News/Commentary

Tucker dives deeper into Argentina’s broken economy and what it has to do with the US

September 15, 2023 | | Print Article

On the latest episode of Tucker Carlson’s Twitter (X) show, he met with Javier Milei, a libertarian seeking to be Argentina’s next president.

Speaking from Buenos Aires, he said that Milei hopes to reverse Argentina’s economic decline by pursuing new policies rooted in capitalism, not socialism.

He began the episode by providing some cursory background information about Argentina and its broken economy.

Watch:

“We’re in downtown Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. This was once, about a 100 years ago, one of the richest cities in the world, and you can tell as you walk around the faded grandeur of a once-great city. But this is now a desperate country. Its economy is in shambles, has been for a long time. Argentina famously defaulted on its debt more than 20 years ago, but now hyperinflation has made this country genuinely desperate,” he began.

“You see it when you have dinner here in restaurants and people pull out bricks of local currency, the peso, to pay. It feels like Weimar or Zimbabwe, but it’s not. It’s a developed country that’s moving backwards at high speed. And because of the frustration that’s built up across the population, particularly among poor people, a man called Javier Milei is poised to become its next president,” he added.

But who is this guy? A “former soccer star goalie, a performer in a Rolling Stones cover band, and a libertarian economist.” But not libertarian like an American libertarian.

“He wouldn’t fit in with the Cato Institute, which has attacked him for liking Donald Trump too much,” Carlson explained. “He’s a libertarian in the traditional sense. He believes people should have the maximum amount of freedom they can be given, which is a lot — much more than they now get in Argentina. He has moved from basically nowhere in the last several years to become maybe the most famous person in this country.”

“The election is next month in October, and once again it seems like he’s likely to win. The reception he’s gotten from the press in the West — particularly the United States — has been hostile, to put it mildly. They describe him as a far-right figure like he’s a Nazi. Is he? We sat down with him at great length … to find out what he’s like. He didn’t seem very radical. Continuing what they’re now doing in Argentina seems radical, in fact insane, but judge yourself,” he added.

The interview then began, and during it, Milei lashed out at Argentina’s political “caste,” vowed to rectify runaway inflation, slammed abortion as morally repugnant, and questioned so-called climate change.

For his first question, Carlson asked Milei to explain his popularity. The libertarian candidate responded by saying his past and especially his ideas make him popular.

“Argentina is a country that has embraced socialist ideas for the last 100 years. So [classical] liberalism is a natural form of rebellion against the system. And rebellion is always led by youth. When they look at me, they see someone talking about liberalism and rebelling against the status quo,” he said.

Carlson responded by asking how anyone can support Argentina’s socialist status quo given how it’s wrecked the country’s economy and made everybody poor. In response, Milei explained how leftists use the guise of “social justice” to fool people.

“Argentina’s embrace of socialist ideas began with an idea that seems attractive but is actually a terrifying way to operate an economic system: the idea that where there is a need, there is a right. It’s a problem because there can be infinite needs, but someone always has to pay for those rights. And the resources for that are finite. That sparks a conflict between infinite needs and infinite resources,” he said.

“In the liberalist views, this conflict is easy to resolve through economic freedom and private property. This is a natural mechanism to resolve this tension in a society. But the socialists don’t much like the invisible hand; they prefer the claws of the state. And they hide it behind the discourse of social justice. This sort of social justice is deeply unpopular because it’s premeditated by unequal treatment under the law and preceded by a robbery,” he added.

During the course of the interview, Carlson also asked Milei what advice he’d give to GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“I would tell to him to continue his fight against socialism, because he’s one of the few who truly understood what the fight against socialists and statists means. He perfectly understood that wealth creation resides in the private sector,” he replied.

“The State doesn’t create wealth, it destroys it. The State cannot give anything because it doesn’t produce anything, and when it wants to do it, it does it horribly. From my humble position, the only thing I could say is that he should double his efforts in the direction of defending the ideas of freedom without giving an inch to the socialists,” he added.

Watch the whole interview on X.

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Vivek Saxena
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