We are at war

It seems that from now on Argentina is at war, or at least that is what the President of the Nation, Alberto Fernández, has said. No one knows well if it was due to verbal incontinence, neglect or the nervousness of the Argentine situation, but the truth is that the president has launched his phrase of war without the slightest suspicion of being ashamed.

It is certainly incredible that after 829 days in office and 19 years in which Argentina has lived immersed in a pattern of uninterrupted chronic inflation, the President lets us know that it is only now that the real fight against inflation begins. If it is for the facts, Fernández is right: it is only in the 27 months since he became president that accumulated inflation has been 132%, it is clear that nothing has been done so far to definitively defuse the incessant price increase, but quite the contrary what has been achieved is to incentivize it unwillingly. While they said a long time ago that issuing money did not generate inflation, banknote printers worked around the clock tirelessly to deliver hundreds of thousands of bills to politics that are now getting out of control. The President took over with 255 million $1,000 bills on the street: today there are more than 1.65 billion kilnero bills out there.

Despite the mistakes made, the government does not seem to understand mistakes. This “war” is launched again on the wrong enemy and with weapons that have never won a single battle.

The problem of government is not only ideological: it is also characterized by a lack of understanding of reality rarely seen. Price controls will intensify: since Roberto Feletti applied them (or at least since he did so more markedly through the various price freezes and export bans) inflation is accelerating more and more and more and the shortages of goods are surely unbearable. They will try to increase export withholdings: since 2002, the equivalent of $175 billion (just under half of Argentina's current debt) has been withheld from the countryside, yet it seems that it has only been enough to sustain a few years of populism. They intend to reinstate the “Wealth Tax” for a decade so that “the rich pay their debt to the IMF”: during 2020 the idea of this levy was born “for one time”. As everything that is transitory in Argentina ends up being permanent, it seems that this will not be the exception: the government does not take any dimension of how harmful the permanent change in the rules of the game is for everyone.

While the Ministry of Women spends $10.8 billion a year, the Ministry of Habitat is getting ready to remodel all its offices by redecorating them to new and a delegation of officials stroll around Dubai squandering what little public funds are left, it seems that the only solution to continue this delirium is to shear a little more to the private sector.

All indicators have deteriorated dramatically: inflation, unemployment, exchange rate, regulatory level and fiscal pressure have worsened since the inception of the current government. The real war that the government has to wage is nothing more or less than against themselves, against their ideology, against their ignorance and against their uselessness. They are solely responsible for the fact that what has really accelerated in Argentina has been the unchecked advance towards absolute decay that will lead us to the definitive abyss.

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