The president of Argentina’s Central Bank (BCRA), Mercedes Marcó del Pont, recently declared
it is totally false to say that printing more money generates inflation, price increases are generated by other phenomena like supply and external sector’s behaviour
Add to this the Argentine government’s statistical manipulation to suppress inflation measures, currency controls (banning of the US dollars), and other political controls (such as ban on imported books), as well as cronyism, the result has not only been intensifying capital flight but growing social instability which has been ominous of mounting social crisis.
Writes the London Evening Standard, (hat tip Bob Wenzel)
Tens of thousands of Argentinians blocked the streets of Buenos Aires in the country’s largest anti-government protests in more than a decade.Demonstrators marched against rising inflation, crime and corruption under President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, whose popularity has plummeted since she was re-elected last year as the economy wobbles.
Argentina’s etatism or a combination of both socialism and interventionism (fascism) only validates the admonitions of the great late Professor Ludwig von Mises,
State interference in economic life, which calls itself "economic policy," has done nothing but destroy economic life. Prohibitions and regulations have by their general obstructive tendency fostered the growth of the spirit of wastefulness. Already during the war period this policy had gained so much ground that practically all economic action of the entrepreneur was branded as violation of the law. That production is still being carried on, even semi-rationally, is to be ascribed only to the fact that destructionist laws and measures have not yet been able to operate completely and effectively. Were they more effective, hunger and mass extinction would be the lot of all civilized nations today.Our whole life is so given over to destructionism that one can name hardly a field into which it has not penetrated. "Social" art preaches it, schools teach it, the churches disseminate it.
The consequences of destructionism has now become evident in the streets of Buenos Aires.
