Argentina finding that free markets are better

 Red State:

Markets aren't perfect, but they generally get things right in the long run, as long as they are left alone. Argentina's wonderful Javier Milei seems to have assimilated that fact, even if his American counterparts mostly have not. In the most recent evidence of El Presidente Milei's economic acumen, we see that he has trashed Argentina's rent control program - and the rental housing market is now booming.

For years, Argentina imposed one of the world’s strictest rent-control laws. It was meant to keep homes such as the stately belle epoque apartments of Buenos Aires affordable, but instead, officials here say, rents soared.

Now, the country’s new president, Javier Milei, has scrapped the rental law, along with most government price controls, in a fiscal experiment that he is conducting to revive South America’s second-biggest economy. 

The result: The Argentine capital is undergoing a rental-market boom. Landlords are rushing to put their properties back on the market, with Buenos Aires rental supplies increasing by over 170%. While rents are still up in nominal terms, many renters are getting better deals than ever, with a 40% decline in the real price of rental properties when adjusted for inflation since last October, said Federico González Rouco, an economist at Buenos Aires-based Empiria Consultores.

This probably comes as a surprise to anyone who doesn't understand market economics - like, say, Kamala Harris or Tim Walz. And that's a trifle baffling, because rent controls have failed everywhere they've been tried; the cap on rents results, every single time, in reductions in rental properties available.

Milei’s move to undo rent-control regulations has resulted in one of the clearest-cut victories for what he calls “economic shock therapy.” He is methodically taking apart a system of price controls, closing government agencies and lifting trade restrictions built up over eight decades of socialist and military rule in an effort that has upended the lives of many Argentines.

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Rent controls are counterproductive wherever they are imposed.  Milei is probably the best thing to happen to the Argentia economy in recent years.  If nothing else he has exposed the idiocy of rent controls.