In one of the more ghoully stories of the week, Argentina's voters opted to slip back to hellhole status by re-electing far-left socialist Cristina Fernández Kirchner as their new Evita, vice president–style this time. Again. And no one thinks she's really going to be the vice president anyway. Her president is a placeholder. The second socialist coming is now in the country.

The Wall Street Journal reports this:

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina's once-disgraced nationalist Peronist movement was voted back into power on Sunday as voters grappling with an economic crisis rejected President Mauricio Macri's austerity policies, ending the country's experiment with policies Wall Street had supported. Alberto Fernández, a Peronist veteran, got 48% support in a vote that has far-reaching consequences for international creditors and the future of a South American trade agreement with the European Union. "We are going to build an Argentina that we deserve," Mr. Fernández said to cheers of "Alberto Presidente" at his campaign headquarters here. "The government has returned to the hands of the people." Mr. Macri conceded the race and congratulated his successor. The president, a close ally of the Trump administration and a favorite with investors , received a better-than-expected 40%, setting his center-right coalition up to be a strong opposition.

Seems that once was not enough. Why do people do this to themselves?

The problem is on the economic front. Macri never did the right things that President Trump has done to create a good economy. Macri was a weak-on-economics conservative elected in the rubble of Fernández's earlier reign, and he made a mess because his knowledge of economics was about as sophisticated as the Argentine pope's. The final result is this.

The short story here is in having elected Mauricio Macri, a man who passed for conservative but whose ideas about economics were not free-market. He focused on targeted industries and crony capitalism instead of free markets to help his country's socialism-ravaged economy recover. He did nothing about the currency, which is run by a central bank so incompetent that the whole thing should have been dollarized years ago. He dutifully focused on IMF-style austerity instead of hardcore free markets the way Chile once did, something that brings pain to the people but not to the bureaucrats.

Why didn't he listen to and closely follow Chile? I just don't understand this. It's the one thing that would have worked.

Now they are getting this.

Happy Halloween, Argentina.

Image credit: Twitter screen shot.