South America is doing the world a favor at the moment, but you have to tune in to reap the benefits.
Just as South and North Korea and West and East Germany became perfect Cold War laboratory experiments contrasting the blessings of democracy and capitalism with the destructive drudgery of communism, the reformist government in Argentina and the Marxist-led ones in Colombia and Brazil are inviting us to compare and contrast.
Hint: You won’t have to do much research to see which system is still the best.
Argentina’s new free-market President Javier Milei is lapping Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Brazil’s Inacio Lula da Silva in terms of economic achievement and the ability of people to live in freedom.
Milei is also an ardent supporter of Israel’s right to exist and defend itself — while the Marxists have sided with the Hamas terrorists who massacred 1,200 Jews on Oct. 7 and now hide behind Gaza’s civilian population.
Of course, Argentines, Colombians and Brazilians are not quite the same people, unlike the Germans and the Koreans.
Yet the results so far among these close neighbors with Iberian roots show that free markets and freedom will beat central planning every day of the week.
So far Milei has achieved, well, the unachievable.
Argentina — yes, the country that was until recently South America’s economic basket case — now has a primary fiscal surplus, the first in more than a decade and a half.
March was the fourth straight month with more government revenues than non-interest spending: In other words Milei, who was inaugurated in December, has produced a government budget surplus every month since taking over.
This surplus is partly because Milei has also delivered on another of his promises: paring back Argentina’s gargantuan state.
He has halved the number of federal agencies, from 18 to nine, slashing public spending by up to 30%.
Best of all, Milei is also making inroads against Argentina’s biggest bugbear for decades, inflation.
Monthly inflation in May cooled for the fifth straight month — again, marking the entire Milei presidency so far — and now sits at 4.2%, compared to over 25% in December when Milei’s term began.
Economists know that budget deficits lead to higher inflation: When the government pumps more and more money into an economy that is producing the same amount of goods and services, prices will rise.
Just don’t tell Joe Biden that, as he doggedly denies that his spendthrift policies are the reason inflation re-ignited here during his term in office.
So Milei’s results compare well even to North America, but how does Argentina today stack up against his South American neighbors?
Colombia this year expects to have its largest fiscal deficit since the Marxist Gustavo Petro took office in August 2022.
Petro is also pursuing former conservative president Alvaro Uribe in court — what self-respecting country does that? — and now seeks to scrap the national Constitution in order to write one that will make his radical agenda easier to implement.
In Brazil, meanwhile, the Lula government that took over in January 2023 produced the second-highest primary deficit in the country’s history last year, reversing the surplus produced in 2022 by conservative president Jair Bolsonaro.
Just as in Colombia, Brazilian authorities are also criminally investigating Bolsonaro.
All of this explains, of course, why Petro and Lula have done all they can to undermine the Milei government.
The Brazilian and Argentine leaders didn’t even speak to each other while both were in Rome last week during the G-7 meeting, and Petro frequently shares anti-Milei posts on social media.
Polling shows that the new president remains popular with Argentines, especially among the young — in spite of a string of anti-Milei protests and riots, some organized with help from Brazilian sources.
Just as it was with the two Germanies and remains the case with the Koreas, the South American contrast between the two economic models couldn’t be starker.
As the Venezuelan-born Manhattan Institute fellow Daniel Di Martino posted on X recently, Milei is the greatest threat to left-wing tyrants in the region.
“Milei’s success will be the end [of] socialism in Latin America,” wrote Di Martino.
We Americans should take heed.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation.