Politicians and governments today generally rule from a government-knows-best model. They believe they can calibrate, modulate, and manage an entire economy from a comfy government desk.
From the price of eggs at your local grocery store to exactly how much the cashier gets paid, they want a finger in every pie. They raise a red pen against the private sector, convinced that with enough rules, regulations, and tax dollars, they can engineer a perfect society.
Quite frankly, we find it exhausting – and destructive too.
If the people are lucky, and after the micromanagers have made a big enough mess of things, a rare leader may come to power who believes in allowing the natural and self-correcting forces of the free market to order society. They cut the sprawling state down to size. They don’t pretend to know what’s best for you.
Instead, they step back, outline the government’s boundaries in chalk, and let the private sector do its thing. They trust that everyday people, guided by self-interest and the ever-changing signals of supply and demand, are way better at running the world than any politician.
One side wants more control and higher spending. The other wants less government and more freedom. It’s a tale as old as time, but it shapes everything from your tax bill to the price of your morning coffee.
What’s more, these diverging experiments in political economy offer remarkable instruction. In today’s guest article, our old friend Joel Bowman, of Notes From the End of the World fame, juxtaposes these differing approaches – and their resulting pain and pleasure.
Enjoy!
MN Gordon
P.S. If you’d like more of Mr. Bowman’s erudite insights, do yourself a favor and head over to his website and subscribe to his newsletter. This will ensure you receive all his latest musings on freedom, liberty, and the culture of the west. We have no financial arrangement with Bowman and do not profit from publishing his work. We simply find his observations and writing to be valuable and believe you will too.
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The Rapper and the Rolling Stone
Mamdani and Milei, a tale of two leaders…
“But what can a poor boy do
Except to sing in a rock ‘n’ roll band?”
~ The Rolling Stones, Street Fighting Man (1968)
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina…
Today, a few words on a subject about which your editor knows a great deal: ignorance.
Ah, the pages we could fill with all that we do not know!
The trick to not knowing, as the Father of Philosophy reminds us, is in not pretending you do. And it is here, at the very first hurdle, that most do-gooder politicians and government-knows-best meddlers come unstuck.
Let us choose, as our exemplars of knowledge and ignorance, two members of the popular political cast hailing from opposite Ends of the Americas, both filed under the letter M:
First up, the Mayor of New York City, Ayatollah Zohran Mamdani
And second, the President of Argentina, Señor Javier Milei
The former, a political activist, campaign organizer and one-time hip hop rapper, believes he knows what voters need… and how to give it to ‘em, good and hard.
The latter, a professional economist, vocal proponent of the Austrian School of Economics and former singer in a Rolling Stones cover band, is not so sure…
On matters of substance, the two men could not be more different.
Class Warfare
On the one hand, Mamdani descends from a long line of prominent intellectual and cultural elites – his father is a fêted political theorist and anthropology professor; his mother is an acclaimed director and producer of “international art-house and crossover films.” (Claude says: “In the west, she is probably more recognizable within elite film and cultural circles.“ Yeah, we didn’t know either…)
Milei, on the other hand, traces his roots back to tierra áspera – his father was a bus driver, who later became a transport businessman; his mother was a homemaker. (Milei describes a strained or distant relationship with them both… at best.)
Aside from their differences in musical taste and class background, and more germane to the beat of these Notes, the fast talker and the rock crooner diverge on matters of political preference, too.
When it comes to their respective approaches to government, Milei’s tool of choice is a giant motosierra, which he uses to cut the sprawling State down to size… while Mamdani arrives on the scene with a gym teacher’s whistle, ready to coordinate, calibrate, modulate and otherwise manage the economy into shape.
Against the private sector, Mamdani raises his red pen… around the public sector, Milei traces a chalk outline.
More and Less
From the price of eggs at the local grocery store… to who owns and runs the store… who should be allowed to work there and what their hourly wage should be… where the eggs are to be farmed… under what conditions and with which chickens… and so on and so forth, down to the tiniest detail…
… there is scarcely an aspect of daily life over which our leading men would agree.
On the face of it, their political domains are different, too.
Argentina is a country of 48 million people scattered across a vast and varied terrain of just over a million square miles. New York is a city of 8.5 million people, crammed into a land space of just over 300 square miles, meaning you could drop ~3,500 Big Apples into this fin del mundo and barely crack the crate.
And yet, with a nominal GDP of roughly $1.3 trillion, New York’s economy is almost double the size of Argentina’s, which weighs in at around about $700 billion (projected, 2026). That works out as a per capita difference of roughly fivefold. NYC’s GDP per capita is around $70k per person; Argentina is closer to $14k.
(As readers can see, we’re using back of the envelope numbers here, assuming from the outset that statisticians are perhaps best qualified to challenge politicians in a contest of compulsive fibbers.)
But even allowing for the difference in their respective economies, it may come as a shock to some readers (and a painful one at that) to learn that government spending in New York City is more than six times per person what it is in Argentina…
And that’s without having to pony up for a military… national defense… navy… Social Security…Medicare… Medicaid… interstate infrastructure… federal courts… diplomacy… embassies… foreign consulates… border control… a space program…nuclear program… national debt servicing… federal disaster relief… the FBI, CIA, DEA, TSA… and all the other gaudy baubles and shiny trinkets typically shouldered by federal governments.
So while the Argentine government spends $2,100 per person (adjusted) annually… spending in MamdaniLand comes in at $13,500 per person.
What do New Yorkers get for their tax dollars?
Big Apples and Little Apples
Violent crime is roughly the same between the two locales, with the Big Apple experiencing slightly more homicides than Argentina, at 4- and 5- per 100k population, respectively.
Shockingly, poverty is comparable, too, with official data from the city’s own NYCgov Poverty Measure showing between 23-26% of residents living in poverty, compared to 28% of the population here in Argentina, per the latest INDEC data.
And that’s despite NYC residents having access to welfare, SNAP, subsidized housing, cash vouchers, Earned Income Tax Credit, school meals, shelters, etc.
Homelessness, meanwhile, is difficult to compare, although official data suggests NYC has a higher rate of unsheltered residents per capita, with official stats showing 0.06% of the population sleeping rough compared to 0.02% here in Argentina, even as NYC’s “right to shelter” laws ensure some 90,000-110,000 people find temporary shelter every night (and are therefore not counted in the above figure).
That’s a situation made all the more painful given that, at $81,000 each, NYC spends about six times more per homeless resident than Argentina’s entire annual GDP per capita… and almost 40 times Argentina’s total spending per resident each year.
That’s up from “just” $28,000 per person in 2019… and roughly double what the city’s Department of Education spends each year per student, $42,000. And yet, the problem only seems to grow…
No surprises for guessing Mamdani’s solutions for the city’s Big 3 problems…
On homelessness: more public housing… more housing vouchers… more rental assistance… and a $1.8 billion government contract with the city’s hotels to serve as an emergency homeless housing system…
On crime: a new Department of Community Safety, expanded mental-health response teams, and a public safety plan estimated to cost the city $1.1 billion… (from a man who actively supported Defund the Police during the BLM riots)…
On poverty: universal childcare, free buses, city-owned grocery stores, rent freezes, higher minimum wages…
… and an endless catalogue of collectivist gimcrackery that Argentina just spent the past 75 years proving does not work.
How, exactly, Mamdani proposes to pay for all these trinkets and freebies is up for debate, especially as the billionaire exodus (we mentioned in this Note) gathers pace.
And what about Sr. Milei? How have his free market policies been working down this End of the Americas?
Is there any place left for a street fighting man?
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World…
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
founder of Notes from the End of the World
P.S. As we were going to print, Bowman let us know that The Rapper and the Rolling Stone is Part I in what will be an ongoing series in which he will compare and contrast the leadership stylings and philosophical underpinnings of Argentine President Javier Milei and New York City Ayatollah Zohran Mamdani. Be sure to head over to his website and subscribe to his newsletter so you can tune into these reveries in real time.
