In June, Elon Musk attended a free-market confab via Zoom to toast Argentina’s regulation-slashing president, Javier Milei.
Musk used the opportunity to laud Milei’s progress in “deleting entire departments” of the Argentine bureaucracy — and to extol the virtues of deregulation.
“There has to be some garbage collection process for removing rules and regulations in order for society to function and not to get hardening of the arteries just to the point where you can’t do anything,” Musk said.
Musk’s comments provide a glimpse into the multibillionaire’s vision for President-elect Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk pitched the idea of DOGE to Trump during his presidential campaign, which he supported with $200 million and numerous public appearances. Musk is now slated to co-lead the new initiative with pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
It’s unclear what exactly DOGE is. It has no statutory authority, and Trump has indicated that Musk and Ramaswamy would work “outside” of the government.
Lambert here: That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
But Musk appears to have gotten the idea from Milei, who created Argentina’s Ministry of Deregulation last summer. The Argentine president can deregulate almost by fiat under a law the National Congress enacted in June.
“Musk has been paying attention to what is happening in Argentina since the very beginning of the rise of Milei,” said Ian Vásquez, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. The libertarian group hosted the June meeting Musk attended.
Vasquez released an analysis early this month crediting Milei with scrapping approximately two rules per day of his year-old presidency.
“A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids,” Ramaswamy posted last month on Musk’s social media platform X.
Milei, for his part, has visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago. And he touted DOGE this month in a public address marking the first anniversary of his presidency.
“A world power like the United States is designing its own ministry of deregulation in image and likeness of ours,” Milei said.
Milei tapped Federico Sturzenegger, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-educated economist and former president of Argentina’s central bank, to lead his government-shrinking program.
In remarks at Cato’s June meeting in Buenos Aires — shortly before his appointment — Sturzenegger blamed a “triangle” of powerful interests for the country’s economic decline in the middle of the last century. He included unions and populist “Peronist” politicians among those interests, as well as corporations in search of tax credits and protectionist policies that impede competition.
“Vested interests have the capacity to organize themselves and to organize regulation in their favor,” Sturzenegger said through an interpreter. “These are interests that make us not to be free and not to be developed.”
Lambert here: See on “dark matter.”
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