Argentina:The Washington Post declared, in an op-ed, “Free market Argentina proves capitalism is the answer to poverty.”

The Bloodbath That Wasn’t: Milei Proves His Doubters Wrong

Javier Milei slashed poverty, tamed inflation, and turned a supposed “bloodbath” into a case study in market reform.

https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/11/the-bloodbath-that-wasnt-milei-proves-his-doubters-wrong/

We were promised an absolute bloodbath.

During the 2023 election in Argentina, politicians, academics, journalists, and commentators lined up to denounce populist candidate Javier Milei and his plans for “shock therapy,” symbolized by the chainsaw he had taken to brandishing ominously on the campaign trail while shouting, “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” (“Long live liberty, damn it!”)

Just days before Argentina went to the polls, more than a hundred economists, including superstar Thomas Piketty, published an open letter. They said a win for Milei would “inflict further devastation and social chaos” on a country that was already devastated and in chaos. His plans for dollarization and severe cuts to public spending would “increase already high levels of poverty and inequality and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”

Milei’s proposals, the esteemed number crunchers said, were not a “radical departure from traditional economic thinking” as he claimed but a return to “laissez-faire economics . . . fraught with risk that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people.”

Others were blunter in their predictions. There were claims Milei would “bring back a modernized version of the brutal fascist regime of General Jorge Rafael Videla,” which ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 and was responsible for the disappearance of at least 30,000 people. Members of the Peronist government shouted in unison, “If Milei does what he has said, there will be dead people and blood.”

It was even claimed that Milei would start harvesting the organs of Argentina’s poor to give to rich donors after comments he made about the need for a “free market” in organs.

A self-described anarchist-capitalist, Milei had simply called for a reduction in red tape and for people to be able to buy and sell organs without the involvement of the state. But everything he said was seized upon by his opponents as evidence of his desire to take his chainsaw not just metaphorically to the social fabric and the economy but quite literally to the bodies of the Argentine people themselves, tearing them limb from limb to be devoured by his vampire billionaire friends.A bloodbath, like I said.

Milei, of course, took it all in his stride. The former tantric-sex guru with the wild hair and even wilder eyes cared little about the opinions of a man—Thomas Piketty—he had already called a “turd” and a “criminal disguised as an intellectual,” or of people he derided as “communist pieces of sh-t.” Nor, it seems, did the Argentine electorate care very much—or at least enough of them to guide the wild man to a historic win.

More than two years after Milei became president, we now have a pretty clear idea of who was right and who was wrong.

This week, in response to new figures from Argentina’s statistics agency, The Washington Postdeclared, in an op-ed, “Free market Argentina proves capitalism is the answer to poverty.”

The new figures show Milei has reduced the country’s poverty rate from 53 percent to 28 percent—a massive reduction.

By drastically cutting state subsidies and laying off 60,000 public-sector workers, Argentina achieved its first-ever fiscal surplus in 123 years. Inflation collapsed from an insane 200 percent to 33 percent. Growth is at 4.4 percent and predicted to outpace the average rate in Latin America over the next two years.

There remain significant challenges, of course. A poverty rate of 28 percent and inflation at 33 percent are still bad and too high; they’ll need to be brought further under control. Milei also faces a “battle” over unemployment. With his cuts to public-sector jobs, the unemployment rate now sits at 7.5 percent. The Post is confident, though, that “market forces” and an “expanding private sector” will soak up the laid-off workers. Massive deregulation—Minister of Deregulation and State Transformation Federico Sturzenegger has cut more than 14,000 regulations so far—“will stoke private investment and growth.”

The Washington Post is right: “It is rare that we get to witness such a radical experiment in real time.” Milei has provided inspiration to insurgent right-wing parties across the Western world, including Reform and Restore in the U.K., both of which are looking to make serious cuts to government spending and also to break the overweening power of civil servants and bureaucrats. The enormously bloated public sector will be a major barrier to implementing a genuine right-wing agenda in the U.K.Milei was also an inspiration for DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—in the U.S. Who can forget the golden chainsaw he gifted Elon Musk with at CPAC in 2024? Or the boyish glee with which the CEO of X, Tesla, and SpaceX swung it around on stage?

With everything that’s happened since, and with current events in the Middle East, those heady days, so full of promise, feel like decades, not just a few years, ago.

Nevertheless, despite receding from view since Musk retired as its leader last May, DOGE continues to cut government waste. As of January 1 this year, DOGE claimed to have made an estimated $215 billion in savings, or $1,335 per U.S. taxpayer. This included the termination of more than 13,000 contracts, massive grant rescissions and lease cancellations, a 9 percent reduction in the federal workforce—some 320,000 workers—and a whole raft of measures targeted at pretty much every department, wing, and branch of the federal government.

DOGE has now been disbanded as a centralized agency, although it’s still due to exist, in reduced form, until July. Its principles have been incorporated into agencies and the Office of Personnel Management, and the Trump administration continues to pursue broader policies of government reform.Whether this attempt to routinize the operations of an extraordinary agency—conceived in an extraordinary time and led by an extraordinary man—will succeed or whether old habits die hard remains to be seen.

As Milei’s radical experiment in reintroducing free-market principles to his own communist-stricken nation continues at a pace, calls to dust off that golden chainsaw and to find a man crazy enough to wield it are likely to grow.