Mary Anastasia O'Grady regularly writes about Latin America for The Wall Street Journal. In this article she writes about all that has gone wrong in Argentina, a country that should be rich but is instead semi-poor.
Argentina has rich land, few indigenous tribes, great natural resources, excellent ports, educated citizens, great tourist draw, and a healthy (i.e., non-tropical, for the most part) climate. In short, it has everything you could ask for to make it economically successful. Everything, that is, except political sanity. And because of that one shortcoming, it is in her words, "a basket case." Her dreary view is widely shared by sympathetic observers.
She sees similarities between what has been done to destroy the Argentine economy and what an Obama government will propose for the U.S. She may or may not be right about that prediction. Her discussion of the precision with which Argentine leaders continue to shoot their country in both feet is worth your time. Toxic welfare state politics can ruin a country, and Argentina is a case study of this sad truth.
