It doesn't have to be based in reality. They can just roll out the same argument as "true communism has never been tried", but from the right.
Ultimately Argentina never recovered from the collapse in value of being a food exporter. They're never going to recover until they can sort out the good old balance of payments problem. Doing so is going to be unavoidably uncomfortable as imports get relatively really expensive.
... Not sure about that; it's not like it has had many success stories, and it somehow manages to chug along.
But the school is also a spectrum. If you watch interviews with Hayek, he's quite pragmatic in some ways; he concedes that some social programs can be desirable, particularly around heathcare, but pushes that such programs should be as market oriented as possible. He's also fine with taxes on negative externalities, like pollution.
Von Mises, who many consider the father of the movement, was extremely rigid and uncompromising in his classical economics view and how government should be minimal (though being jewish and watching the nazis operate greatly influence this viewpoint). Add to the fact that much of the modern torch has been carried by American advocates who were heavily influenced by Murray Rothbard (who was a student of Mises and can best be described as anarcho-capitalist through and through) and the whole movement has took a nosedive off the crazy tree.
IMO the movement is now mostly made up of people who at best can no longer see the forest for the trees and at worst are bigoted or terrible people who can't stand that "the government" won't let them do terrible things. I've literally seen videos of Rothbard disciples advocate for debtors bondage/slavery, child labour, and even worse things.
just to point it, but he isn't applying much of the Austrian ideas in Argentina. The stuff he ends-up doing tends to be out-right run of the mill monetarism. He didn't do anything new or revolutionary.
Do the Austrian school economists even have ideas that can be applied as a shock, like what you can do in a single year?
Define "current increased", last data I can find from El País [1] - which is a leftist source - and I have seen repeated in many other outlets - Argentinian and international - is that poverty has seen a sharp decrease in the second half of 2024, and is the same as pre-Milei levels.
[1] https://elpais.com/argentina/2024-12-21/milei-celebra-una-ba...
If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue. With heavyweights such as George Selgin endorsing Milei’s performance to date, it’s going to require some very adept use of the reverse gear if things are subsequently judged not to have panned out as planned (which appears to be the typical outcome of other attempts to apply this school of thought throughout history).
The world does seem very accepting of the current increased poverty levels in Argentina - “it’s always been this way”, “it was just under reported before” etc etc. Maybe.
From a purely human point of view I hope they succeed. The timing could be excellent for them, a Return to prosperity given the current global situation wrt world order and demographics could conceivably put Argentina in a very advantageous position economically?
I have grave reservations about the social science called economics though, well specifically “macro economics”. I worry that this experiment just leads to even more suffering.