The Art of Deregulation and the Aesthetics of Obstruction

Two shores of the Río de la Plata and two opposing responses to the same problem: Sturzenegger’s radical deregulation and Oddone’s administrative reformism.

The Art of Deregulation and the Aesthetics of Obstruction
A Conversation About Two Republics and Their Destiny
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

What is strange about left-wing governments is that, if they could, they would apply the successful policies on security, the economy, and state deregulation; but they have to hastily align themselves with the Stalinism of the grassroots committee.
Yamandú Orsi did not offer unconditional praise, but he described El Salvador’s security model as an “example to analyze” and pointed to the high level of popular support it generates. His most resonant remarks were:
“Security is an issue that must be discussed. The example is Bukele. It is El Salvador. The example of a process… An example to analyze.”
“Why does it generate among the population a level of support that would surprise us all? […] There is a level of approval for the presidential figure that should make us stop and think about how much people are willing to sacrifice freedom for other things.”
(Subsequently, after the political repercussions, he clarified that applying that method literally in Uruguay seemed “impossible” and “unacceptable” to him because of the violation of human rights.)
Unlike a laudatory statement, Uruguay’s Economy Minister, Gabriel Oddone, has used the background of Argentina’s crisis and the subsequent arrival of Javier Milei in power as a cautionary case study of what Uruguay must avoid in terms of fiscal disorder.
In his remarks, he has argued that disorderly macroeconomic management ultimately creates scenarios of collapse that lead to political victories such as that of the Argentine president.
In this regard, he has warned of the need to take care of public finances so that the country does not suffer drastic consequences:
“That is the story of how disorderly macroeconomic management ends […] there is an election and someone wins whom none of us wants to win” (making explicit reference to the Milei political phenomenon as a consequence of previous imbalances).
The public is a dropsical monster, my dear reader, that devours foreign trade statistics and the most scandalous feuilletons with equal appetite.
Yet nothing reveals the vulgarity of an age more clearly than its fascination with rubber stamps. In the Río de la Plata, that vast twilight where melancholy disguises itself as national accounting, we are witnessing today two singularly divergent ways of redeeming man from his worst enemy: the bureaucrat.
On one side, we have Mr. Sturzenegger, a gentleman of convictions so absolute that they verge on artistic affectation.
His method is the pickaxe; he does not seek to persuade the State, but to disintegrate it with the savage joy of a smiling dandy who sets fire to his own prostituted Palace to clear out the wreckage.
For him, deregulation is a form of classical tragedy: implacable, purifying, and brutally sincere. He has understood that the only tragedy worse than not being regulated is being regulated forever by bureaucrats without style.
His chainsaw is not a carpenter’s tool, but a scepter with which he lashes the altars of inefficiency. He despises redundant institutions with the same elegance with which a true artist despises sincerity, and his reverse legislative work is a monument to that dizzying freedom that terrifies the mediocre.
On the opposite shore, where the climate is more temperate and ministers wear suits of cautious chromatic ambiguity somewhere between black and gray, lives Mr. Oddone.
Ah, Uruguay! That kindergarten where revolutions are carried out with notarized minutes and excess consists of discussing the interest rate over Sunday lunch.
Mr. Oddone’s bill does not seek to demolish the temples, but merely to change their latch and require them to clean the windows.
It is an exquisitely minor reform, an act of institutional coquetry.
It speaks to us of “positive silence,” that divine paradox by which the State, out of pure fatigue or distraction, finally grants us reason by failing to answer.
What a deliciously cynical concept! It is the victory of indifference over the arrogance of the service counter.
Oddone does not wish to burn down the obese and inefficient ministry that castrates growth; he prefers to digitize it, perfume it subtly, and make the line just a little shorter, so that the citizen may arrive home in time to drink mate.
His deregulation is reformist, polite, and profoundly Uruguayan: a revolution that asks permission and wears comfortable espadrilles.
Every regulation, my dear friend, is a sin against the imagination. To force the human soul to fill out forms in triplicate is an atrocity as great as realism in painting. And especially in technological times, when to slow down is to obstruct.
But the difference between the two shores is the distance that separates the scaffold from the couch.
Sturzenegger aspires to the sudden death of the Leviathan of preventing absurd things; he prefers the aesthetic collapse of structures created for the sole purpose of resorting to the “friend of a friend”; bureaucratic persistence as the companion of mediocrity.
Oddone, by contrast, believes in administrative intermediation with stamped paper that gives life to the Consulting Firm; he trusts that, if we treat bureaucracy with enough tenderness and computing efficiency, it will eventually forget that we exist.
Let us look at some examples of this battle over contradiction:
While Sturzenegger eliminates entire regulatory frameworks and the ministries created solely to sustain them, Oddone modifies processes and deadlines and digitizes the same procedures that obstruct the administered citizen.
While Sturzenegger dissolves, merges, or massively privatizes agencies, regulatory bodies, and trust funds that amount to monstrous public costs, Oddone meticulously organizes the same state architecture, focusing on interoperability and digitization, which he piously calls “going paperless.”
While Sturzenegger imposes the State’s total withdrawal from setting sectoral rules, prices, or barriers to trade, Oddone would celebrate the State’s transformation from a total obstruction into a facilitator when there is no alternative, introducing pillars such as positive silence and regulatory quality.
While Sturzenegger openly confronts degenerated corporate interests without fear of direct conflict with unions, rent-seeking business corporations, and unproductive provincial structures that spend other people’s money, Oddone surgically avoids affecting specific bureaucratic-union and political corporate interests, seeking multiparty consensus.
While Sturzenegger operates with an anti-regulatory “chainsaw” logic, altering absurd legal foundations and intervening drastically in the ossified structures of the Argentine State in order to refound a deregulated market, Oddone applies an approach of fine administrative surgery.
The Uruguayan project seeks to oil the welded gears of an expensive and inefficient economy through incentives for digital agility, without calling into question the creaking institutional foundations or the structurally unsustainable size of the Leviathan State.
In the end, peoples always get the governments they deserve; just as, strategically, they succeed or fail in interpreting the citizen discontent they believe tolerates them.
And between the neighbor’s iconoclastic fury and the compatriot’s hygienic prudence, the respondent hesitates over what to admire more: the violence of sincerity or the discreet charm of ineffectual lukewarmness.

State deregulation
Sturzenegger and Oddone
Bureaucracy and reform

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