Sure, but Argentina wasn't doing ING what an MMT theorist would advocate for (which is balancing government spending with available productive capacity). This is evident because they had an out of control inflation rate.
Argentina's economy has been a shit show for a while. And of course outright killing the economy and everybody's standard of living in the process means you're doing something, but it's not what I'd consider helping the economy.
Of course, the first order effect of less spending is not usually good, particulary for those receiving the money.
However, Argentina has runaway second order effects like inflation that must be dealt with, and we know that the only real way to deal with that is to depress the money supply. They will have to deal with the pain in order to repair the rest of the economy; it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.
> it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.
There's no rational beyond blind faith here. Inflation will eventually stop, most likely, but thinking that “because of the sacrifice, things will go better in the end” is just magical thinking.
The economy doesn't give a shit about morality, and Germans are paying the price of this belief at this very moment: they put their moral take about debt (“Schuld”, which also means “guilt”) in their Constitution in 2009 and now they are stuck in a recession with no end in sight because the government cannot support their economy, and they also bullied the whole Europe into reducing their debt during the 2010s, which lead to catatonic growth level in the EU for a decade.
When economics policies are decided on a moral basis with religious-inspired arguments it leads to disaster (and it's true no matter what moral values are driving it: Mao starved his population for the exact same reason, even though the moral values that inspired his policies weren't the same).
