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The wealth/income gap is of necessity ever-widening under "Capitalism".
What about going from Democratic Capitalism (Current) to Wild West Capitalism (No Regulation): Libertarianism.
Nothing tried by Libertarianism will change this endemic nature of fundamental Capitalism.
The gap in Argentina (Libertarian majority government) continues to widen!! And there is other economic fall-out from an all austerity rampage, and cuts to elite taxes.
Over 100 economists warned against Javier Milei’s economic policies. Over 100 economists were dead wrong.
Ivo Vegter
The authors were influential economic superstars: Thomas Piketty, author of the famous (or rather, I should say infamous) Marxist manifesto on inequality, Capital in the 21st Century; and three other neo-socialists, India’s Jayati Ghosh; the Serbian-American Branko Milanović, and Colombia’s former finance minister José Antonio Ocampo.
Their warning was stark: Milei’s proposed policies were, they said, “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful to the Argentine economy and people,” and he “ignores the complexities of modern economies, ignore[s] the lessons of historical crises and open[s] the door to the accentuation of already serious inequalities”.
Their problem? Milei’s policies are laissez-faire, but “unregulated markets are not benign: they reinforce unequal power relations that worsen inequality and make it difficult to implement key development policies, including industrial, social and environmental policies”.
Proof, pudding
We’re 18 months on, and the numbers are already proving these eminent economists wrong. If the proof is in the pudding, Milei’s pudding is delicious.
His radical free-market reforms, which included halving the number of government ministries and slashing public spending, pulled Argentina out of a recession. In April 2025, it recorded robust 7.7% year-on-year growth.
Inflation dropped like a stone, from an annual rate of 211.4% in 2023 to 43.5 percent by mid-2025. It is still falling, and the month-to-month rate of 1.5% in May 2025 is the lowest recorded in five years.
Meanwhile,the poverty rate, which even free-market economists expected would rise in the short term, declined from 52.9% in the first half of 2024 to 38.1% in the second half.
In May, the Institute of Race Relations published my paper on Argentina’s remarkable turnaround from a corrupt, stagnant, socialist backwater with one of the worst economies on the planet, and why South Africa can learn valuable lessons from it.
How did over 100 of the world’s most eminent economists get it so wrong?
Study versus control
At the root of this question lies the problem that universities do not present economics as a study of human action and of the choices people make when they set out to satisfy their unlimited needs and wants by the efficient use of scarce resources.
The economics establishment doesn’t view the subject merely as a social study, but as an objective science. Universities teach economics as a means not to study human behaviour, but to control it. They provide economists with the tools by which governments can manipulate economies to achieve political ends.
The neo-Keynesian synthesis that is taught in most faculties accepts the view that classical free markets are efficient in the long term, but believes that Keynesian interventions in markets are necessary to correct short-term imbalances and market failures.
Most professional economists believe governments can, and should, direct the economy through monetary and fiscal policy based on mathematical models of how people might respond to economic interventions by the state. The consequence of this school of thought is that it gave governments virtual carte blanche to inflate the money supply in order to fund deficit spending, which in turn assured the loyalty of their voter base. It also synchronised business cycles into market-wide booms and busts, which, inevitably, these economists blame on insufficiently regulated markets instead of on the monetary and fiscal policy that caused them.
Critique
To see how they went wrong, it is helpful to critique some quotations from the open letter.
“The economic vision underlying these proposals supposedly advocates minimal government intervention in the market, but in reality relies heavily on state policies to protect those already economically powerful.”
The only state policy that “protects those already economically powerful” is respect for property rights. The implication is that the government ought to be an agent of redistribution, instead of a protector of life, liberty and property. It is a normative value judgement, not an empirical description of economics, and it exposes a fundamental philosophical difference with Milei.
“The model of laissez-faire assumes that markets work perfectly if the government does not intervene.”
It does not assume so at all. How can it, when markets are merely the aggregate of choices made by fallible humans with imperfect knowledge?
Laissez-faire theory holds that markets are the most efficient way to deploy finite resources in the production of infinite wants and needs. More importantly, it holds that a single controlling agent (like a government) cannot possibly know all that it needs to know in order to determine people’s subjective wants and needs, and how they can best be satisfied. The market is merely a term for a distributed information system, in which no single actor has sufficient knowledge to make production decisions for an entire society.
Inequality
“But unregulated markets are not benign: they reinforce unequal power relations that worsen inequality and make it difficult to implement key development policies, including industrial, social and environmental policies.”
Markets are neither benign nor malign. They just are. They are a society’s aggregate knowledge about needs, wants, resources and production methods, all summarised into prices.
They don’t worsen inequality, either: inequality is actually lower in the most free economies in the world, and higher in unfree economies subject to socialist redistribution.
Moreover, a 2015 IMF study showed that the main economic drag caused by inequality involves the enrichment of politically connected elites, and not free markets. The problem is cronyism, not commerce, and of cronyism, Argentina had plenty.
Market failures
“Markets are also prone to failures, caused by externalities (when all benefits or costs cannot be attributed to individual agents) and information asymmetry (when some agents in a market know more than others).”
Markets, being composed of people, are prone to failures. So are governments. Unlike governments, however, markets are self-correcting. If one person fails, another steps up to correct the failure. If one company fails to produce what the market needs, a competitor will arise to eat its lunch.
The consequence is that markets are far less prone to failure than governments are.
Externalities, as I’ve written before, are the catch-all excuse for regulation. When externalities can be quantified, it is easy enough to sue, and regulation is usually not controversial. More commonly, however, the sorts of externalities that keep left-wing economists up at night are based on thumb-suck guesstimations of diffuse and indirect harms.
As for information asymmetry, there is no bigger information asymmetry than between government bureaucrats and the market as a whole. You can’t legislate information asymmetry away. The entire point of prices, and why they talk of “price discovery” is to minimise information asymmetry.
Financial crisis
“The 2008 global financial crisis demonstrated that inadequate regulation of markets can have disastrous consequences. The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic provided further evidence of the need for public intervention.”
No, the 2008 global financial crisis demonstrated that reckless intervention in markets can have disastrous consequences. Don’t blame the bankers, and don’t blame those who saw it coming years earlier (like libertarian Ron Paul in 2003).
And the Covid-19 pandemic only provided evidence of the need for public intervention in response to an economic crisis caused by public intervention.
Public spending
“A significant reduction in public spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality, and could lead to a significant increase in social tensions and conflicts.”
Except that it didn’t.
“Milei’s idea of drastically cutting taxes while reducing public spending would significantly reduce the state’s ability to satisfy the social and economic rights of citizens.”
That would be the point, yes.
“As Argentina navigates its complex economic landscape, it is essential to approach policy formulation with balanced and empirically informed strategies that are not only attractive in the short term, but also sustainable, equitable and enabling in the long term.”
There was nothing uniquely complex about Argentina’s economic landscape. And the policies that our august left-wing economists prescribe are the same policies that had failed Argentina for over a century.
They’re the same policies that are failing so many countries, including South Africa.
What Milei has proven is that orthodox left-wing economists are simply wrong.
Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets
What about going from Democratic Capitalism (Current) to Wild West Capitalism (No Regulation): Libertarianism.
Bob (Democratic Marxist)
Bob A, Libertarianism is neither Wild West (because the Natural Law is strictly enforced for all), nor is it Capitalism (while in Capitalism having one's own capital is a pre-requisite for entrepreneurship, in Libertarianism it is not so)...
"Markets are neither benign nor malign. They just are. They are a society’s aggregate knowledge about needs, wants, resources and production methods, all summarised into prices.
They don’t worsen inequality, either: inequality is actually lower in the most free economies in the world, and higher in unfree economies subject to socialist redistribution."
Bald statement with no sources..........
This is certainly not true in the current Republican Government USA - the wealth/income gap is continuing to widen, despite their policies. And though it is true that cronyism/corruption is rampant, that fails to explain the very real negative economic consequences that are widening the gap.......cutting social spending, loss of huge revenue due to tax cuts, and the rise of the wealth/income of the elite.
As to Argentina, yes right wing economics does kick start a beleaguered economy. But the only issue in society is not economic growth........the reason.......all do not have equal ability to take advantage of it (Despite Libertarian's "we'll all be successful entrepreneurs like Jeff Besos, or Elon Musk")
The Canadian facts..60% of new business fail within the first five years - the market is red in tooth and claw:
"People also ask
How many businesses fail in the first 5 years in Canada?
I've spent years working with Canadian entrepreneurs, and the statistics can be sobering: approximately 20% of small businesses fail within their first year, and around 60% don't make it past year five.Apr 11, 2025
Also, society has to do uneconomic measures to a minor degree, in order to maintain a very modest, livable quality of life for those on the bottom, for many varied reasons. The answer cannot be that the more non-competitive should die, or at least be on the streets homeless.
It is way to premature to be making long term prognostications about the equality/inequality a ways down the road yet. I believe that the negative reports will soon be coming in after this initial honeymoon period of transition.
Bob A is forgetting that it is entrepreneurs who enable workers to create wealth, despite governmental obstructions.
Reasons why Canadian businesses fail:
1. Misconception highlighted by Left-wingers like Bob A, e.g. "we'll all be successful entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk". The truth is that almost all entrepreneurs work harder than their workers do, make only enough money to survive decently, love doing what they do and love their 'freedom'.
2. Complicated governmental regulations.
3. The ultra-rich bribing the politicians to create obstructions for the non-ultra-rich competitors.
Without entrepreneurs, society would only have 'wants' and politician ordained 'rights', and no one would be producing wealth to satisfy those wants and no one would be performing any duties to satisfy their desires (which the politicians ordain as 'rights')...
The experts, and the general public, intuitively realize that something is not going right with our vaunted Capitalism, in any of its varieties...too many problems, and becoming more intractable (Wealth/Income Gap).
They are becoming open to seeing whether there is another economic system, not that is perfect, but simply better (Especially on "equality").
My entire life, we have been told Capitalism is the greatest, and everything else is just evil.
The world is a little more complex than that simplistic approach. Dilip appears still to be captured by that narrative.
While it sounds like Vlad is maybe sneaking a peek at the other end of the bookshelf. :)
The key problem with Capitalism is the tendency for all wealth to accumulate at the top, just like it does in the game of monopoly.
I think the long term answer is some form of hybrid economic system, which doesn't exist as yet.
Oh well, just a quick coffee break for me, back to the rating update.
The system you are advocating has failed every time it has been tried and perhaps 100 million people were murdered in the 20th century but this time it will work when it has never worked in the past. I guess we could all afford to lose some weight.
Ozempic is going to be a lot cheaper in Canada soon because someone didn't dot the "i's and cross the t's".
Democratic Marxism is not yet fully developed, as is Democratic Socialism (France under Mitterand) and Old-Style USSR Communism (A bastardization of the thought of Marx by Lenin).
So we still have time to try to build in safeguards against the flaws of the past in both these systems, since there are commonalities with Democratic Marxism.
We are looking outside our own politics, for help in improving this new economic/political system.
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