True to its slug, today’s column will divert its focus from such central developments as last Monday’s Memory Day or market fluctuations in order to view the implications for the future of the state arising from two news items not receiving so much attention, one at home and one abroad – the free movement of cattle into Patagonia, now reverted, and United States President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Education Department.
Deregulation & State Transformation Minister Federico Sturzenegger has generally been on the right track in living up to that job description but slapdash dogmatism in the application of even the best principles can have the worst results. Convinced that there is no such thing as a good restriction, Sturzenegger removed a 1973 ban on the export of beef on the hoof with a measure which included permitting cattle from elsewhere in the country to enter Patagonia, overlooking the decades of effort which have gone into making that southernmost region Argentina’s only zone free of foot-and-mouth disease. The strident protests of Patagonian governors defending their ranchers quickly led to the suspension of this measure, perhaps quickly enough to save the region from losing its precious freedom from foot-and-mouth disease to this heedless enforcement of free-market dogma (that remains to be seen) but this example goes to show that rolling back the state is not always the right move.
But behind this specific example there is a conceptual flaw in pursuing deregulation as an end in itself – the libertarian government seems intent on cutting back a bloated state to its right size without having any clear idea what that size might be or perhaps even harbouring the illusion that anarcho-capitalism can be made reality. Since President Javier Milei has defined 25 percent of gross domestic product as the paradigm for public spending, state planners should define the priorities within that parameter and then go removing everything surplus to those requirements rather than blindly hacking away in advance – nor is the removal of pettifogging restrictions any substitute for the structural reforms (labour, pension, tax, etc.) which remain in hock to the upcoming agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the midterm results.
That Trump’s cultural wars on woke should lead him into shuttering the Education Department sounds like his “nothing exceeds like excess” presidency flouting the established rules beyond all precedent – in the spirit of Count Dmitry Tolstoy (the reactionary cousin of the famous novelist) who upon taking office as the Education minister of Czar Alexander III, declared: “I shall count myself successful when education in Russia has ceased to exist,” so convinced was he that the ignorant masses should be shielded from subversive schooling. But as it happens, there is an Argentine precedent for Trump’s move dating from the Carlos Menem Presidency which Milei admires so much – while Milei slavishly seeks to imitate Trump (even if Sturznegger would doubtless maintain that it is the other way around with Elon Musk), Argentina decentralised its schooling three decades beforehand (while retaining an Education Ministry at national level until Milei merged it into the Human Capital Ministry upon taking office in late 2023).
Unlike Trump’s ideologically motivated onslaught against the Education Department, the decentralisation of schools (along with hospitals) in 1992-1993 had little enough to do with education. After the privatisation windfalls from the first Menem years had started to run out, then Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo desperately needed another way of keeping at bay the fiscal deficit eroding the dollar-peso parity of convertibility. Since the HEW (health, education and welfare) trio accounts for two-thirds of the budget in so many countries, passing the first two of these costly items onto the provinces seemed to him an excellent short cut towards a balanced budget. Another example of the unidimensional fiscal thinking so dominant in the current government.
The fiscal relief was perhaps crucial for keeping convertibility alive long enough to clinch constitutional reform and re-election in 1995 for Menem although ultimately imploding in the 2001 meltdown but did it benefit education? In a society as unequal as Argentina, education has no chance of being the great leveller. Not only do the poorer provinces lack the funds to meet any national standards but all too often they are institutionally weak under strongmen whose self-interest gives them little motive to upgrade civil society along the lines of Count Dmitry Tolstoy’s logic. The net result of these three decades has been not only a wider gap between richer and poorer provinces but also between public and private schooling. Not a good idea at the end of the past century, it is even worse now with the great cliché of education being the key to the 21st century (even if premised on the need to adjust to a global society which Trump is also determined to dismantle).
The paradox of the “Make America Great Again” protectionist nationalism propounded by Trump is that the global society it seeks to subvert is the worst enemy of the state he also seeks to nix (while amply using its powers) – if left unchecked, globalisation would play right into the hands of tycoons of the Elon Musk ilk, making Milei’s dream of anarcho-capitalism come true. Which also raises the question of whether Trump and Milei are on the same page, despite similar rhetoric regarding the “deep state” and “caste.” Perhaps impossible, considering that they rule very different countries with different histories and also a huge disparity in legislative strength (even if Milei’s run-off mandate was 56 percent as against Trump falling short of an overall majority with his 49.8 percent, despite the image of a landslide). The state-of-the-nation speech at the start of the month now ending is one thing but the state of the state remains a good question.
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