Que pasó en Argentina

Para no pocos resulta sorprendente que Argentina, después de haber sido la economía más próspera en la región y un modelo para el resto de América Latina, poco a poco se convirtió en un país con una economía mediocre.

O'Grady resume el caso argentino. Aquí la versión en español y aquí la versión en inglés.

Los párrafos más importantes:

This gets us to the root of the problem, which developed long before the Kirchners' abuses of market and legal principles. The constitution once held limited government and private property to be among the highest ideals of the land. But in the 1920s these protections, which had made the country a magnet for immigrants and the seventh-largest economy in the world, began to erode.

An early example of this assault on liberty was when Congress imposed a rent freeze to deal with a housing shortage after World War I. This only exacerbated the problem, and in 1922 a politicized Supreme Court widened state powers to allow the regulation of rents. That decision put property-rights protection on a slippery slope. A decade later the Court gave the legislature the power to regulate interest rates.

The interventions didn't end there, and as state control of the economy expanded and the nation grew poorer, the country could not recover its footing. Economic populism and labor militancy took hold; protectionism blossomed and Argentina became a welfare state. Meanwhile, the informal economy swelled under the high cost of legality.

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