Why is it that after more than a century of socialist/Marxist failures, South America keeps re-embracing it?

How hard is it to understand that people leave – and they take the money with them? So the headline below from Bloomberg News is both infuriating and heartbreaking at the same time.

Per Bloomberg News:

Argentina, Columbia, Chile, and Brazil have embraced leftist economic orthodoxy and pushed the continent away from free market principles. Bloomberg reports that more than $137 billion left South America in 2022 after left-wing governments were elected. That’s a 41 percent increase from the year before, with much of it going to the United States, Spain, and Panama (which use the U.S. dollar). Anyone with money is looking for an exit strategy.

If you travel to Miami – the financial capital of Latin America – and see the glittering high-rise condos and office buildings erected downtown and along the ocean, many of these projects are financed with runaway money from South American billionaires.

Maybe there is hope. In Argentina – where inflation is running at 100% and more – the leftist government has left two-fifths of its 46 million people in poverty. Alberto Fernandez, the country’s failed leftist president, has decided not to run for re-election this October. The front-runner in many polls is Javier Millei, a libertarian economist who has named one of his dogs after Milton Friedman.