Are Argentinians Incapable of Learning From Their Mistakes?

Or from anyone else's? Apparently so:

(Argentine President Cristina)Fernandez has rankled Wall Street by imposing price controls, nationalizing private pension funds and publishing inflation data far below private estimates.

So, how have the Argentinians responded to Fernandez destroying the economy and stealing their life's savings?

"Argentine President Cristina Fernandez looks set to win a second term in October and deepen her interventionist policies after thrashing rivals."

Why cry for Argentina? They do this to themselves.

Of course, one could quite reasonably cry for the minority who understand that stealing life savings, inflating the currency, and imposing price controls add up to armed robbery of the masses by the criminal elite.

By the way the Reuters article describes Fernandez as "center-left". Good thing she isn't radical.

This reminds me of a book I read a couple years ago: "The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse: Based on the first hand experience of the 2001 economic collapse in Argentina" by Fernando Ferfal Aguirre.

It isn't very well written or edited, but the author is the first to say so. However, a lot of his experiences mirror things I saw in Lebanon in the Fall of 1975 and Spring of 1977. One of his more important points is that the lone individual or family living in an isolated area is running a very significant risk of torture and murder by people who want whatever the lone person or family might have.

In a really major breakdown, like the Lebanese civil war I saw, even small towns will be at risk. The village I was in, Jouar El Haouz, was a Christian village which, between my visits, was taken over by the PLO: One morning the villagers heard someone ringing the bell of the church across the street from my step-sister's house. They went to investigate. The PLO told them at gunpoint to start walking. No stopping at home. Just get out or get shot. A few very old people were allowed to stay, but they were all alone.

After the village was emptied the PLO went house to house, shooting the locks off the doors, then went in and vandalized what they didn't take: upholstery slashed, table tops gouged with knives, all clothes in closets cut with scissors. Eventually the Syrian peace-keepers moved in, and the PLO, unable to remove the ammo they were storing in my step-sister's house, blew it up.

If you look at the areal view at the Google link, you can see the church: It's the building with the orange tile roof on the inside of the bend in the road. Directly across the street to the northwest is a grayish rectangle: our house. There used to be an orange tile roof on it,too, but when the ammo dump exploded the roof went straight up and the walls moved out. It apparently has never been rebuilt.

If you back out a bit you see a lot of blue ponds. Those are reservoirs to catch snow and spring run off for irrigating the apple orchards during the summer. I spent a couple days guarding ours from a fellow who liked to cut the lock off the valve and steal the water. Not sure what I would have done if he had been pushy but fortunately the only person I saw was a goatherd with a Galil assault rife, and he just led his goats to the water and let them drink. No big deal.

Anyway, when things got bad there were a lot of shortages because trucks couldn't get to warehouses and out again: the village store ran out of bottled propane for stoves, and most foods. We had kerosene space heaters and were able to cook on one in the salon aka living room, and cooked a lot of windfall apples by candle light. Some nights that was all there was to eat. Or apples, cooked apples, apple juice, and Spam.

We had a gunfight around the house one night, and since my brother-in-law was against guns, we were at the mercy of whoever it was. They didn't try to come in, but if they had we were defenceless.

We had all gone to bed around 8:30 or 9:00. My bedroom was at the front of the house, and lying there in the dark I heard people standing on our porch, whispering. Then pulling back and releasing bolts on assault rifles. Shooting from the porch outside my window, with reverberations such that I couldn't tell which was the last shot and which the first reverberation. Then people running up the road Southwest of the church, and more shooting. Then silence, followed by a car driving fast past the house with it's lights out. Then it was over.

Next morning there was no sign of the shooting, no empty brass. No one in the village would say they knew who it had been. Just another night in a civil war zone.

Here is a website with a very little more on Jouar El Haouz.