I'm John Batchel with my good colleague Professor Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College.

She is in Quito, Ecuador, and it is momentous news of Argentina under the libertarian and outspoken

Javier Malay, given the model that it represents for Daniel Naboa, for example,

that there is a better way than statism and narco-terrorism.

Argentina reports, Professor Reuters, Argentina economic activity grows 5.7% in February and Argentina's surprise peso strength,

tempers fears of inflation comeback. I'm overwhelmed with good news. It's like eating too much

chocolate. What is to be done? Where's the bad news, Professor? We have a couple of minutes.

It's always remarkable that we continue to come back to Argentina and the policies of the

Havier-M-A government for the good news we're looking for in the region.

And once again, Argentina has not disappointed.

And it really comes back to the same things we've talked about on previous shows, which is that

the bitter medicine that after a long rule by perinism and more kind of clientistic

distributive policies, that the Malay government went and really implemented severe austerity,

cut about half of the government's organizations, ended up axing about 70,000 people in the

government with the, so to speak, a chainsaw that Malay talks about, devalued the

currency to basically get it back to be in a way, a place where it could be actually tradable

again.

It also cut back a lot of the transfer payments by the federal government to the state.

A lot of things, including the elimination of subsidies for a range of activities,

you know, subsidized transit subsidized electricity.

So it really imposed a lot of hardship.

You saw initial jump in inflation.

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