A little more than two weeks after assuming office, Argentinian President Javier Milei on Wednesday presented his most extensive reform bill to Congress aimed at deregulating South America’s second-largest economy.
The 351-page bill includes 664 articles aimed at deregulating and modifying laws pertaining to several sectors, including labor, commercial, real estate, aeronautics, and health. According to Milei, the omnibus bill contains two-thirds of all of his reform proposals.
“Argentina is immersed in a serious and deep economic, financial, fiscal, social, pension, security, defense, tariff, energy, health and social crisis without precedent, which affects all levels of society and the very functioning of the State,” the bill states.
These crises were caused by “an innumerable number of restrictions on the exercise of constitutional rights, especially those of trading, working, and exercising lawful industry,” the bill continues, adding that these restrictions “severely limit competition” and “artificially distort prices” while “burdening the real income of citizens.” Reason
18 days ago, President Javier Milei was inaugurated in Argentina. Since then:
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 28, 2023
-Eliminated 12 out of 21 cabinet posts
-Firing 5,000 government employees
-Ending 380k government regulations
-Banned woke language in the military
-Bill to affirm the right to self-defense
-Bill to… pic.twitter.com/Pwx2grdZx6
Alongside massive cuts in bureaucratic overreach and a slap in the face to far-left “woke” liberals Milei is seeking to extinguish decades of government intervention in the nation’s oil industry by unshackling crude exports and leaving local fuel prices at the whim of market forces. Argentina has massive shale beds. When their bounty comes to market it could shake oil prices everywhere.
The free-market provisions in his bill seek to replace rules from the 1960s that prioritize ensuring affordable fuel supplies at home. Those rules, which give refiners the right to first refusal on export cargoes and let the government meddle in crude and gasoline pricing, have in recent years held back the vast shale patch known as Vaca Muerta — Spanish for dead cow.