By ckybe @Adobe Stock
Unpalatable Realities

Roger Kimball in The Spectator would like readers to pause and reflect on Argentina.

Explains Mr. Kimball, Javier Milei, the new “anarcho-capitalist” president of Argentina, has embarked in earnest on a regimen of “shock therapy” for his troubled country.

You think we have runaway inflation in the US? Well, we do, agrees Mr. Kimball. But in Argentina, it will soon be nearly 200 percent.

Since taking office in December, newly elected President Javier Milei has taken steps to counter Argentina’s inflation:

• cut the government payroll by 5,000 jobs.
• abolished whole departments.
• introduced a law legalizing the use of force for self-defense.
• decreed that welfare benefits would be stripped from anyone blocking traffic while protesting in the streets.
• banned the use of the word “free” to describe government largesse since the services are not “free.” On the contrary, they are paid for by the taxpayer.

The final measure had one commentator calling it “the most sensible law in world history.” Were it implemented in America, he continued, “the Democrat Party would literally not be able to campaign anymore.”

Don’t hold your breath on that one, advises Mr. Kimball.

Magical thinking obviates a multitude of unpalatable realities.

Lamenting the uproar to come, Javier Milel warned that hard decisions will need to be made in coming weeks:

The goal is [to] start on the road to rebuilding our country, return freedom and autonomy to individuals and start to transform the enormous amount of regulations that have blocked, stalled and stopped economic growth.

Biden’s Stalinist Newspeak

Rather than acknowledge America’s chaos and tackle it with “robust action,” the Biden administration falls into “Stalinist Newspeak.”

What People Do Know:

• Civil society is frayed and tearing apart in America.
• Inflation and high interest rates are eating away at middle-class prosperity.
• The Southern border is a sort of Potemkin facsimile.
• Violent crime is out of control.
• The imperatives of woke ideology have undermined trust in our defining institutions from education and the media to churches and the military.

Joe Biden’s “ostrich response” is to insist that the media start reporting on the economy “the right way,” i.e., in a way that reflects well, if untruthfully, on the Biden administration.

Pravda used to do the same thing.

Most economists are predicting that the US economy will enter recession this year. But that unpleasant news is at odds with the happy pink unicorn tale that the Biden administration requires.