"Chris Bishop’s primary responsibility is reforming the RMA. ... The bureaucratic class has magnificently undermined his agenda."

"[Chris] Bishop’s primary responsibility, other than completing Steven Joyce’s highway from Warkworth to Whangarei, is reforming the RMA. ... [G]iven how central the reform of the Resource Management Act has been to this government, it defies comprehension that National didn't arrive with a draft ready to go. ...

"The excellent folk at the NZ Initiative have done an analysis of the two proposed [replacement] laws [which eventually emerged]: the Natural Environment and the Planning Bills. Nick Clark, the researcher, concluded, '...in the translation from principles to legislative text, something has gone wrong. Key elements have been weakened, complexity has crept back in, and an extraordinary amount of the systems' substance has been deferred to secondary instruments that do not yet exist.' ...

"The desire to place property rights at the heart of the legislation has been superseded by placing mana whenua into their customary central role in managing the land. ...

"[Also, i]f passed, these bills will not be the final word. That will be left to ‘secondary legislation’, or regulation; binding rules made by the minister of the day that determine how the law is to be applied. The proposal is for parliament to delegate its authority to the executive with minimal oversight. This time next year, Minister Swarbrick could use this secondary legislation to mandate her own vision into reality.

"Did we vote for that? ...

"[T]he bureaucratic class ... has magnificently undermined his agenda. This should have been self-evident thirty months ago ... "

~ Damien Grant from his post 'Chris Bishop has emerged as the main pretender to a shaky crown. How shall we assess his performance?'

No, the state did not ban speaking te reo in 19C schools.

While considering Elizabeth Rata's recent Research Report into the History of New Zealand Education -- which I recommend, by the way -- I remembered a long-ago 'Cue Card' that appeared here on the topic of Education, contrasting liberal, conservative, and libertarian views on the subject:

The 'liberal' view [of education] is that all that is wrong with state education can be fixed with more money, better staff-student ratios, greater control of curriculum, more qualified teachers and more paperwork. But as more and more money spent on education has shown that more of the same just produces more and more failure.  

The view of conservatives is generally that public education needs to be made more efficient. With more efficiency, they say, 'delivery' of education will be better.

Libertarians however maintain that state education is all too efficient: it has been ruthlessly efficient at delivering the state’s chosen values. After generations of indoctrination at the knee of the state we now have several generations who are 'culturally safe' and politically correct -- ‘good citizens’ unable to use the brains they were born with, unthinkingly compliant in every respect with the values in which they've been totally immersed; braindead automatons to whom group-think is good and for forty-two percent of whom the reading of a bus timetable or the operation of a simple appliance is beyond them.

In previous decades the government's chosen values included banning the speaking of Maori in schools; speaking Maori in schools is fast becoming compulsory, along with the teaching of the ordained versions of Te Tiriti and the inculcation of the ideas of multiculturalism and the inferiority of western culture. Governments and their values change, but their use of their factory schools for indoctination doesn't.

The government's recently chosen values are "fairness, opportunity and security." We know that because [then-Prime Minister] Helen Clark said so. Orwell would have recognised these words, as he might the rigid orthodoxies of what passes for teacher training. "What happens in our schools is a very big part of shaping the future of New Zealand," says Ms Clark in the same speech, acknowledging that this is the way to make subjects out of citizens. Libertarians agree with Ms Clark's statement, which is precisely why we want governments away from the schools and away from control of curricula. 

Both Liberals and conservatives endorse state control of schools and of curricula, and they both seek to be the state. Libertarians don't.

They still don't.

But I made an error in the above 'Cue Card,' which Ms Rata's Report neatly corrects.

It is of course a historical fact that it's wasn't so much that the state banned the speaking of Māori in schools. What actually happened, as she reports, is that from George Grey's Education Ordinance of 1847 on, Māori were insisting that their children be taught in English, the lingua franca of the day. This is from Māori parents, Māori politicians, and Māori tribal leaders.

This is unsurprising. English was the entry into 19th century industrial technology – metallurgy for the new era of factories, rail, road and steamships, animal husbandry for livestock farming, and soil cultivation for grain and fruit production. Older crafts included leatherwork and blacksmithing. Combined with the English language, technological knowledge added to the already established Māori involvement in national and international business and trade.

The 1858 Native Schools Act continued the 1847 Ordinance's requirement for English language and industrial training. ...

The purpose of the Native village schools was to ensure that children would be bilingual: Māori at home and in the community and English acquired at school. English was a foreign language to many children so second language teaching methods and English content was used.

These were schools located in Māori villages, at the specific request of Māori elders, often with Māori parents attending classes as well, And in those "native schools" as they were called 

W. Rolleston, first inspector of Native Schools ... noted [in 1867] widespread dissatisfaction with the syllabus and with Māori as the language of instruction.

There was too much of the Bible taught, and too little of other subjects. They were taught moreover in their own language, whereas what they wished to learn was English.

The 1867 Native Schools Act directly addressed these concerns. Māori Members of Parliament supported implementing the Act. Karaitiana Takamoana (Eastern Maori) noted that the missionaries had been teaching the children –

“for many years, and the children are not educated. They have only taught them in the Maori language. The whole of the Maoris in this Island request that the Government should give instructions that the Maoris should be taught in English only”

Four more petitions to Parliament followed: In 1876 from Te Hakairo and 336 others; in 1877 from Renata Renata Kawepo and 790 others; and in 1877 from Riripi Ropata and 200 others. 

The schools gently prised education from the hands of missionaries into those of the state. They were funded by the taxpayer, with control of government funding and the school management transferred to village committees "at least 5 who are elected annually by parents of the children at the school." But above all:

The [Native Schools] Act required teacher competency, English language instruction, and syllabus quality:

The English language and the ordinary subjects of primary English education [said the Native Schools Act, 1867, S. 21] are taught by a competent teacher and that the instruction is carried on in the English language as far as practicable.

In short, while training Māori in English was one of the state's chosen values, it was at the express invitation of Māori parents, patriarchs, and politicians -- and was not to the exclusion of the Māori language itself.

* * * * 

Ms Rata discusses this topic and much more in a fascinating podcast interview with the NZ Initiative's Michael Johnston:

Free trade is good. A reminder. [updated]

Getting a free-trade agreement with India over the line has been harder work than getting oil out of the Straits of Hormuz. But over the weekend it finally happened, and the agreement was signed.

It's true, as Murray Rothbard used to say, that genuine free trade doesn’t require a treaty or its deformed cousin, a “trade agreement” -- all it needs is repealing our numerous tariffs, import quotas, anti-'dumping' laws, and other restrictions on trade. Which, to be fair, is most of what this agreement seems to offer.

A relaxation of rules, not any new ones.

Over the centuries, getting it understood that trade is good -- a win-win -- has been even harder work. It's been 250 years since Scotsman Adam Smith wrote 700 pages to explain that very point. Yet as Daniel J. Smith, Gabriel F. Benzecry point out, "Returning to The Wealth of Nations, one is struck by how little progress has been made in educating the public about sound principles, a task that must be renewed with every generation."

The Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and voluntary exchange that inspired America’s founders also laid the foundation of modern economics. Yet two and a half centuries later, persistent policy blunders — protectionist trade barriers, ballooning national debt, and stubborn inflation — reveal how far we have strayed from the Scotsman’s insights, endangering the principles upon which our republic was founded.

Protectionism is becoming so endemic once again, so normalised, that it requires a major effort to implement its opposite. It's big news when shackles come off. freedom free-trade 

The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge — it’s a failure to teach and apply enduring principles. ...

Yet even as those principles are applied we can see and applaud the results. Even as the world's population has increased rapidly, we see that the most important growth with more population is not more stomachs to feed, but more minds able to produce -- and (in Adam Smith's words) more people ready to truck, barter and trade. The very simple fact, as Marian Tupy reminds us, is that "for every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent."

For every 1% increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3% — according to @HumanProgress's new Simon Abundance Index.

In other words, when people are left even moderately free to produce, resources grow at a faster pace than the population.

It was Malthus, writing after Adam Smith, who ignored so many of his lessons and saw only the stomachs to be fed. 

The Malthusian mind never [saw] the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt.

The record is clear. Smith explained how it works 250 years ago. Let's applaud when more of it is allowed to happen.

UPDATE: Another reminder: 

It's not nations that trade. People trade.

And they will if you just get out of their way. 

#ANZAC: "And year after year, the numbers grow fewer, who remember what it was we're not to forget"

 

'Sacrifice,' by sculptor Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park

"It's gratifying, in a way, that we start Anzac Day every year with a commemoration of a shambolic dawn landing that kicked off a pointless and wholly tragic military campaign that snuffed out some of the best young men of two young nations. It's not a victory march, but a sobering commemoration of the destruction of war.
    "This is healthy. This much is good.
    "'Lest we Forget!' we say"
    "It's said every year. And yet year after year, the numbers grow fewer who remember what it was we're not forgetting....

"THE MYTHOLOGY OF ANZAC is that the battle at the Dardanelles gave birth to two nations. If that’s true, it is an odd birth, fathered out of failure by way of disaster. 

"In the end, the attempted occupation [of the Gallipoli peninsula] was decided upon partly because in any bureaucracy once plans are begun they are very hard to stop ..." 

[T]he reason they embarked [was] not to beat the Hun, but to save the Czar [and to] gift Constantinople to Russia.... as an altruistic gift to an 'ally' who was the most autocratic in Europe, who had shown no sign of earning British trust ... the price for the sacrifice to be paid for in the blood of those Australian, New Zealand and British young men and their families.... 

    "Such is the code of sacrifice under which the decision was made to go.... [in pursuit, said Churchill, of] 'a victory such as the war had not yet seen.'
    "It never would. It never could. 
    "Instead, it all turned to omnishambles. The only thing in the end about which anyone had anything about which to boast was a successful and well-executed withdrawal. 
    "It was a bloody mess that achieved nothing, that could achieve nothing, purchased at the price of a wholesale sacrifice of young lives that could have meant something. It was a total unmitigated disaster, but at least, now, dear reader, some reason for the whole, sordid shambles might be clearer. 
    "The reason however for commemorating the shambles as the botched 'birth' (in some way) of our nation is very much less so."

~ composite quote excerpted from NOT PC's posts 'Lest we forget what?' and 'But what were the ANZACs fighting for, Grandad?'

It's been raining a lot

It was the explosion heard almost around the world, yet now all but forgotten. The Hunga Tonga/Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption and subsequent tsunami devastated much of the island kingdom of Tonga, displacing hundreds of people from the outer islands, and propelling a record-breaking amount of water vapour into the Earth's stratosphere -- enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

As an underwater volcano, it thrust an unprecedented amount of water into the sky, increasing total stratospheric water content by about 10% -- enough to cause a rapid change in atmospheric chemistry. That additional water vapour from the eruption is still up there, still decaying steadily, not expected to return to its pre-eruption range until around 2030.

Talking to a friend recently about the rain, the floods, the wet weather events in the last few years, you have to wonder whether that massive uptick in stratospheric water might still be playing a part?

Hunga Tonga erupted in January 2022. MetService recorded 53 severe weather events in 2022, and issued 182 severe weather warnings. In January 2023 Auckland had its worst flood in memory, a record 539mm of raining falling in January. Cyclone Gabrielle arrived in Feb 2023. Extreme rain events occurred throughout 2024, from extreme rainfall events occurred throughout the year, from Dunedin to Westland. The North Island got a Red Alert and the South Island a state of emergency in May 2025 for record rainfall and strong winds. And this week Wellingtonians were stuck with severe flooding and landslides after 77mm of rain fell in less than one hour, causing the worst flooding event since Wellington's disastrous 1976 storm.

Naturally, NIWA says "nothing to see here." (They don't seem to have even mentioned the eruption since 2024.) The influential 2025 Hunga Volcanic Eruption Atmospheric Impacts Report frustratingly focusses more on temperature than rainfall. But just as the atmospheric water increase still lingers, so too a few studies suggest some lingering interest in the question -- examining especially how much the eruption  may have nudged rainfall patterns in the Southern Hemisphere, including New Zealand.

A January 2026 study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics found some statistically significant extratropical regional climate responses to the eruption, driven by circulation changes. A recent finding from the Austrian Polar Research Institute), published just weeks ago, found that the eruption continues to influence stratospheric patterns, increasing chances of extreme precipitation events at mid-latitudes-- which includes New Zealand.

Yet while they're happy to go on the record about their modelled "causes" of recent rainfall events, the largest volcanic eruption this century remains the climate event no local climate scientists want to talk about. 

I can't imagine why.

Let's (not) make a noise!

"‘LET’S MAKE A NOISE FOR THE MIGHTY WESTS TIGERS!’ the ground announcer shouts to the crowd, his voice booming through portable speakers that are spread around the oval.

"‘I CAN’T HEAR YOU, TIGERS FANS,’ he continues, ‘I SAID MAKE A NOISE!’

"Why sporting administrators feel the need to fill breaks in the game with pumping music or high-pitched screeching of ground announcers is beyond me.

"Can you imagine an Ashes game at Lords, thousands of the Barmy Army singing, trumpets playing ‘Jerusalem’, and all of it drowned out by ‘We Will Rock You’ or ‘Hells Bells?’ Can you imagine decades-old home-grown supporters’ chants of an old firm clash between Rangers and Celtic interrupted by the shrieks of a ground announcer, or the cheery drunken chaos of the Bay 13 crowd of a Boxing Day Test match drowned out by rock music? They just can’t let us enjoy the natural noise of the game. ...

"The groans of despair at a last-second loss, the jubilation of an unexpected come-from-behind win are sounds that add to the atmosphere of the game, not the loud music and cliched slogans of chant champions and ground announcers. Why can’t we just enjoy the unscripted barracking of the game?

"‘AND NOW,’ the ground announcer’s voice blasts through the speakers again, ‘HERE COMES YOUR WESTS TIGERS.’"

~ Paul Harman from his post 'Time’s up, Ground Announcer'

"Every dollar collected through a capital gains tax is a dollar stolen twice"

"Capital gains tax represents one of the most egregious examples of double taxation in the federal code, yet politicians treat it as if they're taxing 'unearned' income for the first time. 

"You earn $100,000, pay income tax on it, and save $70,000 after the government takes their cut. You invest that already-taxed money in shares, real estate, or bonds. Ten years later, you sell for $140,000. The government swoops in again, demanding capital gains tax on your $70,000 profit. They're taxing the same economic activity twice: your initial productive work that generated the savings, then the delayed consumption that made investment possible. 

"Capital gains represent nothing more than the time value of money plus compensation for risk. When you save instead of consume immediately, you defer gratification to provide capital for productive investment. That $70,000 you invested didn't sit idle; it funded business expansion, job creation, and economic growth. The return you earned reflects both the productive use of that capital and inflation's erosion of purchasing power over time. 

"The double taxation becomes even more perverse when you consider inflation. If your $70,000 investment becomes $140,000 over ten years, but inflation averaged 3% annually, your real purchasing power increased by roughly $18,000, not $70,000. Yet the IRD taxes the entire nominal gain, including the portion that merely kept pace with their own monetary debasement. 

"Every dollar collected through a capital gains tax is a dollar stolen twice; once from your labour, again from your thrift."

~ Handre [translated from American]

"Neoliberalism." "Austerity." Bollocks.

There are people who think the world in recent times has been suffering under something called "neoliberalism" in which "social spending"is savaged ....

... and others who claim governments have recently been inflicting something called "austerity." Here's the UK's "austerity" measured over the last three centuries. Their experience is not unique ...

[Hat tips Zeitgeist Explorer and A. Comte] 

"This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine."

"Capitalism created the possibility of the win-win-win. It used to be a zero sum game where somebody won, somebody else lost.  

"It was never a zero-sum game in my mind. You’re always trading with your customers and your employees and your suppliers for mutual benefit, mutual gain. That’s the miracle of capitalism. That’s why humanity has been lifted out of the dirt in the last 250 years. The Industrial Revolution led humanity out of this trap that we were in, which really was a zero-sum game. ...

"The biggest mistake people make, intellectuals in particular, they still think we're in a zero sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk somehow stole the money from the people. 

"They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching. They're creating value for their customers, they're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing, their investors are seeing their capital go up. It can be reinvested and compound. 

"All philanthropy ultimately comes from business. That's where the profits are. Where do all the taxes come from? It ultimately comes from business as well. 

"This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. Somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world."

~ Whole Foods founder John Mackey on the Win-Win Mentality That Lifted Humanity Out of the Dirt [hat tip David Senra]

Simple Swarbrick

"Mainstream Media reports that the Green Party will campaign on mass electrification for the election, saying the sun, wind, water and geothermal energy 'don’t come through the Strait of Hormuz.'

"Chloe Swarbrick with that wild-eyed enthusiasm that only she is capable of offers a simplistic solution. I use the word 'simplistic' advisedly. She herself says the solution is simple. ... Swarbrick said the Government needed to create a national electrification plan ...starting with improving access to 'cheap, easy loans for solar panels and batteries' ... 'tak[ing] control of our country’s own needs by powering ourselves, with every renewable resource available in abundance around us.' Would that it were so easy. ...

"[T]hink about a few things.;

• Is what Swarbrick proposes really a solution?
• Does she really know what she is talking about?
• Is she aware of the pervasiveness of the petrochemical industry in our day to day lives and how much we depend upon it?
• Have she and the Greens really thought through this policy or is it an easy one to articulate.
• Or in fact are Swarbrick and the Greens speaking and policy making from a position of unawareness or ignorance of the nature of the problem?

"And if the answer to the preceding question is in the affirmative, do they have any business being near the levers of power. ...

"Think about it and ... about the pervasiveness of the petrochemical industry and how much we depend upon it."

~ David Harvey from his post 'Unawareness, Blind Ignorance and a Sense of Unreality'

"The blight of Pauline Hanson is that her dumb bigotry offers a fantasy."

Former Aus PM Paul Keating -- aka the Lizard of Oz -- has deservedly unloaded on the pathetic race-baiting of newish Aus Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor.  "Many people, me included, wished him well in fighting One Nation with a conservatism anchored in principles. How dispiriting is his cowardice."

The Liberal party, battling an extreme version of itself – One Nation – has again fallen back to its default political policy: racism.

Angus Taylor, announcing a policy at primary odds with an immigrant nation, says a Liberal government under his leadership will adopt Trump ICE-style policies to weed and “boot out” people who fail to adhere to “national values” and who are responsible for the erosion of national culture including the Balkanisation of communities.

And, to hammer the point, sitting beside Taylor at his policy launch was Mr Racial Opportunism himself, John Winston Howard, late of anti-Asian migration in 1988 – the picket fence suburban racism of his first round as Liberal leader, and the wilful anti-humanitarianism of his electorally-driven Tampa atrocity of 2001. ...

Angus Taylor came to the Liberal leadership with a reputation of being mainstream Liberal; that is, a keeper of the Liberal party’s best longer-term instincts both in social and economic policy.

And many people, myself included, wished him well in consolidating the Liberal base and in fighting One Nation with a conservatism anchored in principles. If not righteous, decent.

But by adopting racism with its shabby appeal to differentiation and primal instincts, Angus Taylor marks himself out as a political leader unworthy of the leadership of a party that has managed Australia for the greater part of the last century and which celebrated the country’s unifying values.

Racism is not simply immoral and abhorrent, it is absurd. The notion that some of us are in some way different to the rest of us – in some way born differently, of some alien biology. ...

The blight of Pauline Hanson is that her dumb bigotry offers a fantasy. The fantasy that Australia in the modern age can return to a monoculture. A monoculture which fails to acknowledge or accept that a continent of our scale is able to turn its back on the multilateralism of neighbouring states or on the vitality of their societies. And, more than that, shun them while disparaging any contribution they may make or bring to us as migrants.

How dispiriting for the rest of us is Angus Taylor’s cowardice in not even attempting to stand and argue for principles that have been integral to Australia’s strength – principles his party has long championed.

RELATED:

=>Welfare State Leaves Boat-People to Die

Thursday, 30 August 2001, 11:01 am | Libertarianz Party

"New Zealanders who wish the 434 Afghan refugees on board the Tampa moored off Christmas Island would just 'go away' are exposing the dark underbelly at the heart of the Welfare State," says Libertarianz Leader Peter Cresswell....

=>Better Way for Boat-People

Thursday, 30 August 2001, 11:06 am | Libertarianz Party

"There is a better way forward for politicians wrestling with a way to deal with the 434 homeless Afghan refugees that no country wants to admit," suggested Libertarianz leader Peter Cresswell today....

"If you want to know the real meaning of work, read Frederick Douglass's account of his first time working as a free man."

"If you want to know the real meaning of work, read Frederick Douglass's account of his first time working as a free man.
    "After escaping slavery, his first job was loading coal onto ships. It was new, hard, dirty work. Here's how he describes it:

"'I was now my own master. It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own.
"'There was no Master standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and my newly-married wife. It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.'

"Dirty, backbreaking work—and he describes it as rapture, pleasure, a new existence. 

    "Next time you struggle to find meaning in whatever it is you do for paid work, think of Frederick Douglass."

~ Gena Gorlin, quoting Frederick Douglass from his Autobiographical Writings

"Taxes ... "

"Taxes are the price you pay to fund the things that you protest against."

~ Spike Cohen

'Who Deserves Our Support?'

"Whenever I begin to debate certain issues such as the war in Iran or the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, I am confronted with the fact that the side I support has done some pretty stupid (sometimes evil) things. America supported the Shah, who was an oppressive dictator. Israel enabled the rise of Hamas by supporting Islamist social and charitable organizations within Gaza in order to create a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). And then there allegations of even more sinister actions, ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous. It is easy to see why so many people retreat to a kind of neutrality. They shrug and say both sides have some valid points. Who can know which is worth supporting?

"Without a well-grounded philosophical framework, there really IS no way to know. ... if you’re not thinking conceptually, it might be hard to make a distinction between this group dropping bombs and that group dropping bombs.

"You might be tempted to view the conflict in terms of who is the underdog. Who is the David fighting Goliath? Of course, even on these terms, it’s pretty bizarre to view a nation of about 10 million (Israel) as the Goliath when they are facing down Iran (a nation of about 90 million) or the entire Arab world (around 500 million) or the entire Islamic world (perhaps as many as 2 billion).

"But regardless, this is the wrong way to look at the conflict. Instead, we should be thinking in terms of what kind of civilisation does each side represent? What values would we like a society to uphold — and which of these 'sides' [if any] better represents those values? ... it does mean understanding the fundamental distinction between [semi] free and unfree societies — between good societies that sometimes makes mistakes, and fundamentally bad societies that (like all societies) have many good people in them who are just trying to live their lives.

"Once you understand the distinction, you might come to understand that the only way to 'Free Palestine' or to truly support any of the “underdogs” in the world is to free them from the ideological chains of their terrible belief systems. Fundamentally, these people are not angry at the West because they have (sometimes legitimate) grievances about particular actions, but because they resent the example that even a semi-free society presents. While we can’t force people to be free or even to believe in freedom as an ideal, we can (and should) show them the utter futility of continuing to support the death cult of Islamism. It was only utter defeat that discredited Nazism in Germany and emperor-worship in imperial Japan — and allowed them to develop into much happier, freer, and more prosperous societies. That is what I wish for Palestine, Iran, and all the oppressed people of the world."

~ Stewart Margolis from his post 'Who Deserves Our Support?'

Deregulation in Argentina: Milei Takes “Deep Chainsaw” to Bureaucracy and Red Tape

Argentine President Javier Milei has lowered inflation, drastically reduced government spending, and dismantled large parts of the federal bureaucracy. But as Ian Vásquez points out in his guest post, one of the most far-reaching efforts by his administration has been its deregulation push, with officials implementing about two deregulations per day on average since he took office, and using ingenious ways to discover where most needs deregulation. It's an Example for the World, if only New Zealand were not too sclerotic to learn from it ...

Deregulation in Argentina: Milei Takes “Deep Chainsaw” to Bureaucracy and Red Tape

by Ian Vásquez
At the heart of Argentina’s chronically crisis-prone economy is a political system that encourages unconstrained public spending and overregulation in the extreme. It is the system set up by Juan Domingo Perón in the 1940s that strengthened in subsequent decades, and that President Javier Milei promised to cut down with a chainsaw and replace with classical-liberal policies of the kind that made his country one of the most prosperous in the world a century ago.

Since assuming power in December 2023, Milei has been slashing government to that end. His priorities have been to get spending under control and to deregulate. Milei cut the budget by about 30 percent and balanced it one month into his term. That facilitated more disciplined monetary policy and the reduction of inflation from 25 percent per month when the president came to office to 2.2 percent in January 2025.

The success that Milei’s economic stabilisation has had so far is now widely acknowledged. The president took an economy from crisis to recovery much faster than most people expected: Growth returned in the second half of 2024, wages have increased, and the poverty rate, after having initially risen, has fallen below the 40 percent range that the previous government left as part of its legacy.

How much Milei has been deregulating, however, and the role that deregulation plays in Argentina’s success, is less widely appreciated—yet it is every bit as important as cutting spending. To understand why, it helps to know something about what makes Argentina’s politics different from that of most countries.

Argentina’s Peronist System

For more than seven decades, Argentina has had a corporatist system that Perón set up using Mussolini’s fascist Italy as a model. Under that system, the state organises society into groups—trade unions, business guilds, public employees, and so on—with which it negotiates to set national policies and balance interests. It’s a kind of collectivism that erases the individual, centralises power in the state, and incentivizes interest groups to compete for government favoritism through public spending and regulation.

This system gave rise to a proliferation of rules intended to protect and promote particular sectors through price controls, licensing schemes, differential exchange rates depending on type of economic activity, capital controls, preferential borrowing rates, compulsory membership in (and support of) guilds, and other interventions.

The system that the Peronist party set up discouraged free exchange, competition, and productivity but became deeply entrenched. Privileges accorded by regulation were politically difficult to lift. Legal scholar Jorge Bustamante, moreover, notes that regulation plays a more significant role in redistributing wealth in Argentina than fiscal policy does. He adds that “the waste of scarce resources caused by regulations is more serious than the direct activity of the state in the economy itself [fiscal policy], which is known to be in deficit.”

Unions in particular gained immense political power. Such was the case that Bustamante describes the Argentine system as one that “converts the unions into organs of the state when the party to which they belong [the Peronist party] is in power or converts the state into a prisoner of the unions when the party is in the opposition.”

Federico Sturzenegger, Argentina’s minister of deregulation and state transformation, made a similar point at the Cato conference we held in Buenos Aires in June 2024 with President Milei and other leading classical liberals. “The Peronist party,” Sturzenegger said, “is the manager of the status quo.… It is the manager of the vested interests; it is the conservative party of Argentina.”

The Peronists may want to conserve the system, but Milei is right in cutting it down. According to Cato's Human Freedom Index, the Argentina that the president inherited is one of the most regulated countries in the world, ranking 146 out of 165 countries in terms of the regulatory burden. As of last year, it ranked 81st.

Milei’s Cuts in One Year

Since coming to power, Milei has made wide-ranging cuts to Argentina’s bureaucracy. In his first year, he reduced the number of ministries from 18 to 8 (eliminating some and merging others), fired 37,000 public employees, and abolished about 100 secretariats and subsecretariats in addition to more than 200 lower-level bureaucratic departments.

The president has also aggressively pursued deregulation. Using a conservative methodology, my colleague Guillermina Sutter Schneider and I calculated that during Milei’s first year in office, he implemented about two deregulations per day. Roughly half of the measures eliminated regulations altogether, while the rest modified existing regulations in a generally market-oriented direction.

Milei has implemented these reforms legally and constitutionally, and they have resulted mainly from two broad measures. First, Milei began his administration by issuing an emergency “megadecree” that consisted of 366 articles. Emergency decrees are consistent with Argentine law if they meet certain conditions. They are also reviewable by Congress, which has the right to reject the orders within a specified period of time. Since the legislature did not object, most of the deregulations in the megadecree went into effect.

Second, Congress approved a massive bill (“Ley Bases”) last June that allows the government to issue further deregulatory decrees for one year. Most of Argentina’s deregulations are taking place under that authority and have been led by the new Ministry of Deregulation that began operating the following month.

The ministry is literally in a race against time, and its sense of urgency is palpable. When I visited Minister Sturzenegger and his team in November, they showed me a countdown sign outside his office that read “237 days left,” indicating the time remaining for the government to continue issuing deregulatory decrees. Sturzenegger’s team—made up of legal experts and accomplished economists—also has a clear sense of mission: to increase freedom rather than make the government more efficient. When reviewing a regulation, therefore, they first question whether the government should be involved in that area at all.

Following that approach, the government implemented deregulations in sectors of the economy ranging from agriculture and energy to transportation and housing. 

Looking at Prices

To help prioritise those reforms, the ministry looks at prices. If the cost of a good or service is significantly higher in Argentina than internationally, the regulatory burden often explains the price differential. Sturzenegger reports that deregulation in Argentina has tended to make prices fall by about 30 percent. The ministry has also set up a web portal called Report the Bureaucracy that takes recommendations from businesses and the public, resulting in numerous reforms.

Some of the reforms have been procedural. For example, government inspections are now sometimes conducted after a firm begins engaging in business (on the assumption that it is following the law and may be subject to inspection), rather than before any business is allowed to even go forward. This “ex-post” inspection of the labeling of imported textiles, for instance, led the price of textiles to fall by 29 percent. 

The government has also instituted a “positive administrative silence” rule affecting several activities by which requested permission is considered approved if the government bureaucracy does not respond within a fixed period of time. In yet another example, Milei prohibited legally sanctioned hereditary positions that had become normal practice at numerous government agencies.

Much of the impact of the deregulations has not yet been measured, but the hard or anecdotal evidence that does exist suggests that the reforms are making a significant difference. The following are some accomplishments from Milei’s first year:

• The end of Argentina’s extensive rent controls has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a 30 percent drop in price.
• The new open-skies policy and the permission for small airplane owners to provide transportation services within Argentina has led to an increase in the number of airline services and routes operating within (and to and from) the country.
• Permitting Starlink and other companies to provide satellite internet services has given connectivity to large swaths of Argentina that had no such connection previously. Anecdotal evidence from a town in the remote northwestern province of Jujuy implies a 90 percent drop in the price of connectivity.
• The government repealed the “Buy Argentina” law similar to “Buy American” laws, and it repealed laws that required stores to stock their shelves according to specific rules governing which products, by which companies and which nationalities, could be displayed in which order and in which proportions.
• Over-the-counter medicines can now be sold not just by pharmacies but by other businesses as well. This has resulted in online sales and price drops.
• The elimination of an import-licensing scheme has led to a 
• 20 percent drop in the price of clothing items and a 35 percent drop in the price of home appliances.
• The government ended the requirement that public employees purchase flights on the more expensive state airline and that other airlines cannot park their airplanes overnight at one of the main airports in Buenos Aires.

Many more examples could be given, but there’s no doubt that Argentines are beginning to feel the results of the reforms. Those results also help explain Milei’s approval rating of 50 to 55 percent, according to recent polls.

Year Two of Milei: The “Deep Chainsaw” Begins

In his address to the nation on his one-year anniversary as president, Milei explained that the cuts he’s made so far are only a beginning. “We will continue to eliminate agencies, secretariats, subsecretariats, public companies and any other State entity that should not exist,” he promised, and then went further: “Every attribution or task that does not correspond to what the federal state is supposed to do will be eliminated. Because as the state gets smaller, liberty grows larger.” Milei declared that he would now begin applying the “deep chainsaw.”

Minister Sturzenegger is leading the charge. A decree in February instructed all ministers to review all laws and regulations under their purview and recommend comprehensive deregulations within 30 days. In a country with nearly 300,000 laws, decrees, or resolutions, that is no small task. But according to Sturzenegger, the government has cut or modified 20 percent of the country’s laws; his goal is to reach 70 percent. He adds that the pace of firing public employees will increase.

Regulatory reforms have already picked up pace. In January, Sturzenegger announced a “revolutionary deregulation” of the export and import of food. All food that has been certified by countries with high sanitary standards can now be imported without further approval from, or registration with, the Argentine state. Food exports must now comply only with the regulations of the destination country and are unencumbered by domestic regulations.

That innovative reform, which outsources regulation, is intended to generate “cheaper food for Argentines and more Argentine food for the world.” But it is also an example of how the ministry takes input from Argentine citizens about the need to change nonsensical regulations. As Sturzenegger explained: “Countless companies have told us of the incredible hardships they had to go through to meet local requirements that were not required by the destination market. A producer who needed to certify a sample to see if he could enter the US market was asked to set up a factory first.”

In another case, Argentina required a watermelon exporter to package his product in a way that was different from what the recipient country required. So, in practice, the exporter would load the ship in compliance with Argentine law and, once the cargo left port, the watermelons would immediately be repacked.

Other examples abound. A decree in February facilitated farmers’ use of new seeds by eliminating the requirement to conduct extensive testing of those seeds. As Sturzenegger observed, in a country where agriculture plays a significant economic role, those restrictions were especially perverse: “Brazil has tripled its soybean production, largely with seeds made by Argentine researchers, working in Argentine companies but based in Brazil. The dramatic thing is that the increase in production in Brazil sinks the price of the grain while we are relatively stagnant because we cannot access our own technology!”

Another decree reduces the cost of warehousing imported containers awaiting customs inspections by an estimated 80 percent because it allows importers to keep their goods in competing locations during that time rather than solely in places run by the customs service. That cost reduction, like countless others that result from accelerated regulatory reforms, will be passed on to Argentine consumers. And to the extent that the chainsaw really does go deeper and faster in year two, the benefits will be even more pronounced.

An Example for the World

Milei’s task of turning Argentina once again into one of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world is herculean. But deregulation plays a key role in achieving that goal, and despite the reform agenda being far from complete, Milei has already exceeded most people’s expectations. 

His deregulations are cutting costs, increasing economic freedom, reducing opportunities for corruption, stimulating growth, and helping to overturn a failed and corrupt political system. Because of the scope, method, and extent of its deregulations, Argentina is setting an example for an overregulated world.

* * * * 

Ian Vásquez is Ian Vásquez is vice president for international studies at the Cato Institute, holds the David Boaz Chair, and is director of Cato’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. He is a weekly columnist at El Comercio (Peru), and his articles have appeared in newspapers throughout the United States and Latin America.

His post first appeared at the Cato at Liberty blog.

How regulation works

Above a certain size, building new homes in France requires a registered architect.

Take a wild guess: what size do you reckon that is ...

In the same vein, at what number of employees do you reckon French firms are obliged to unionise ...

...and at what level of income do you reckon UK firms are legally obliged to register for VAT...

...and what happened in Georgian Britain when they taxed windows ...

Here are The Beatles ...

"And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley."

"Q: 'So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?'

"A: 'That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.

"'The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.

"'I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.'

"Q: 'Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, 'Succession' is really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.'

"A: 'There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.

"'Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. ... But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading. ...'

"Q: 'What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?'

"A: 'So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?'"

~ from an interview with Henry Oliver on developing literary taste in an age of TV binge-watching and dumbed-down mass culture: 'How to Be a Serious Reader'

"Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements...."

"Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind... Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships. The political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens. It means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed."

~ Ayn Rand from her article 'The Roots of War' [hat tip Objectobot]

The Vance Effect

See if you can spot when Victor Orban's chances really hit the skids...

TOFU Trump

 

A brief update for you on last week's summary post:

Brief Trump summary of the past weeks: 

-“Open the Strait” 

- “Help us open the Strait” 

- “We don’t need the Strait open” 

- “Open the f’king Strait or I destroy you all” 

- “I will block the Strait”

How to get me into a voting booth

When it comes to election time my general approach is "Don't encourage them, don't vote." I've never been  disappointed with that considered choice.

But Henry Olsen has an idea that might get me into a booth: a negative vote.

We know exactly who we cannot stand and why the other lot would be a disaster. But our positive support for any party is probably lukewarm at best. ...

Perhaps the voting system should reflect that.

Imagine this: ... You head to the polls and discover that, not only can you vote for a party, but you can also vote against one.

Instead of adding to your preferred party’s vote count, you could bring down the count of one you hate. Now that voters have finally mastered MMP, this would take democracy to a whole new level.

Are you a middle-aged farmer worried about the Greens’ alternative Budget, or a young college graduate mad at the Coalition for reducing Auckland’s housing construction allowance? Use the negative vote to express your anger!

No one would be obliged to use their positive vote, so all votes could be negative. The party with the fewest negative votes would then win the election.

I like it. It could be that all parties are so hated, we could have a Prime Minister leading a party with more negative votes than positive. Just fewer negative votes than all those other bastards.

Then let's see them talk about their bloody "mandate."

PS: Which of the bastards would you be voting against?

Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds

"[There is now a] strange coexistence between an unprecedented variety of opinions that are strongly represented in the public square and the rigid worldview that constrains the beliefs of the most influential people in our society ....

"Never before have so many opinions been at our fingertips—and never before have so many professionals felt unable to voice theirs. What explains this paradox [of infinite voices and narrow minds], why does it matter, and what can we do about it?

"It is impossible to understand the recent politics of the Western world without considering a giant sociological transformation ...: The bourgeoisie has switched sides. ...

"Karl Marx called on the workers, not on the lawyers or freelance illustrators, of the world to unite. The origins of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, of Britain’s Labour Party, and even of the modern-day Democratic Party in the United States lie with factory workers and trade unionists. ... But of late, these realities have started to shift ...

"Plumbers are right wing but lawyers are left wing. Cab drivers are right wing but university professors are left wing. Police officers are right wing but civil servants are left wing. And though many professions claim to be apolitical, the plumbers and cab drivers and police officers increasingly suspect that the lawyers and professors and civil servants are letting their political values influence their work. The decline in respect for 'experts' is in part owed to the blatant lies spread on social media; but it also has its roots in the real ways in which the consensus within these professions has increasingly come to adhere to a narrowly progressive—and often lamentably erroneous—set of assumptions about the world. ...

"The resulting state of affairs leaves both sides equally unhappy. ... What one side perceives as flagrantly unjust domination by the well-credentialed, the other interprets as the perils of revanchist demagoguery."

~ Yascha Mounk from his post 'The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides: What happens when elites all believe the same thing'

Trump’s “victory timeline” claims (actual quotes)

June 25, 2025: "Iran's nuclear facilities have been obliterated."
Jan 2, 2026: threatens a "locked and loaded" military intervention if Iran kills peaceful protesters.
Jan 13: "Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!... HELP IS ON ITS WAY"
Feb 13: Regime change "would be the best thing that could happen" in Iran
Feb 24: "We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret words, 'We will never have a nuclear weapon.'" "My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy. But one thing is certain, I will never allow the world's No. 1 sponsor of terror to have a nuclear weapon."
Late Feb: "I'm not happy with the fact that they're not willing to give us what we have to have."

Feb 28: [Oman says a deal is "within reach."]

[IRGC kills 36,000 protestors to March. No "help" appears.]

Also Feb 28: Trump releases an 8-minute video on Truth Social announcing strikes have begun, saying Iran's "menacing activities" endangered the US and its allies; cites the Iran hostage crisis, support for Hamas and Hezbollah, the killing of protesters, and Iran's chanting of "Death to America." He called on the Iranian people to overthrow their government.
Mar 2: "First, we're destroying Iran's missile capabilities… and their capacity to produce brand new ones. Second, we're annihilating their navy… Third, we're ensuring that the world's number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon… And finally, we're ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders."
Mar 3: Iran is building "powerful missiles and drones to create a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions."

Mar 3: Iran poses an "imminent threat" because it is going to retaliate against US forces when Israel attacks.

Mar 3: "We won the war." 

Mar 7: "We defeated Iran." 

Mar 9: "We must attack Iran." 

Mar 9: "The war is ending almost completely, and very beautifully. 

Mar 10: practically nothing left to target 

Mar 11: “You never like to say too ⁠early you won. We won. In ​the first hour it was over.” 

Mar 12: "We did win, but we haven't won completely yet." 

Mar 13: "We won the war." 

Mar 14: "Please help us." 

Mar 15: "If you don't help us, I will certainly remember it." 

Mar 16: "Actually, we don't need any help at all." 

Mar 16: "I was just testing to see who's listening to me." 

Mar 16: "If NATO doesn't help, they will suffer something very bad." 

Mar 17: "We neither need nor want NATO's help." 

Mar 17: "I don't need Congressional approval to withdraw from NATO." 

Mar 18: "Our allies must cooperate in reopening the Strait of Hormuz." 

Mar 19: "US allies need to get a grip - step up and help open the Strait of Hormuz." 

Mar 20: "NATO are cowards." 

Mar 21: "The Strait of Hormuz must be protected by the countries that use it. We don't use it, we don't need to open it." 

Mar 22: "This is the last time. I will give Iran 48 hours. Open the strait" 

Mar 22: "Iran is Dead" 

Mar 23: "VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST." 

Mar 24: "We’re making progress." 

Mar 24: We "won" the war. Iran wants "to make a deal so badly."

Mar 25: “They gave us a present and the present arrived today. And it was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. I’m not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a very significant prize.” 

Mar 26: "Make a deal, or we’ll just keep blowing them away." 

Mar 27: "We don’t have to be there for NATO." 

Mar 28: No major quote 

Mar 29: Claimed talks were progressing 

Mar 30: "Open the Strait of Hormuz immediately, or face devastating consequences." 

Mar 31: Claimed a deal was "very close" and that Iran would "do the right thing" 

Apr 1: "Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders' death. They're all dead,"

Apr 1: "We’ll see what happens very soon." 

Apr 2: Repeated that a deal was likely, while warning of continued strikes if not 

Apr 3: "Something big is going to happen." 

Apr 4: Said Iran must comply "immediately" or face further consequences. 

Apr 5: "Open the fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah." 

Apr 6 : "...a whole civilization will die"

Apr 6: "We may even get involved with helping them rebuild their nation."

Apr 7: Total and complete victory 

Apr 8: "Double ceasefire ... We have already met and exceeded all Military objectives" 

[Hormuz Straits that were formerly open will now be tolled. Iranian regime continues nuclear programme. Iran regime continues political executions at the rate of nearly 6 per week.]

So what was achieved ... ?