Dictators and their apologists like to say that authoritarian government makes for economic efficiency, that loss of liberty is balanced by material gains. Not even that illusory apology holds up in the case of Argentina's Juan Perón, whose government last week released the first full and coherent set of statistics on how the economy has fared since Perón took over the government of Argentina in 1945.
The record, by Perón's own accounting, is mediocre at best. Gross national product climbed by about one-third between 1945 and 1954. But meanwhile the population increased from 15 million to 19 million, so that the...
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