain how you know this?
I ask because I lived there for 5 years, and anytime I sold dollars for pesos, the cuevas (the place that does the exchange) were extremely picky as to which $100 bills they would take.
>This is the fulfillment of Hayek dream of stripping control of the currency from the state.
Choosing the dollar isn't "stripping control" from the state, it's giving it to a sovereign state that doesn't have your interests in mind. Given the current situation it may be better, but lets stay in reality here.
> Choosing the dollar isn't "stripping control" from the state
Until now, the government of Argentina has abused its currency monopoly by printing money, with devastating consequences. Inflation is approaching 150% per year. By "We'll abolish legal tender, stripping control from the state", GP means "We'll abolish legal tender, eliminating the government's currency monopoly and allowing the people to choose a sound currency." This is, by definition, "stripping control from the state", where "the state" obviously refers to the Argentine government.
> it's giving it to a sovereign state that doesn't have your interests in mind.
This would be true if the Argentine government was imposing the dollar as legal tender, but they're not. They're allowing the people their choice of currency. For now, that may well be the dollar. But if the US government begins to abuse the dollar (via inflationary policies, for example), dollars will lose favor and a more sound currency will take its place.
This also prevents the Argentine government from steering their economy with monetary policy, but Libertarians view this as a feature rather than a bug.
If you use Zimbabwe as a model, it will probably be dollars plus a basket of regional currencies. A lot of South African Rand circulates in Zimbabwe so you might see a lot of Brazilian Reals, not to mention Pesos from other countries.
Legal tender means a currency that has to be accepted when tendered to settle a debt.
So in practice it is very inconvenient not to have one and to be able to refuse anything you want or to have to accept anything. The workaround is to have a contractual clause that specifies exactly how a debt may be discharged.
Legal tender has an even narrower definition in some countries. For instance, in the UK, legal tender is the currency that has to be accepted by a court of law when a debt is to be paid to them. In all other cases, for instance if there is a debt to a private individual or a company, then the law has nothing to say. Mostly we get by on the "Oh, don't be ridiculous" principle.
That's actually very important and why it exists: It ensures a way to settle debts. "Oh don't be ridiculous" has very little weight in money and debts disputes.
In the case you mention this is called "defence of tender before claim". It means the person offered to the money but that was refused, so they go and pay it into court to protect themselves. In effect it means that if someone offers to settle in legal tender and is refused, then follow that legal procedure, then the creditor cannot do anything anymore expect recovering the money from the court.
A wonder if a pound note actually meant a single pound (or just pound type, e.g. £5). It's a genuine question how it would be perceived in the UK, esp. when spoken by non Brit/Irish person.
It actually happened to me once, when I was in London dining in a restaurant. I wanted to pay in cash that I withdrew in Scotland and the lady did decline the money I gave her.
Pretty wild for me as a German doing a little trip through the UK.
Very German thing to do, yet in the UK I have not had a need to pay in cash, just use your card (or phone/watch if you are into that). Dunno if it was the money type, or just not want to be dealing with cash per se.
I’m by no means an expert in Argentina nor its currency. However, don’t many Argentinians who work for US/European firms already get paid in USD?
A few years ago, I managed a team of developers and analysts. They were all paid in USD through a shell company, if you will. Everyone expected this. The first question new recruiting firms asked us was, “You will be paying in USD, correct?”
We had one guy who had to be paid 50% in ARS because he had child support obligations, and it was a headache. Not because of the split on our side, but for the shell company. He was actually the lone ARS exception employee to be paid in ARS
The amount of Argentines who live in Argentina who get paid in dollars is ridiculously small, so small that I'd bet it's statistically insignificant. You're talking about an edge case - developers and analysts, of those developers and analysts, ones that are skilled enough (in their trade and in the english language) to work abroad, and lucky enough to get sought-after remote positions. There's also a very small number of people who are paid in a cryptocurrency tethered to the US dollar.
However, remember that the vast majority of Argentines are paid in pesos. Even with salary adjustments, the vast majority of Argentine salaries cannot keep up with triple digit inflation. Bank accounts have a minimum of double digit interest rates and your money still loses value in relation to inflation. This is a large part of why the poverty rate has increased from a little under a third of the country to over 40% of the country.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. The number of people who work directly for someone abroad and are paid in a foreign currency is practically insignificant.
In cybersec, the Argentinian scene is also one of the hottest producers of zero-day vulnerabilities. Those get paid in crypto, which is then washed to USD/EUR locally.
He is also a populist, who would not even allow a abortion, to a 10 year old rape victim. (that was a literal question and answer in an interview with him). Oh and he would allow the selling of children.
So I would question the consistency of his freedom ideology. If you use the state to enfore strict law on abortion, meaning deciding over other peoples bodies, how will you do so without a state? Or why do so, when you do not want a state at all?
That’s an incredibly bold claim. When did he say that and what was the context?
> If you use the state to enfore strict law on abortion, meaning deciding over other peoples bodies, how will you do so without a state? Or why do so, when you do not want a state at all?
If you consider the top job of government is to protect life, it flows pretty naturally. Just because you personally don’t agree with it does not mean it’s irrational.
"That’s an incredibly bold claim. When did he say that and what was the context?"
See Wikipedia:
"In a June 2022 interview, when asked about his stance on the sale of children, Milei initially said that "it depends"
But being a populist, apparently he took that back after some public outcry.
And when you want to abolish the whole state, then it is really not rational to use the state to enforce some radical ideology with the help of the state in my opinion. But I won't discuss forcing a 10 year old rape victim to carry a baby in the name of life here any further.
Wikipedia cites 'latin-american.news', a two-year-old domain with a global website rank of 10,989,423. For comparison, 'thelaundryspot.com', the official website of a laundromat in Austin, TX, has a global rank of 8,737,785.
This might as well be a sourced from the Wikipedia admin's blog.
edit: Lol, in the last hour, the awful source was removed and the ridiculous quote removed. The wiki now reads:
"When questioned on the topic of selling children, Milei initially responded ambiguously [womp womp] but later clarified his opposition, stating, "Obviously, I do not agree with the sale of children.""
Just getting asked such nonsense is indicative of a media trying to paint a narrative.
The next level of such nonsense would be framing it like, “Do you think both parents should have a say in the sale of children?” or “Would your universal flat tax on the sale of livestock apply to the sale of children?”.
But you are aware, there are anarchocapitalists that would allow selling children? So even if that quote is wrong(so far I have not found the original radio interview confirming or negating it), it is not a weird question(especially given his other statements). And the answer could just be "no". No narrative painting in my point of view. But I lack the original transcript.
Please use as source a reputable newspapers. The fake news campaign to attempt to destroy Milei's reputation was enormous. I wasn't able to watch a youtube video without seeing an anti-milei fear-mongering advertisement in the month before the election.
Anarcho-capitalism provides suitable conditions for strongmen, religious leaders, little feudal lords to impose their views on the less powerful, so I don't necessarily view a contradiction.
The lords are smaller scale, have more of an absolute power, not bound by things like laws and such.
To me, it seems like a repeat of history, we had an anarcho-capitalist society already, but people started to self-organize into larger groups with rules, tradition, processes ⇾ states.
Yes, large governments have less power over an individual. The president / prime minister can't decide that I deserve to be executed for a traffic offense.
A small feudal lord has fewer subjects, but also fewer (no) limits. Nothing preventing him from killing you without repercussions on a whim.
The guy's Wikipedia page[1] is a wild ride. Let's see: He's a cosplayer. He's telepathic. He speaks to dogs, both dead and alive ones. He speaks to dead people, too, including Ayn Rand. He has seen the resurrection of Christ three times, but he can't talk about it. He met a lion, as a gladiator in the Roman Colosseum 2,000 years ago.
Argentina had strict lockdowns and in the height of a wave, a picture leaked of the President and his huge family all gathered together for a fancy dinner. My coworkers were furious.
Anarcho-capitalism is a nonsense label to allow libertarians to cosplay as anarchists without having to give up on their positions of power. It seemingly only exists so rich people can be against paying taxes or having to follow laws and regulations while getting to pretend they're revolutionaries "fighting the system".
When is the last time you saw a "think of the kids" argument offered in good faith? I honestly can't remember. Anarcho-capitalists' ideal is a "consent society", free from coercion (state or otherwise). Children cannot meaningfully consent and thus selling them is not "consistent" with anarcho-capitalism.
> When is the last time you saw a "think of the kids" argument offered in good faith?
Right there, when I made one?
But no, what you're claiming doesn't align with other proponents of the ideology I've seen. They are only opposed to state coercion, but market pressures can certainly be coercive and they don't resist that.
And by what mechanism would anarcho-capitalists prevent the selling of children or child labor? They don't hold that the state has such a power. Children also don't consent to be even their parents' wards, so the consent of children is not a sufficient framework to construct a basis of opposition.
Markets don't have the will to decline child exploitation and anarcho-capitalism doesn't invest an entity with the power to prevent it. Individuals may honestly say they don't want it but the system offers nothing to oppose the incentives that will cause it.
> They are only opposed to state coercion, but market pressures can certainly be coercive and they don't resist that.
Market pressures aren't coercion, they're called incentives.
> And by what mechanism would anarcho-capitalists prevent the selling of children or child labor? They don't hold that the state has such a power.
Anarcho-capitalism has never been put into practice, so the specifics are speculative. Just as the specifics of a functioning democratic republic were speculative until the theory was put into practice.
Right now, the government has a monopoly on "justice". If you have a criminal or civil case before the courts, your case is judged according to the "common law", by a state-selected "common judge". In anarcho-capitalism, both the law and the judge would be optional. You choose your law and your judge, I choose mine, and they get together and figure out the case. "Judicial services" organizations interact and cut deals with each other all the time--the only difference is that, right now, they're all run by governments.
This begs the question of good faith (I could just say "my judge is me, and my law is that I do whatever the fuck that I want", but the incentives of such a choice don't make sense. If I murder you, who would provide justice? Thus everyone is incentivized to pay for, one way or another "judicial services", such that if you need them, they are able to come to your aid. This sounds ridiculous on its face, but if you actually think about it, it makes plenty of sense. We pay ~30% of our incomes in taxes in the US, and only a vanishingly small proportion goes to pay for government-monopolized "judicial services". It would likely be pretty cheap--just do the math on how much of your taxes go to paying for the judicial system.
But wait! All that would need to happen to enable child slavery would be for someone to form a legal-services corporation which would not view this as a crime! Sure, but for such a corporation to actually function, they would have to be viewed as legitimate by other legal-services corporations. Can you imagine GEIKO judicial services doing business with an organization that's on the record enabling child slavery? Neither can I.
Thus, if you sold a child into slavery, that child would naturally have a case against you, as you sold something that didn't belong to you and did them tremendous damage.
It's worth remembering that, while such a system might be imperfect, the current system is far from perfect. As with everything else, the state is pretty shit at preventing children from being bought and sold.
> The Children also don't consent to be even their parents' wards, so the consent of children is not a sufficient framework to construct a basis of opposition.
Children don't pick their parents, ergo consent isn't a thing? I don't buy it, and by golly, my legal-services corp won't stand for it!
> Markets don't have the will to decline child exploitation.
Markets have the will to fire people for racist tweets, but not to fight child exploitation?
> and anarcho-capitalism doesn't invest an entity with the power to prevent it.
The boundaries between "incentive" and "coercion" are mostly a matter of viewpoint and I can tell that we would certainly disagree on them so we can just skip past all that.
> Can you imagine GEIKO judicial services doing business with an organization that's on the record enabling child slavery?
I absolutely can! Nestle is known to have practiced child slavery and people did and do business with them. Cobalt mines in Congo, south african countries during apartheid, etc. I have known all kinds of horrors in service of the capitalism we have now and nothing you're saying is persuasive to me about why they would stop under this other, more extreme capitalism.
> The boundaries between "incentive" and "coercion" are mostly a matter of viewpoint
No, they're not. (you're right we should probably skip that!)
> Nestle is known to have practiced child slavery and people did and do business with them.
You're referring to activities in other countries, all outside of the jurisdiction of any "judicial service", be it the US government or otherwise. Why would "judicial services corporations" in an anarcho-capitalist society be expected to address and/or stop evils outside of their jurisdiction, which states are not expected to stop?
> Cobalt mines in Congo, South African countries during apartheid, etc. I have known all kinds of horrors in service of the capitalism we have now and nothing you're saying is persuasive to me about why they would stop under this other, more extreme capitalism.
Mining isn't unique to capitalism. At least in capitalism, you have the option to not patronize unpalatable organizations, which is not the case in any alternative system. And, as you well know, Apartheid, much like Slavery and later Jim Crow in the American South, was imposed via the state's police power. Such systems would be impossible in an anarcho-capitalist society.
> I have known all kinds of horrors in service of the capitalism
This is a joke, right? Capitalism has lifted a billion people out of absolute poverty in the last 30 years, and would have done so 50 years earlier (as evidenced in the natural experiments in Taiwan/China, South/North Korea, and West/East Germany) if it weren't for big-hearted, empty-headed dolts and their irrational, uninformed hatred for capitalism. Leftists killed 100,000,000 million people to prolong their anti-capitalist experiments, with nothing to show for it. More heavy-handed state intervention isn't going to out-do capitalism. The only way to improve capitalism is to free it from the yoke of the state, free it from politicians and grifting bureaucrats, and to let the people run their own lives.
I can tell you have strong opinions about how society should function. Have you considered the possibility that you would be more empowered to improve people's lives in the absence of government? You, and everyone who thinks like you, would have 30% of your income back to plug into whatever social causes you'd want to support. The best part, of course, would be that you wouldn't have to win an election to see your preferred changes come into being--you'd just have to organize and implement your programs without coercion. And don't forget the best part--there's no coercion, ever, by those people who scare the shit out of you! There's no state schools indoctrinating your kids! No monopolies being bought by mega-corp lobbyists! No religious dogma enshrined in law!
I'm also convinced that a lot of the problems people fear ("there will be people starving in the streets!") will not only be easily solved, but we will be better for having the opportunity to solve them. How many old folks are sitting around in their homes feeling useless, who could be running the voluntary welfare societies that used to be so prevalent in the United States? How many families have been spread to the four winds because the nanny state has replaced family support networks? How many men and women are desperate for meaningful work, which has been forcibly relegated to a calcified network of ineffectual bureaucrats who couldn't care less? As Scalia said, the welfare state has given us "donors without love and recipients without gratitude". By removing the state as a faceless intermediary, the urgent need for charity would not be deniable by those who hate paying taxes, and the tremendous blessing that is charity will replace the rampant sense of entitlement to other people's money. Without politicians who are incentivized to drive us apart, social cohesion would greatly improve. We would better understand that we're not opponents in some contrived power for control, we're neighbors who have a very personal duty to help each other get by.
This is why it drives me nuts to hear folks dismiss libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism with assumptions of bad-faith, or accusations of "just being rich people who want to keep their money". It is a recipe for human flourishing. It is imperfect, of course, but better to have an imperfect system based on the ideal of maximum human freedom for all rather than one based on the principle of the minority being forced into the service of the majority.
Yeah man I have considered the no government thing which is why I am an anarchist. An actual one, not one that wants to replace the existing systems of state power with the even less restrained systems of capital power.
Have you as a real anarchist also thought about how to do things, when no one has political power, but decisions need to be made?
Say, taking over a factory requires real power, no? How to deal with people who object (like the current owners)? Using force is power by my definition. And if it all is spontaneus with nor formal powet structure, then it still comes close or equals rule of the strong by my experience. And I think I read and debated all or most of the theories of anarchism with various people, but this contradiction, I could not get satisfactory answers for to solve it.
Depends. It is not a single coherent ideology. Most anarchocapitalists regard property and property of ones own body to be sacred. That would disallow selling children as you cannot own them in the first place. They own themself.
From the few interviews I've watched, he seems like a real life manifestation of an Ayn Rand hero character. I doubt he has any public sector or welfare in his plans
Ayn Rand heroes are all sophisticated, educated artists and artisans. This man is more like a psychotic Ron Paul (I say this with some affection). He's an anarchist and very Austrian in his economics affiliation. Definitely not an affiliation that Objectivists favored at all.
He's not an anarchist. The creator of the mislabel "anarchocapitalism" was himself an Ayn Rand fan until she basically told him he wasn't an anarchist and he decided to take that personally. Anarchism is the abolition of hierarchical systems of power. "Anarchocapitalism" only refers to the abolition of the state while maintaining all other hierarchical systems and capitalism in particular.
You can not enforce property claims without violence. "Anarchocapitalists" either handwave this with private armies (which is just feudalism with extra steps) or insist on everyone following the Non-Aggression Principle, which is nonsense without a system of enforcement. The more honest types usually fall back to minarchy, i.e. having a small state that basically only consists of a legal system and police force to enforce property claims and resolve disputes.
Heck, the person who came up with the name opposed not only taxes but also the civil rights movement and universal suffrage. The only coherent ideological thread in his life was not wanting to pay taxes, not wanting to have to follow regulations and being convinced he was very smart.
I'm well aware of the argument that left-wing anarchists make that anarcho-capitalism isn't real anarchism. As per usual, only left-wing anarchists care about this semantic argument. Anarcho-capitalists keep using that term, and 99.9% of the rest of world doesn't know, and wouldn't care even if you explained your point of view to them.
Also, is Murray Rothbard like Voldemort to you? You seem to refuse to even say his name.
Most people on HN likely don't know who Murray Rothbard is and he didn't have any coherent ideology or philosophy so he's not interesting beyond being the guy who came up with the label.
Anarchism is by definition "left-wing". If flat earthers redefined "globe" to mean a saucer shaped object and the media started to run with that because flat earthers made for "good content", opposing that usage wouldn't be dismissed as "arguing semantics" either. Sometimes it's important that words mean things. Heck, the entire political right in the US has spent the past years making the changing meanings of words their main issue. Clearly "arguing semantics" matters sometimes.
Calling yourself "anarcho-capitalist" is like calling yourself "punk" because you're knee-deep in Sex Pistols merch. It's using a label as a fashion accessory, not a political statement. Clearly you think political labels have some use or else you wouldn't refer to "left-wing" anarchists.
There's no historical basis for the label "anarcho-capitalism". Ancaps claim they're building on individualist anarchism if asked to justify their label but even Stirner was to the left of them. "Anarcho-capitalism" isn't promoting individualist anarchism, it's promoting autocracy. Anarchism is the absence of oppression and power hierarchies, "anarcho-capitalism" is the absence of regulations and limitations on individual power, relying on The Market instead of Divine Right as a justifying cause.
"Anarcho-capitalism" is not only not "real anarchism", it's not any anarchism, just like throwing bricks at Starbucks windows is neither necessary nor sufficient (i.e. almost entirely orthogonal) for being an anarchist.
Compared to the well-worn disaster experiment they've been running for decades with such innovative ideas as rampant money-printing and promising social welfare while delivering poverty and suffering, I'm sure any other direction they go is up, comparatively.
Your brain is dripping with paranoia. No sarcasm intended whatsoever.
I don't buy into the attendant far right libertarian whackjobbery, so not sure the new president is the answer to anything, but clearly if things have been so bad for so long, especially with the same hard left ideas one that have historically shown to end in the same place over and over again, radical change in the opposite direction looks very attractive.
And it might off in spades, if not pursued in the same stupid ideological manner as the socialists, but it's high risk. I hope it pays off for them bigtime. I'm not wedded to any ideology, unlike some.
Text is not tone, especially in a hellhole like this. It's not paranoia if the pattern is 90+%. But you're in a mighty comfy position that high up on the fence, so don't let me lecture you.
The "well-worn disaster" has the highest rate of English speakers, largest middle class, and largest industrial base of similar countries in Latin America.
This will simply regress Argentina to the mean of the poor, deinstruialized, primary resource exporting countries of the rest of Latam.
The mean in South America is dialing the same crap policies to 11. With 4 in 10 Argentines in poverty and 140% inflation, you are making an incredibly poor case for...I don't know, defending the status quo? Advocating for ratcheting up the previous policies? It sounds clinically insane either way.
Useless statistics displayed out of pure ignorance because you, like most people here, don't live there, haven't lived there and have no knowledge of the history or political context.
I wish you could do even a hint of research to spew this pathetic apologia.
I live here and I've traveled to all over Latin America. I have a _much_ better clue of what I'm talking about. There is hardly a middle class in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The mean standard of living in Chile is similar but with no less middle class, more rich, and more poor.
Now the middle class in this country will get to see to what extend their sustenance was being managed through wealth transfers.
There's practically no middle class. You're probably very privileged and confusing your own comfortable privilege with the lives of actual workers.
140% inflation, currency controls, 16 years of K government destroying institutions and you want to come at me with the "lots of English speakers", now things are gonna be worse.
Mate, people emigrate from Argentina to the rest of LATAM, not viceversa (unless you earn in USD).
The fact that you're pretending people live better here and you're just trying to make it about class shows how little perspective you have. Speaking for "the People" right?
“I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop.“ - Hayek
Scammers will descend on Argentina and loot the entire economy.
Libertarians, like Marxists, are terribly naive about the prevalence and maliciousness of psychopaths and hustlers. The global economy is a dark forest.
The whole thesis of this guy, and history shows it has serious merit, is in Argentina the government is the scam. What he is trying to do is remove the amount of scope that exists for grift and corruption in the Argentine state.
I wish him good luck, sincerely, but if it looks like it works a lot of other countries will start going to great lengths to mess it up.
> Scammers will descend on Argentina and loot the entire economy.
Too late. That already happened a long time ago.
I remember an Argentinian friend telling me of a time when she and her coworkers would get paid and they'd all immediately leave work to spend their money before the prices went up. Waiting until the end of the day meant taking a significant haircut.
The reality in Argentina shows that exchange houses prefer Tether over Tron. This is not an endorsement to USDT, just the reality. They will look at cryptocurrencies with high liquidity and low fees.
It's hard to love your country when it steals your money right out of your pocket to spend it frivolously. On top of inflation, most of this year I've been paying income tax while I'm on a monthly salary of less than USD 1000 (equivalent).
Many Europeans love their countries but use Euros rather than the old national currencies. Also most countries allow mines to be bought and sold. I'm not sure the Argentina experiment will go well but not really for those reasons.
Dunno but the FT has "Milei’s pledges ... have delighted investors and businesspeople who have despaired of the country’s inability to capitalise on its vast natural resources."
We shall see. Your link is about arguing about oil near the Malvinas / Falklands which is kind of a different issue.
It would make sense if they had more dollars in reserves. Apparently they don't. Where they are going to get them? Also, his other policies are quite questionable.
Our currency is already super devaluated and everything has been artificially frozen for three months now, because the main rival was our current ministry of economy and he burned all ships to try win the election. So expect at least one if not two huge devaluations (40-60% each) before the year ends.
At the beginning of next year you will be able to exchange every peso in existence for about 40 billion USD or so, a lot a money, but not really...
Maybe this is same effect as Trump - "crash and burn" opposition: most people know they are fucked whatever the government does, so they want everyone else to be fucked, too.
There is a long history of governments choosing to use something as a national currency that is outside the control of the central bank -- the US Dollar, gold, silver, etc. It has been tried many times before, and sooner or later it has always led to panics, bank runs, financial instability, and brutally painful recessions.
In theory, panics "should not happen" if banks are properly run. In reality, people can and will panic from time to time, because the rational response to concerns that banks may fail is to withdraw everything from them.
If Milei is successful in getting Argentina to adopt the US Dollar as the national currency, I can confidently predict a future wave of bank runs: A majority of depositors will show up asking to get their dollars out of their banks, which will of course call the Argentine Central Bank to try and borrow dollars... but the Argentine Central Bank itself can run out of them.
> the rational response to concerns that banks may fail is to withdraw everything from them
An economist would correct you that the rational response to concerns that banks may fail is to withdraw everything from them while lying about it and telling everyone else not to do it.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. This is exactly why it failed. They switched to dollars without getting public spending under control. People were spending their money on imports, which means the central bank was bleeding money at a constant rate. It could have worked if they either implemented austerity policies or clamped down on imports, but they did neither. It was completely unsustainable long-term, and they knew it.
Not to mention all the gov owned companies that were sold, but they sold them undervalued and they were sold debt free. So the state paid for the debt and didn’t get enough money to cover it.
The whole thing was corruption on top of corruption
Brazil had the same inflation problems and adopted a plan very similar to Cavallo's plan. Brazil also had a lot of corruption and trouble reducing public spending, but came out of it comparatively better. Ultimately, the crux of the 90's failure was the obsession with the dollar running top to bottom in society (caused mainly by the politicians misleading the people about the viability of the peg) and the refusal to de-peg when it was the obvious way ahead. And off we go again...
The 90s had a 25% unemployment rate, a wave of suicides from people's businesses failing and no safety net, and an actual, honest-to-God hungry middle class that couldn't afford to eat.
The only way you can say this is if you weren't alive to see it.
It's quite a risky plan when 1) you don't really have any dollars right now, 2) your country has more people than California, its economy is very different from any American state, and after this move you'll be stuck with whatever the Fed does.
We want to be stuck with whatever the Fed does. You might think that's stupid because the Fed is not great, but what we have right now is way worse.
One of Javier's main goals is to remove to the Argentine politician the capacity to emit more useless currency. I don't know if he's going to go ahead with that proposal or if it's going to sleep forever "soon to come", but we are just tired of our politicians, at the point that we prefer to depend on politicians of another country to dictate our monetary policy...
Short term. However many of them could become middle class if the government didn't keep screwing their efforts to get ahead. Switching to a stable currency will cause pain short term, but that is a.one time pain, but once the pain is paid they get a stable currency unlike now where inflation has been destroying the poor for nearly 100 years.
Of course they are betting the us dollar remains stable. Nobody can know this for sure, but history says it is a better bet than the status quo.
Implying the poor are poor just because of some random act and not because the current administration put them there.
Milei voiced that removing the subsidies in the current situation is nonsense and that first he wants to work on bringing income up so people can afford subsidy-less fares.
Em... I mean the American coal towns of just over 100 years ago paint a very different story.
That's when you have government give exclusive power to use resources to individuals and provide firepower to them. Remove all limitations of contractual terms and all labor protections.
The peso was pegged 1:1 to the US Dollar in the 1990s and people able to have been using US Dollars for a long time.
There are a number of countries who use a currency over which they have not control, be it the US Dollar or the Euro. I suppose the trade off is that you get a stable currency and it makes trade easier.
Many developing countries are stuck with "whatever the Fed does" whether we like it or not. When the US raise interest rate we see large capital outflows wakening our currency.
Except compared the Argentinian peso for the last 40 years and that the population uses electronics such as televisions as currency / savings as it is.
How is that going to work practically? I mean who's going to exchange your pesos into dollars when that currency has been "denounced". I sure wouldn't, and so wouldn't Argentinians I'd Imagine, nor will they take old pesos for goods or services will they? In fact, I'd expect the peso inflation to accelerate as people want to get rid of them like hot potatoes.
The situation you're describing would happen if there's no transition period whatsoever. If the plan is to stop using pesos overnight, that would certainly be catastrophic. You can avoid that if you say "we'll stop using pesos by X date. Until then anyone can trade their pesos for dollars at any bank for a fixed exchange rate of Y pesos per dollar. Businesses will be required to accept dollars by Z date, and can reject pesos by W date."
The ratio doesn't live in vaccuum. Setting the ratio means nothing if nobody is willing to step up and sell dollars at that price. And for that they need dollars to sell. The ratio is not some random number picked out of a hat.
China loaning USD to Africa is even better for the US. They get to consume the equivalent of that amount of cash - it will not be redeemed for some time now.
Wouldn't this happen organically by removing all KYC needs for a bank account and then mandating that banks cannot refuse to open a dollar denominated bank account and also cannot refuse to convert Pesos to Dollars?
Then it would leave to commercial banks the task to procure themselves enough dollars
With the runaway inflation there, I get why the idea seems like a good one, especially at first glance. I know the realities of such a change are pretty complex and nuanced and that doesn't seem like this new president's strong-suit.
The recent John Oliver coverage of Milei has me far more concerned about the social and environmental destruction and instability his leadership is likely to cause.
I sincerely hope he governs far better than I think anyone has a right to expect, given how he campaigned.
This is a brilliant experiment. Argentina already has an awful economy, and if this fixes everything, then we have a template to perhaps fix some other economies. Deregulation is good for GDP, but is complete deregulation better? Let's find out!
I can’t speak to Argentina specifically (and I can’t even read the article behind the paywall).
However, this isn’t without precedent. Ecuador currently uses the US Dollar as its official currency.
If people are already transacting in USD, and prices are set in USD, and the peso is just a proxy for that in many transactions, I can understand the desire to cut out the middle man.
There is a great interview with Devon Zuegel about her observations about money in Argentina:
Econtalk: Devon Zuegel on Inflation, Argentina, and Crypto
When inflation is often high and unpredictable, people look for unusual ways to hold their savings. And when banks are unreliable because of public policy, people look for unusual ways to keep their savings safe and to make financial transactions. Welcome to Argentina, where Zuegel finds surprising applications of cryptocurrency for solving problems.
They had a peg and moved off when then temptation grew too great. I think they've done that a couple of times.
This is the tricky part of this by the way. For a sovereign state any preventative action is always the equivalent of me hiding the keys to the liquor cabinet from myself so I can quit drinking.
In countries that make it work it's a tricky balance of political incentives and traditions but even there when the temptations are great - see the U.S. where any politcal imperative or norms for a sensible budget are outweighed by the temptations that seigniorage brings with it.
the "temptation" was caused by a massive speculative attack that moved billions of dollars out of the country, a depletion of reserves and the complete collapse of society in December 2001.
>How might this effect BRICS? Interesting that Argentina will align with the USD.
Doesn't matter, as many, many people have noted BRICS doesn't exist, and to the extent that it does it's a joke. Two of the countries are actively at war with each other, 2 are falling apart, and the last one is slowly losing a brutal land war.
Better question is how this effects LatAm politics, and that's more interesting. Certainly there's been a drift to the left there, but wild swings in policy are an Argentine hallmark.
Milei voiced opposition to BRICS so I don't think this has any effect on that.
Bloomberg article covering Argentina's dollarization when it was first proposed by Milei which has some better info on what that means for Argentina
https://archive.is/tef4H
IMF paper linked at the bottom of that article is a good read on what dollarization actually means for an economy outside of a political agenda.
I'm not so sure, imagine if Argentina pretended to elect a "communist" that then seized some American assets in the country and planned to hand them to the Chinese?
The tricky bit is making sure the resulting US occupation becomes long lasting, I think you would have to store away substantial amounts of money to bribe a gaggle of senators for a few decades to make incorporation possible.
I doubt this would happen. Americans don't want a place that is as chaotic and corrupt. If they can get their act together there is a chance they could join, but until that happens there is no way it would happen.
Argentina is mostly white, Christian and doesn't have any part in the internecine blood feuds that roil South Asia or the middle east. Lots of land, and well educated. No history of slavery (well at least not like its neighbor Brazil). So, yeah, it'd be a great addition to the USA. I'd take it.
To expand on my previous point Argentina seems like one of America's most poorly governed states at the local level - New Jersey. High level of local corruption, etc. And NJ is full of Italians and so is Argentina. It'd be like admitting a giant-size NJ. I'll take it!
- he doesn’t have anything like a majority in the Argentine congress (in either house). I don’t know Argentine law and would welcome comments from someone who actually does but it would surprise me if this is something the president can do unilaterally.
- as a practical matter, Argentina itself does not have enough dollars to make this happen. You need a ton (more than that…) literally of physical currency to make this work. I don’t think their reserves are sufficient to cover it. (You need many additional tons of coins to make it practical too…)
Separately this is generally not a great idea economically. You do kill inflation in Argentina (replaced with American inflation but that is extremely low and stable by Argentine standards). But you have no control over your monetary policy or your exchange rates. If your economy is export driven to (e.g.) China, you now have to worry about the dollar-yuan rate, which is not under your control.
Of course this is also Argentina which is a particular basket case economically so I won’t rule out the possibility that this could be better than what they have now (or would have had under the loser in this election). But my guess is this would be worse if implemented.
For a country which produces a large number of really outstanding economists (including great macroeconomists!) Argentina is surprising disaster.