Well, it seems that Lindsey and co. are right about the 2000-1 Argentine trade surplus (unless my extremely preliminary research has me making the same mistakes so characteristic of the Cato Institute, not a wholly unlikely scenario), but I have trouble with the argument that fiscal deficits are the source of nearly all the country's woes.
<<So what really happened in Argentina? Fiscal deficits, not trade deficits, were what drove up Argentina's foreign debt. Government spending grew rapidly during the second half of the 1990s, while an anti-growth tax system did a poor job of pulling in revenue.>>
What would a "pro-growth" system of taxation be, in Lindsey's book, I wonder? I'm reminded of Katha Pollitt's amusing suggestion that the next policy initiative of the flat tax crowd would be a proposal to "do away with the middleman and pay tithes directly to the richest one percent." But that brings one to the views held by those at the free-market collective, The Economist, which partly blames middle-class tax evaders, not tax shelters for the super-rich, for falling government receipts. I'm transported further back to a weekend morning spent reading the Murdoch-owned Times, in which Matthew Parris wrote disdainfully of December's popular uprising, believing that such mass hysteria so often paved the road to chaos, ruin and then dictatorship (all this, after de la Rua's government declared a State of Emergency and an early curfew!) Why couldn't the Argentine people, banging on about corruption even as they bragged about fiddling their tax forms, actually understand the workings of their economy, like the people of Chile, "a more modest country." Ah, yes, the Chilean solution. How could I have been so blind?