this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 122 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Shuttering their central bank and converting to dollars... Meaning they aren't actually getting rid of a central bank, but are rather converting to a foreign central bank.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It seems the whole point is adopting a currency they can't print more of. Because of the 'print more money' thing doesn't seem to be solving their inflation issues.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For some context, during the last 4 years the quantity of money our governemnt needed to print* was so high that our printers weren't enough and we had to pay other countries to print more pesos.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For some context, during the last 4 years the quantity of money our governemnt needed to print* was so high that our printers weren’t enough and we had to pay other countries to print more pesos.

Usually in modern language "printing money" is simply the central bank moving a numbers on a spreadsheet, not necessarily creating new currency notes. This is especially true if the newly "printing money" is being used to repay foreign debts.

Are you saying Argentina is actually running out of currency? If so, where is it all going?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

It's not like the fed dosen't print money as crazy too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

And the Dollarzone grew three sizes that day

[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I wonder how long it will be before I can point to this as yet another example of why libertarian policy is absolute bullshit.

My guess is not long.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

From the moment he opened his mouth

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Have to wait for the bears first.

[–] goat 84 points 1 year ago (25 children)

i can usually understand most political views, but libertarians just make me confused

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago

You are still not half as confused as the average libertarian.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

TL;DR: Basically, in the US at least, Libertarians are spoiled white guys who don't even understand how good they have it and have Ayn Rand power fantasies that they'll make their own way and the rest of the world has just been dragging them down.

A couple of my college buddies are full on Ludwig Von Mises/Murray Rothbard anarcho-capitalist nutjobs. The basic conceit is that all governments and states are illegitimate uses of force and are drags on the free functioning of the economy. Left with no "coercive" governments, people will competitively self-organize into private collectives to replace all governmental services, and all resources will flow to their best and natural use. It's absurdly naive and ignores absolutely everything about human nature and even the de facto reality of their desired end state.

So somehow private property will continue to exist and be protected by voluntary courts and security, and funny how it works out that in this case my buddies get to keep the fruits of the privilege enjoyed by centuries of their ancestors and built up in a decidedly non anarcho-capitalist system. All existing government property will be sold off and the proceeds distributed to... someone? No word on how natural monopolies like the best water route between two river ports will be handled, but it will be privately negotiated and definitely perfect!

It will be a utopia of people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and not letting silly things like "personal safety" or "living wage" or "stewardship of resources" get in the way of making the completely even-handed and non-coercive deals that all people will make with the private entities that spring up to replace governments, but only VOLUNTARILY! People definitely won't make deals they don't like, and that reduce their future power, to avoid death in a "market" with limited opportunities. They definitely won't leave their shares (or whatever) to their children and recreate all the same social structures we have now, but with corporate self-interest as literally the only governing norm.

Now, I suppose you could end up with corporate bodies that are outcompeted by "fairer" competitors (ignoring, of course, all first mover advantages and the willingness to protect profits by violent force that we already see in so many times and places), or maybe certain security and judicial corporations will make agreements with each other and install themselves as a layer over the more economically productive companies and collect fees that are definitely not taxes. Maybe some of them will be the "fairer" entities.

But where does that leave you? Basically, our current world is already at least a little better than the libertarians' best-case scenario, and what their system really does is tell people to give up, that they are not worth one cent more than the economic value they can provide to someone else, and that they deserve no voice in the governance of their lives beyond what they can take.

How this doesn't descend into competing warlord fiefdoms, eventually to be swept away by spasms of violence (in this system, "competition" is just a euphemism for politics and war), is beyond me. With some luck, it might lead to some parts of the world on a tortuously slow and uneven march in the vague direction of egalitarian governance to moderate the use of coercive force. In that case, CONGRATULATIONS! You've landed the world right back where it started, but now with millions dead and the Earth in even worse shape than it would have been.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Comment saved because my god I get so tired of trying to explain this to people, and I've never done so as eloquently as this.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mean, the anarcho-capitalists are fairly extreme, but the libertarians in general seem to be people who want to lock in the benefits they've got in the current system and remove any barriers to fucking over people who don't have them. They also seem to forget that you can't just declare that coercive force no longer exists. The best you can do is try to have some sort of consensus to apply it fairly and sparingly and in the pursuit of noble ends. All of their proposals are just variations on directing the thrust of that power to enforce the status quo when it comes to property holders.

The crazy thing is I'm not even particularly ideological, and I imagine our friends on the .ml domains would not be fans of me. I am just in favor of measures to moderate the worst tendencies of capitalism and to preserve the fact that no one succeeds in a vacuum, things like paying my fair share so people can have safety and opportunity. The Libertarians are just not what they claim to be, either because they're evil or naive.

[–] porkins 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed. The only thing to add to this is that government systems are voluntary and propped up by the people. The reason our current system actually works so well is because there is already a strong sense of local governance and accountability albeit on some rails. Each state defines the types of organized entities that if will sanction. In NJ for example, we have townships, but you could also register using other systems like village, etc. If they wanted to appease the libertarians a little, they could potentially allow for that experiment to exist in the same way that Indian reservations are their own systems.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I can almost understand the Personal Liberties Libertarian, which I think is what the philosophy was originally supposed to be about. But we often see Corpo-National Libertarians or Totally-Not-An-Anarchist-I-Swear Libertarians, and both of those are baffling to me.

[–] xmunk 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yea, the only brand I ever sympathized with was the "Hey man, just let me smoke weed"-bertarians... but all those guys jumped ship a long time ago.

Now it's mostly just "I don't want to pay for schools"-bertarians... and that's ironic because those assholes really need an education.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

confused

You've understood.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It always seems like "common sense" (short-sighted and moronically simplistic) solutions to problems they don't understand but waffle on about something tangentally related to make it sound like they do.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

it's like I'm always with them for the first few seconds, then they just go way off base out of knowhere at some unexpected point in time

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

just make me confused

It's very simple. They incorporate as a superperson. You're a human, somewhat rich. You get a corporation. You put it on like a magic suit and you have super-immunity (impunity) from laws, you can do anything.

The freedom that they want is the freedom to exercise their power (money) with no bad consequences for them.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Trust me. I'm an economist from Facebook University

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey, he may even met our economist, Erdoğan, there!

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh yeah, a bank shutdown turned out great for Argentina the last time they did it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I missed that previous time, I did a quick Google search but I'm not getting results. Would you know roughly when that happened?

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (4 children)

In 2002, there was a major bank freeze overnight in Argentina. They reopened months later, and because of how they now pegged to the dollar, the value of the accounts were functionally cut in half. In those months, many local neighborhoods invented their own bartering systems and it was a whole mess.

This was around the time the USA invaded Afghanistan, which explains why most people don't know about it, but it was obviously a major event for Argentina.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That was a freeze of citizen's personal accounts, not a shutdown. People were not allowed to access and retrieve their own money from their personal bank accounts. This is different. This is the Central (National) Bank, and a shutdown at it. Not individuals bank accounts, if I understand what's going on correctly.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

El Corralito

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Argentina just activated Fuck Around And Find Out protocol.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bruh weve been. The world is just paying attention for the first time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Nos estamos cayendo a pedazos hace décadas y recién ahora se enteran. Me da algo de gracia, arriba alguien confundió el corralito con el cierre del central

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm really interested to see how this plays out. If history plays out that country is headed almost immediately for a recession that may or not be purposefully engineered.

[–] xmunk 9 points 1 year ago

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by dumbass political philosophy.

Oscar Wilde

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is there any betting on when the Argentinian cannibalism starts?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

After we eat through the stray cats

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Wait so also the Falklands was non-negotiable?

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