In modern society, we have come to treat Experts™ as if they were engineers instead of researchers who learn what they can, develop hypotheses, and test those hypotheses against reality to see where our theories of how things work are right and where they are wrong.
Subject matter Experts™ are not engineers, and shouldn’t be treated as such. Engineers understand the limits of what we know and can trust, and in most cases, they work well within the “safe” limits because they know that they can’t take into account all the variables.
When they don’t, they wind up building the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, which began sinking rapidly and unevenly, or the Citicorp Center in New York, which was built with a structural flaw that, until it was fixed (in secret), put it at major risk of collapse.
Some Experts™ are worse than others, because they not only believe they know everything, but they work assiduously to destroy those who actually have good ideas about the way things work in the real world. They aren’t bad engineers; they are cult leaders who think they know everything.
Such was the case with the economists who campaigned to destroy Javier Milei and prevent him from becoming President of Argentina. Milei was a dangerous crank, they said, and would destroy the already sputtering economy of Argentina. What the country needed wasn’t more capitalism, but more socialism.
Milei’s program, the letter argued, would “increase already high levels of poverty and inequality,” produce socio-economic devastation, and severely reduce policy space for years to come.
When he took office in December 2023, annual inflation was running above 200% and climbing… pic.twitter.com/9jihMLGvUl
— Students For Liberty (@sfliberty) May 20, 2026
Milei’s program, the letter argued, would “increase already high levels of poverty and inequality,” produce socio-economic devastation, and severely reduce policy space for years to come.
When he took office in December 2023, annual inflation was running above 200% and climbing toward 300%. The primary deficit had not been closed in over a decade.
These economists were not some DSA activists; they included some of the most prestigious academics in the world, including Nobel prizewinners. They warned that Argentina would transform from a failing state to a failed state, impoverishing the entire country, and driving it into chaos.
When Milei took office, poverty was at 41.7% and rising, affecting 19.5 million Argentines.
It spiked after the overvalued peso was corrected, then began falling.
INDEC’s April 2026 release puts it at 28.2%, the lowest since 2018. The letter had warned this would rise. pic.twitter.com/g8ODGSDJXK
— Students For Liberty (@sfliberty) May 20, 2026
How’d that work out? About as well as the COVID Experts™ who assailed Sweden’s common-sense approach. Unfortunately, unlike the Argentinian’s choice to give Milei a chance, Western leaders followed the Experts™ during COVID and caused immeasurable damage without saving lives. They were 100% wrong, and the people pushing common sense were right all along.
The same intellectual class that mobilized urgent consensus against Milei stayed quiet during a much larger natural experiment in the same region. Why?
Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, went to Caracas in 2007 and called Chávez’s economic policies “very impressive.”
Noam… pic.twitter.com/8NBh74MPLf
— Students For Liberty (@sfliberty) May 20, 2026
In the second quarter of 2025, INDEC reported the economy grew 6.3% year-on-year, and gross fixed investment rose 32.1%. Real wages began recovering.
The collapse the 108 predicted did not arrive. The 108 have published no retraction. There is no working paper analyzing what their models got wrong, no reassessment of the forecast, no public reckoning at all.
The intervention to stop Milei was loud. Where is the post-mortem?
As Students for Liberty rightly ask, where are the academic papers from these academic experts analyzing where they got it wrong? When engineers fail they go through complicated and thorough examinations of the problems, learn from their experience, and do better the next time.
That’s how aviation became the safest way to travel. It’s not that failures don’t happen. They do. It’s just that with every failure the professionals come in to learn everything they can through painstaking analysis, brutal assessments, and by imposing new rules and procedures to avoid disasters.
Nobody just shrugs and moves on, collecting prestigious awards and high-paying jobs along the way. That is third world thinking. And the thinking of academic Experts™, who never pay a price for the damage they cause.
As with COVID, it’s almost as infuriating to see the flippancy with which the Experts™ and their advocates treat the disasters they caused. It’s no skin off their nose, so why spend any time learning? It’s much more fun to theorize and tinker with society, and when you inevitably fail, claim that the solution is just a lot more socialism.
What Experts™ and technocrats care about is control, not success in their claimed goals. Their real goal is accumulating power and bossing people around. And the more immiserated the people are, the more power they can accumulate.
These people deserve tar and feathers, not accolades. But we all know which they get.
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