Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> But Díaz Alejandro is... the ultimate sepoy, and it is
> not a matter of chance that, in the economic circles of the United
> States of America, the Braden DeLongs consider his 600 page long
> bunch of half-muttered hardly digerible stupidities a "standard book"
> on Argentina.

To argue that the Peronist economic strategy looked like a very
reasonable one to adopt as of the end of World War II, but proved
ultimately disastrous because it had unintended catastrophic
consequences for the rate of capital accumulation--that's the core of
Diaz Alejandro's argument. It's not a bunch of half-muttered hardly
derigible stupidities.

And whence comes "sepoy" as a term of abuse? "Sepoy" is an English
misspelling of "sipahi", the Turkic term for the elite cavalry of the
Turkish empires, which after the Islamization of the Turks fought
from Hyderabad to Moscow, from Urumchi to Vienna. Under Turkish rule
commerce flourished and long distance trade grew: Turkic kingdoms
played a key role in transferring technology and thus encouraging
economic growth from one end of Eurasia to the other for a thousand
years. Skilled, loyal, bold, clever--the British East India Company
wanted to recruit sipahis from the declining Moghul Empire for their
armies because of their virtues.


>  > Perón sought to generate rapid growth and to twist terms of
> >  trade against rural agriculture and redistribute wealth to urban
> >  workers who did not receive their fair share.
>
> False. Perón sought to fuel industrial growth with the remains of the
> differential rent on the world market that had bestowed such a gift
> on Argentinian landed oligarchy for decaedes. He redistributed wealth
> the country over. "Urban workers" were already the large mass of
> Argentinians, but also "rural workers" were benefitted.

Everything I've seen suggests not. Lower prices for agricultural
commodities blew back into lower standards of living for rural
workers under Peron...

> >  The redistribution to
> >  urban workers and to firms that had to pay their newly increased wages
> >  required a redistribution away from exporters, agricultural oligarchs,
> >  foreigners, and entrepreneurs.
>
> Yes, quite fair, but not "entrepreneurs" nor "foreigners": the first
> is an obviously senseless category,

Marx did not think so...
> >  Landowner and
> >  exporter elites had always appropriated the lion's share of the
> >  benefits of free trade. They had in the 1930's shown a willingness to
> >  sacrifice political democracy in order to stunt the growth of the
> >  domestic welfare state.
>
> Another idiocy. "Landowner and exporter elites" were in no way
> interested in stunting the growth of a domestic welfare state because
> this state did simply NOT exist.

And why didn't it exist? Because during the Great Depression--when
FDR built the welfare state in the United States--Argentina's
landlord and exporter elites used the army to make sure that no
FDR-like figure held power in Argentina.

>  > The Peronist program seemed prima facie
> >  reasonable given the memory of the Great Depression, and it produced
> >  almost half a decade of very rapid growth toward the end of the 1940s.
>
> Quite true. Only that "rapid growth" is not precisely what one would
> say of a programme that at the same time reconstructed the country
> and gave more than half its population a new sense of personal
> dignity. But we are among economists here, who cares for these stupid
> issues?
>
> >  Then exports fell sharply as a result of the international business
> >  cycle. And exports fell further as the consequences of the enforced
> >  reduction in real prices of rural exportables made themselves felt.
>
> What do you mean, "enforced reduction"? On the contrary, the state
> monopoly on foreign trade (the IAPI, a bourgeois forerunner of a
> socialist self-defence mechanism, in fact) obtained better prices for
> farmers than the prices they had ever obtained from the trade
> monopolies of foreign capital. What is true is that a share of those
> better prices was redistributed, via the State, to industries and not
> to luxurious consumption.

Better prices for the state when it sells overseas, worse prices for
farmers (and farmworkiers) when they sell to the monopsonistic state.

> >  Domestic consumption rose. The
> >  rural sector found itself short of fertilizer and tractors. Squeezed
> >  between declining production and rising domestic consumption,
> >  Argentinian exports fell.
>
> Argentinian main export commodity was by those times meat. Meat needs
> no tractors in the pastorile conditions of those times.

Meat needs a *lot* of grain for the final fattening-up process

> On the other
> side, Perón arrived at agreements for local design and construction
> of agrarian machinery and tractors

At five times the resource cost of John Deere: expensive tractors are
a very bad thing for temperate agricultural development.


> The enemy was
> already in combat outfit by 1950. Korea was to be the first
> demonstration.

Oh God! Not another idiot fan of Kim Il Sung!

Brad DeLong