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Mises Wire
Octavio Bermudez
04/29/2024
Ludwig von Mises visited Argentina in June 1959 by invitation of Dr. Alberto Benegas Lynch. The lectures Mises delivered at the University of Buenos Aires are reproduced in the book Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. As the title suggests, the economic knowledge transmitted by Mises was for both those days and for the future. Argentina in 1959 was in a recession, the Frondizi administration trying to cope with the terrible situation left by President Juan Domingo Peron (1946–55) and the military government that got him exiled.
In his time, Peron turned the Argentinian economy into a command economy with massive price regulations, decapitalization that greatly damaged wages and infrastructure, nationalizations, inflation, foreign exchange control, and import and export restrictions (taxes and quantitative limitations) among a myriad of interventions. The military coup that ousted him from office had mixed views on how to conduct economic policy. There was somewhat of a consensus that policy should aim at recapitalization and lowered restrictions. The system of multiple exchange rates was removed, and the bank deposits that had previously been nationalized and moved to the central bank were given back to the private banks. Yet the military government intervened in finance and banking in other ways like determining interest rates and carrying out operations in the open market by buying or selling currency and absorption documents. The military government was neither worrying about inflation nor giving way to the free market. It did set back some “excesses” of the previous administration, but the general role of the state in the economy remained unchanged.
At the end of 1958, elections were held, and Arturo Frondizi was elected president (with the help of Peron from abroad). The errors of Peron and the military government were fresh when Mises visited Argentina, and Frondizi was just starting his economic reforms of import substitution by foreign investment. To put it more clearly, imports were discouraged, and foreign investment was sought to replace what was being discouraged.
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