Andrew Stuttaford of National Review Online highlights good news from South America.

Argentine president Javier Milei’s effort to crush inflation and to bring back economic sanity to his country continues, despite some rough political going recently (over pensions, and within his party), which is only to be expected given the extent of the challenge he faces. He still has a long, long way to go.

Milei’s moves on certain tariffs have, however, been illuminating. An economist as well as a president, he comes as close to being one of those legendary “market fundamentalists” as can be found in the political wild.

As an economist, he is no fan of tariffs (to be clear, it is not only “market fundamentalists,” who share that view). As an Argentinian economist, he knows the role that tariffs played in supporting the turn to industrial policy in mid-century Argentina.

That shift was an understandable enough response to the economic turn inward of so many countries in the Depression years, but it took an an increasingly ideological tone after Juan Perón adopted the autarkic approach associated with the fascist social and economic theory to which his government owed a great debt. The interlinked combination of high tariffs and import substitution was a legacy that lingered in Argentina, with catastrophic results. Industrial policy is what it is. Senator Hawley will doubtless be glad to know that Perón drew a great deal of support from organized labor.

When Milei took office, he increased Argentina’s s wide-ranging PAIS tax (which, as applied to certain transactions, acts as an import tariff) as a part of his efforts to cut the country’s out-of-control deficit. PAIS? The “tax for an inclusive and supportive Argentina.” Inclusive, of course. At the time, Milei described the increase in the tax (from 7.5 percent to 17 percent) as temporary, which it has proved to be. The question now is how he will fill the revenue hole left by the tax cut.

Beyond an ideological distate for tariffs, his motive appears to have been to cut the headline inflation number.