Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
His Spanish almost sounds like century old German.
[RD] News Thread of the Americas
- Thread starter ReindeerThistle
- Start date
EnglishEdward
Deity
I dispute the concept that the incumbent government were in any meaningful sense left.
Way I see it is they were merely corrupt.
The new leader's policy of abandoning the currency seems anarchic.
However it would likely destroy a particular means of their corruption.
My questions are would:
(a) those argentinians with foreign exchange be permitted to use that to buy up Argentina
and
(b) would foreigners be permitted to buy up argentina as a fire sale.
The answer to both questions being Yes, might lead to feudalism and neo-colonialism.
Way I see it is they were merely corrupt.
The new leader's policy of abandoning the currency seems anarchic.
However it would likely destroy a particular means of their corruption.
My questions are would:
(a) those argentinians with foreign exchange be permitted to use that to buy up Argentina
and
(b) would foreigners be permitted to buy up argentina as a fire sale.
The answer to both questions being Yes, might lead to feudalism and neo-colonialism.
r16
not deity
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2008
- Messages
- 12,146
darth Vader did not post in the Argentinian Elections . Really hate it when people dig such stuff up to like hold me responsible or something . Claimed support of Ukranian Democracy in the company of Chewy did not exactly end well , right . Also , great photo of the Presidentelect guy . A new Boris with the hairdo and apparently he actually looks like mad or something ?
GoodEnoughForMe
n.m.s.s.
Of I fully agree - thus the ostensibly - their only real politics lately have been creating a cult of personality.
The people have settled on "better a madman than a thief".
The Ministry of Public Works sticker refused to go.
I'm not sure if President Milei can make such radical changes unless the Legislature is onboard.
I don't know much about Argentina.
The Ministry of Public Works sticker refused to go.
Elon Musk welcomes Milei’s Argentina 2023 presidential election victory - Buenos Aires Herald
The multi-billionaire owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX reacted to the election results online
buenosairesherald.com
I'm not sure if President Milei can make such radical changes unless the Legislature is onboard.
I don't know much about Argentina.
Last edited:
Zardnaar
Deity
Douche sandwich. Turd canoe.
Funnily enough, if you swap ‘left’ and ‘right’ in their speeches, then the current government and the incoming one are more or less on the same ‘I am a saviour from X’ speech.
Things that tipped the balkance in Milei's favour were the extreme obscenity of putting the entire state at Massa's service (seriously, the campaign was everything and everywhere), of the state actually having murdered prosecutors who dared to investigate it, celebrate it and then threaten to do it again, of having every major official in the Cabinet be a convicted or at least indicted criminal, and -of course- the ongoing economic disaster. It's very hard to convince people with ‘vote me, I'm going to do the same as I am doing right now’ when you have such a dismal performance.
Put simply, not probable. Not that the extreme hardline elements in Milei's groupings wouldn't at least be agreeable to it in theory, but it's simply that he depends on so many other groups for support that he'll have to meet all of their expectations at the same time. We'll have to wait and see, but Argentina's already parcelled out between great powers as it is to begin with.
Hmmm, yes. Not least, an incompetent, ostentatious thief who was doing his best to insult everyone.
Basically the Kirchners decided to artifically create a candidate to derail the electoral process and shove others aside in the race. They've always done that, starting with their first presidential victory in 2003 with 22% of the vote. It's just that the damage they've caused has been so brutal (and they've been shoving it in people's faces that yes, it's due to their own corruption and ineptitude and that they're happy about it) that even the libertarian madman is a price they're willing to pay in order to rid themselves of the Kirchners' 20-year regime of decay.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Wall Street silver is a cesspool so naturally they’ll like a “libertarian” who we all know will use the full power of the government to rob and oppress.The people have settled on "better a madman than a thief".
The Ministry of Public Works sticker refused to go.
Elon Musk welcomes Milei’s Argentina 2023 presidential election victory - Buenos Aires Herald
The multi-billionaire owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX reacted to the election results onlinebuenosairesherald.com
I'm not sure if President Milei can make such radical changes unless the Legislature is onboard.
I don't know much about Argentina.
I cannot imagine a scenario where you have a genuine libertarian who doesn’t become a pro government, pro welfare state progressive as the only reasonable way to even provide the fertile ground for steering into a healthy small government society. I don’t think a single one exists anywhere on a national stage.
But there are a lot of wolves in sheep’s clothing who simply haven’t yet bared teeth.
Yep, and since the current ‘superminister’ has been helping the looting (i.e. selective default: Argentina doesn't pay its pension funds but it does pay foreign creditors including vulture funds) and so everybody keeps assisting. We have literal secret treaties made by the executive without Congress' knowledge regarding debt obligations that we're not aware of except when they suddenly come to collect. (makes helpless gesture)
Estebonrober
Deity
- Joined
- Jan 9, 2017
- Messages
- 6,062
Isn't bringing in a libertarian extremist going to make this kind of international corruption worse generally?
EnglishEdward
Deity
Consider taking a leaf from the USA, where a treaty is not a treaty until it is ratified by a vote of the elected body.
That's the whole horror and insanity of the situation.
The now-beaten candidate Sergio Massa has in the past thirty years espoused anything from communism to Thatcher-style privatisation (he's come and gone a few times).
He has reportedly spent approximately 15 milliard (15,000,000,000) US dollars that the country doesn't have on his private war/election campaign, adding up handouts to governors and mayors, bribes to public figures to come out and support him, subsidies to anybody who'd ask for them. Also in covering up a recurrent streak of assassinations, suicides and accidental killings of governors, senators, deputies, prosecutors and witnesses.
And on top of all that, the previous administration was demonised for a 44-milliard-dollar loan from the IMF on which once the Kirchners came in the IMF suddenly became ridiculously lenient and at the same time the various ‘K’ econoym ministers racked up sovereign debt by another 160 milliard, so nearly four times more. And we have 8-10 times the money supply we had a couple of years ago! All this coupled with brutal austerity so that he have shortages of medications and other supplies with woefully underpaid health, education, etc. personnel.
Add to this the fact that the current president and vice-president not only took office in spite of explicit bans in the constitution against their reappointment (art. 90) but also have been convicted of criminal offences while in office yet not removed by a cowardly Congress. Over 200 federal judgeships and one out of 5 Supreme Court seats remain unappointed because the executive won't appoint anybody a congress they don't exert control over (except for being able to block things through a sizeable minority block).
It is a failure of the democratic system. This is a country of ~47 million people of whom 35 million were eligible to vote. About seven million voted for each of the eventual finalists in the first of three rounds. The democratic/institutionalist and leftwing sectors of the opposition were shoved out by a country that's been racked up to want blood. So over 60% of the electorate already wanted anybody-but-Kirchner from the first round onwards (these percentages roughly kept on). But also, at the same time, a little over 60% of people voted in the second round for the personalist would-be saviours, the new messiahs.
And so we ended up with having to enable and sanction the incumbents' delusions OR try and vote for the only candidate who, while clearly demented but in a different way, has no great congressional block of his own so should be forced to seek consensus.
We have had to choose between
- an insane anarcho-capitalist showman who seems to genuinely adhere to the theory that the market is an all-fixing God and that people with more money than you are inherently morally superior, more capable and more deserving
- an insane corporatist-capitalist showman who seems to genuinely adhere to the theory that the state is an all-fixing God and that people with more political power than you are inherently morally superior, more capable and more deserving.
It is a horror story.
That is also the case here, which shows how, effectively, we are in a case of profound unconstitutionality: the Executive signs deals with no legal authority and yet holds us to them.
I am sorry you have to endure such a state of despair.
Why You Should Be Able to Sell Your Kidney
By James Mackintosh
Javier Milei won the Argentine presidency with a promise to rip up the state, dynamite the central bank and ditch the peso for the dollar. All are controversial, but none so controversial as his belief that there should be a legal market in human organs.
The yuck factor led him to play down his views as the election neared, but trading in organs is one of the most interesting libertarian ideas— and regarded with horror by critics, who see it as the purest form of dystopian capitalism. There are two compelling reasons to allow people to sell their organs, while the counterarguments tend to overlook the basic question of economics: What is the alternative? The cases for and against putting a price on kidneys go to the heart of the debate about capitalism.
For: Freedom
I own my body, so if I want to sell part of it, that’s up to me. I have the right to injure or kill myself—at least in most developed countries—and I have the right to donate a kidney for altruistic reasons. Why can’t I sell a kidney? This is also the political argument for capitalism, espoused by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman: Government direction of the economy crushes individual freedom, and political freedom becomes impossible. The default position for individualists should be that a mutually agreed exchange is fair.
For: It works better
We celebrate altruistic donations of kidneys to save lives, and many countries use “nudge” tactics to encourage after-death organ donations by requiring opt-outs, rather than opt-ins. Yet the U.S. waiting list for a kidney is three to five years, and in the U.K. is two to three years. There’s no match between demand and supply because the supply is restricted by artificially keeping the price at zero. Raise the price, and the supply will rise. Exactly this has happened in the world’s only legal market for kidneys, in Iran, where there’s no waiting list and kidneys sold for about $4,000.
For: Legalize, regulate
Even if morally repulsive, if a black market in kidneys is going to exist anyway, maybe it’s better to have it regulated and done properly. The case against is that it’s inhumane to remove someone’s kidney for money. Beyond the ickiness, this breaks up into several aspects:
Against: Bad incentives
If there’s an open-market price for kidneys, it would encourage their theft from unwilling or uninformed donors, a particularly nasty crime. This, of course, is the reason to regulate; there’s a free market in donated cadavers in the U.S., but no one makes the case that people are killed so the murderers can sell the body parts, because of the penalties for murder. These incentives are arguably worse in the black market for kidneys; a Nigerian senator imprisoned in the U.K. this year for attempting to buy a kidney from a poor victim promised a price equivalent to thousands of dollars, while providing little information about the health effects. Even for donations, incentives can be unpleasant, with family members subject to extreme moral pressure to donate.
Against: Abuse of power
In a free market, the trade would almost certainly be kidneys from poor people being sold to rich people. This is abhorrent to many, an example of social inequality invading the body. Yet the same goes for almost everything in life, including health. Life expectancy for the richest 20% of men in the U.S. is 12 years longer than for the poorest 20%, while the rich can afford better healthcare. We try to mitigate some of that via Medicare, and there’s nothing to stop Medicare buying and distributing kidneys too, so the trade would be from poor people to other poor people, via the government.
Back in Argentina, Milei will have much more to worry about than markets in human organs. The rest of us should try not to be repulsed by the idea, and give it serious thought.
Javier Milei supports a legal market in human organs. NATACHA PISARENKO/ ASSOCIATED PRESS
By James Mackintosh
Javier Milei won the Argentine presidency with a promise to rip up the state, dynamite the central bank and ditch the peso for the dollar. All are controversial, but none so controversial as his belief that there should be a legal market in human organs.
The yuck factor led him to play down his views as the election neared, but trading in organs is one of the most interesting libertarian ideas— and regarded with horror by critics, who see it as the purest form of dystopian capitalism. There are two compelling reasons to allow people to sell their organs, while the counterarguments tend to overlook the basic question of economics: What is the alternative? The cases for and against putting a price on kidneys go to the heart of the debate about capitalism.
For: Freedom
I own my body, so if I want to sell part of it, that’s up to me. I have the right to injure or kill myself—at least in most developed countries—and I have the right to donate a kidney for altruistic reasons. Why can’t I sell a kidney? This is also the political argument for capitalism, espoused by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman: Government direction of the economy crushes individual freedom, and political freedom becomes impossible. The default position for individualists should be that a mutually agreed exchange is fair.
For: It works better
We celebrate altruistic donations of kidneys to save lives, and many countries use “nudge” tactics to encourage after-death organ donations by requiring opt-outs, rather than opt-ins. Yet the U.S. waiting list for a kidney is three to five years, and in the U.K. is two to three years. There’s no match between demand and supply because the supply is restricted by artificially keeping the price at zero. Raise the price, and the supply will rise. Exactly this has happened in the world’s only legal market for kidneys, in Iran, where there’s no waiting list and kidneys sold for about $4,000.
For: Legalize, regulate
Even if morally repulsive, if a black market in kidneys is going to exist anyway, maybe it’s better to have it regulated and done properly. The case against is that it’s inhumane to remove someone’s kidney for money. Beyond the ickiness, this breaks up into several aspects:
Against: Bad incentives
If there’s an open-market price for kidneys, it would encourage their theft from unwilling or uninformed donors, a particularly nasty crime. This, of course, is the reason to regulate; there’s a free market in donated cadavers in the U.S., but no one makes the case that people are killed so the murderers can sell the body parts, because of the penalties for murder. These incentives are arguably worse in the black market for kidneys; a Nigerian senator imprisoned in the U.K. this year for attempting to buy a kidney from a poor victim promised a price equivalent to thousands of dollars, while providing little information about the health effects. Even for donations, incentives can be unpleasant, with family members subject to extreme moral pressure to donate.
Against: Abuse of power
In a free market, the trade would almost certainly be kidneys from poor people being sold to rich people. This is abhorrent to many, an example of social inequality invading the body. Yet the same goes for almost everything in life, including health. Life expectancy for the richest 20% of men in the U.S. is 12 years longer than for the poorest 20%, while the rich can afford better healthcare. We try to mitigate some of that via Medicare, and there’s nothing to stop Medicare buying and distributing kidneys too, so the trade would be from poor people to other poor people, via the government.
Back in Argentina, Milei will have much more to worry about than markets in human organs. The rest of us should try not to be repulsed by the idea, and give it serious thought.
Javier Milei supports a legal market in human organs. NATACHA PISARENKO/ ASSOCIATED PRESS
Basically this. The rest of the article seems to be borderline clickbait.
I think this is the most telling paragraph. We do not get a proper definition of better, but he we can see it defined. A system that allows rich people to avoid a 2-5 year waiting list and results in poor people having a seriously degraded quality and length of life for $4,000 is considered incontrovertibly better. That does define their priorities.
One can get a window on how this innovative trade works looking at Moldova:
The transplant operation earned Nicolae $3,000
Estimates on how much the recipients are ready to pay vary wildly - some put the figure as high as $250,000.
And the costs have been studied in India:
Results: Ninety-six percent of participants sold their kidneys to pay off debts. The average amount received was 1070 US dollars. Most of the money received was spent on debts, food, and clothing. Average family income declined by one third after nephrectomy (P<.001), and the number of participants living below the poverty line increased. Three fourths of participants were still in debt at the time of the survey. About 86% of participants reported a deterioration in their health status after nephrectomy. Seventy-nine percent would not recommend that others sell a kidney.
Conclusions: Among paid donors in India, selling a kidney does not lead to a long-term economic benefit and may be associated with a decline in health. Physicians and policy makers should reexamine the value of using financial incentives to increase the supply of organs for transplantation.
Yeah, that's the kind of deranged libertarian that Milei seems to be slowly shedding. It appears to be that he has followed the ‘make wild promises, later compromise with reality’ election strategy. Not that his opposite lunatics weren't doing much the same.
In fact, a large part of the campaign for both of the finalists was they promising whatever and either themselves or their heterogeneous coalition partners promising not to let them do whatever they had just promised. (shudders)
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