Milei Moves Fast… Too Fast?
What happens when the economy moves faster than people can deal with it
The new Argentinean president, Javier Milei, is a sight to behold. The quirky libertarian (is there another kind?) hasn’t been content to just be the president, and is moving quickly in only weeks on a lot of good policy fronts. He’s cut and simplified the bureaucracy, cut regulations, and is privatizing government-run industries.
He won me over in a funny moment. I can’t find the video now, but using an organizational chart to explain how he would cut the bureaucracy, he began tearing departments off the board and saying, “gone.” One of the departments refused to be ripped off the board easily, so he joked they would put up a heroic resistance before they too would be cut.
Meanwhile, media figures beclown themselves trying to tear him down in the eyes of American citizens. One twit on Twitter said his privatizing of businesses and government-controlled housing was a “fascist rampage.” To these shallow boobs, anything they don’t like is fascism, when one of the generally accepted definitions of fascism is a government that has near total control over the economy. I wish the rampage of idiocy would end, but quite unlikely.
I do have one bone to pick with the chainsaw-wielding libertarian president, however. I saw a video this morning where he explains why he would lower tariffs, which are taxes on imported goods. In other words, he’s a big proponent of free trade. So was I, once.
Now, I don’t know what the tariff rates are in Argentina, and they may be ridiculously high and need to be lowered or removed in specific cases. However, I have come to believe free trade is a net negative for society when you count all the costs. On paper, yes, tariffs artificially increase prices and make goods more expensive. They create winners and losers in the economy, which government should be loath to do: you know, actual fascism. But real people don’t operate on paper.
One of the great sins of Marxist thought is treating people as mere tools of their Revolution. If the Chinese Communist Party needs to starve millions of people to death to advance their cause, they do it. Ironically, all of the good little ideological soldiers running around aping their leaders’ statements would be gladly murdered by said leaders.
Libertarian economic theory certainly is against murdering millions of people for a quasi-religious crusade to bring about Utopia. However, I think it has a similar problem with treating people as nameless, faceless figures on a spreadsheet rather than actual human beings.
Free trade works in theory because as you make goods cheaper, you free up people’s spending power. Those people will have more money to spend on other things. So any nation’s domestic companies or entire industries that are eliminated when they remove tariffs can simply be reallocated to more efficient or easily specialized alternatives.
So, for example, if we remove the tariffs on steel and the U.S. steel industry goes under, all of those steel factories and steel workers and iron miners can switch to the software industry, which we are clearly better as a nation than manufacturing steel.
Perhaps you instantly see the problem there? An empty refinery isn’t going to be immediately repurposed into a software developer’s office with a foosball table in the breakroom. Steelworkers aren’t going to take advantage of millions of jobs retraining programs that every president since seemingly Chester A. Arthur has touted in their state of the union addresses. Can you see a 50-year-old worker on the line developing the next Candy Crush for iPhone 17X+3? Would he rather do that if he could?
What about cities like Bethlehem, PA or Gary, IN that depend on the steel industry? Those cities exist to produce steel. If we outsource our steel to China, do you think Gary is going to become the next Cupertino, home of Apple? Perhaps it could, but how is that transition supposed to work? Bulldozing square miles of industrial area, importing tens of thousands of new citizens and having others move away. That’s just going to go off without a hitch instantly? Gary isn’t a city on paper; it’s a real place, with history, and purpose, as grimy and smelly as that purpose has been. Families split up, and legacies spanning generations ending: are people just cogs in the machine of the economy, to be switched out at will?
Imagine the opposite. Suppose India starts eating our lunch on software development, and China implodes, and we suddenly become the world’s most efficient producer of steel. Are we going to turn Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA into a steel mill? Are a bunch of steelworkers going to move into the overpriced Spanish revival homes and have weekend adventures wine tasting in Napa Valley? Could Gary re-reinvent itself from steel town to mini silicon valley to steel town in one generation?
And that’s before you consider the strategic implications of my steel example. We need steel to defend ourselves, and if the nation producing all of our steel seeks to subvert or ruin us, the cost of cheaper goods may mean the end of America at the hands of totalitarian China. Lenin was right, "the Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
People who lose careers lose a part of themselves. Asking people at even age 30 to completely reinvent themselves is hard. Asking them to change with the real possibility that all of their new expertise and talent might be once again obsolete in another few years is even tougher. Why bother? That’s how you get failed cities, failed regions, a drug and suicide crisis, and the decline of a nation. We’re still dealing with the changes that globalization and NAFTA have brought about, and we keep heaping an accelerating number of changes on top.
The pace of human change is not the four years it takes to get a new degree. It’s not even a single lifetime. It seems our natural pace of change is measured in generations. So when the economic changes keep happening faster than the human ability to adapt to them, you see human misery. And having cheaper prices at Dollar General is not worth the misery, is it?
So, with all due respect to President Milei, and with much ignorance about current Argentinean trade policy, I must say that free trade isn’t good in every situation. It may not be itself good at all.
Massive changes can sink cultures, be they natural disasters, or dumping a bunch of gold on the Spanish economy, or collectivizing the farmland of China and Russia.
Technology operates the same as the economy. Let’s be honest, most of our economy these days seems more tied up in technology that food, clothing, and housing. Much like free trade, the argument for greater automation or AI is that any jobs or industries they eliminate are creative destruction. The people whose lives are upended by the changes can devote themselves to more pleasing pursuits.
But destruction is not creative; it’s destructive. It would be great in theory if people treated every challenge as an opportunity (which they really are), but that’s not how we work in practice. We sulk, we drink, we get depressed, we wonder what are we supposed to do now? Should we become a bunch of writers, and artists, and musicians? What happens when AI can do all those things more efficiently that we can? What’s next?
Chris Gast 1.0 used to worry about technology and automation. He used to think that there would be nothing productive left to do, and people would become fat couch-dwellers with a remote that did everything for them. You know, basically the denizens of the spaceship in Wall-E? I was pretty surprised to watch that movie capture my youthful thoughts perfectly.
Chris Gast 2.0, however, realized human desires are infinite in nature (we are infinite beings after all). Enough is never enough to satisfy. So, people would always find something new to do. So, maybe we don’t have to worry about automation at all!
Chris Gast 3.0 looked around, and came to the realization that most of us would rather be the fat guy on the hover chair pressing buttons than becoming an eccentric artiste. We’ve replaced blacksmiths with Only Fans. Are we better off in a human sense? I don’t think so.
I think one of the major things driving our current decline is the pace of change outstripping our ability to deal with it. But what are we supposed to do about that? Change is hard. I hate the direction Michigan is heading in. A state of drug-addled sports bettors whose leaders scream obscenities at each other for social media engagement. Am I supposed to leave for Indiana? Maybe I should move to Hungary and really get out Dodge before the 2024 election madness spills over into our version of the Spanish Civil War.
So, I leave all of my extended family behind, learn Hungarian, and become a writer in Budapest before ChatGPT does all of our writing for us? You can go over to Rod Dreher’s Substack to see how that’s working out for him. He did pretty much just that, and though he can afford to keep eating and doing what he enjoys, he has paid a personal price for it.
How our lives look in theory is never how they look in practice.
What can we actually do about this? I’m not sure. If I were President Milei, I would keep doing the entertaining and informative videos. I would keep taking a chainsaw to the bureaucracy, because those people are inadvertently the real enemies of Argentina’s survival as a nation and people. But I would not make drastic changes just because they might lower prices for consumer goods a bit.
Telling people to slow down is hard. It may not be possible, and people are doomed to live out the consequences. There is nothing more hateful in the mind of a modern American that telling them “no,” or they shouldn’t get the latest gadget, or we should be satisfied with the status quo, or they should pay more for something.
But if slowing the economy and technology and even government to the pace of human change is practical—or even possible—it has to start with people recognizing what the pace of human change is. We’ll have to take a more human, organic view of these things. A great garden doesn’t happen naturally in a single season.
We have to do away with the Marxist five-year plans that ruin nations, but also the idea that people are just rational consumers with no histories, families, homes, or desires of their own. Humanity needs more than a job retraining program.