 Argentina talk about entertainment. God, who would have thought? I remember being in Argentina last year and this possibility kind of came up and nobody thought it was possible or real or viable. But Javier Millier, I probably not pronouncing it right, just got the most votes in the first round of the Argentinian presidential election. He solidly beat everybody else. He solidly beat the Senate of left. He solidly beat the Senate right slash conservatives. He is now the leading candidate for president of Argentina. Now, who is this Javier Millier? I mean, first of all, this guy is a PhD in economics who claims to be an Austrian with a monetarist leaning. So some combination of Van Mises and Milton Friedman, those are his inclinations. So a free market guy. Now, every article I see compares him to Donald Trump and Bolsonaro. And there are certain elements that are comparable to both Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. But here's the difference. Bolsonaro and Donald Trump had no idea, no conception and no view of economics. They weren't free market guys. They were just guys of our power. They hated the left. They were conservatives. We'll get to Milliel's conservative part. They were reactionary. They were all over the place, right? But they had no economic policies. They had no strong views about economics. This guy is the most free market presidential candidate anywhere in the western world, you know, since Coolidge probably. I mean, he makes Ronald Reagan look like a statist. Now, you know, this is what he stands for. And to compare him to Trump and Bolsonaro and so on is just, is lazy. It's just lazy and stupid. Now, there are respects in which he's similar to them. He hates the establishment. He's very anti-established and very anti-elites. But he also lives in Argentina where, yeah, God, they've had 100 years of just rotten, horrible, disastrous establishment politicians and elites who've just brought the country to the brink of collapse and who have instituted nothing but policies that have been destructive and horrific for the country. At least American politicians have done it, I guess, more slowly, right? More slowly. But, yeah, I mean, authoritarianism and military governments and the whole shebang. So, yes, here's a guy who does oppose all that, but what's there not to oppose? Absolutely oppose it. Given the corruption of Argentinian politics, given the statism, given the authoritarian nature of Argentinian politics, good for him. Now, he's got some bad ideas. He's very anti-abortion and even in the case of rape, he is religious. So he would try to overturn the abortion laws in Argentina. As I said, he's very religious. So in terms of all of that, bad stuff. But here's what the New York Times says is economic policy is. They, of course, think this is horrific, but this is what they say he wants to do. You know, he has proposed dollarizing the economy that is basically shutting down the Argentinian central bank and making Argentina move to the dollar. I think that's brilliant. I think that is a fantastic idea and really brilliant. I'm told by some Argentinians a fan of INRAN's, but he's also not, he's far from an objectivist and he's no real fan of INRAN. So let's not associate with him INRAN because, you know, he's not a Randian. He's a libertarian, but he's not a Randian in, I don't think, in any kind of respect. But here's what he wants to do. Abolish the central bank and dollarize the economy. Wow. That would revolutionize Argentina immediately and would reduce inflation immediately to the levels of inflation in America, which is 3%, 4%, whereas in Argentina it's 116%. So just like that would completely change the Argentinian economy for the better, put it on a stable footing, which is the dollar. I know some of you hate the dollar and think it's about to collapse, but I don't think so as I'll tell you tomorrow night. But Argentina, you know, by stabling it, wow, he wants to, but that's not the end of it, right? He's proposing drastically lowering taxes, not a little bit, not like Republicans in the United States. We're going to take the marginal tax rate and lower it a little bit and lower. He's talking about slashing taxes across the board, really reducing them. Now granted, Argentina has very high taxes and it has all kinds of weird taxes on export and on import and everything. Tariffs up the kazoo and he would eliminate all of that. He is proposing, here's something you don't hear ever from an American politician. He is actually proposing cutting spending. Again, dramatically cutting spending. He wants to charge people to use the public health care system. Now I'd prefer if he moved to privatize the public health care system. And my guess is that's what he really wants, but he's afraid he can't get there passed. Let's see, he wants to close or privatize all, every single one of the state-owned enterprises in Argentina. Now Argentina sits on a bunch of natural resources, a huge amount of natural resources. Imagine what would happen if you privatized that and if you privatized the mining, if you privatized the companies that extracted it, if you privatized the export and import. He wants to eliminate, this is a little familiar, he wants to eliminate the health, education and environment ministers, ministries. By the way, Argentina sits on oil reserves. He would privatize that and encourage the exploitation of that. So he is a, this is the closest, by far, by far. Somebody who calls himself a libertarian has ever come to willing the presidency. The elections are going to be, I think in November, or maybe the runoff is in November. In October, the elections in October, and then if nobody wins that, there'll be a runoff in November. But he is now the favorite. And as such, we could have a small L, maybe it's a big L libertarian, as president of a country of 58 million people. Now, here's what he calls himself. He calls himself a short-term minicurist, i.e., somebody who believes in government, minicurists are people who believe in a government, in a limited government. He calls himself a short-term minicurist, but a long-term philosophic anarcho-capitalist. But he's a paleo. He's against, you know, a lot of, he's like the Mises Caucus. So he's probably, this is probably, I mean the libertarian party in the United States must be beyond itself. An anarcho-capitalist everywhere must be going crazy and nuts. And of course, the danger here is that he gets elected and he completely screws it up and he sets back the cause of economic liberty. Who knows how many decades because of that. But we could also hope that he gets in and he does a few of these things. He's not going to turn Argentina into an anarchist state, but he's going to do a few of these things and make Argentina a relatively rich country. And that will at least resurrect some support, maybe globally, for free markets. Anyway, somebody removed from Argentina, although plans are for me to go there at some point and give a talk, maybe early next year. You know, this is interesting and it's going to be fun to watch from the outside and it's fun to see how this evolves and what happens. At the very least, I would expect him to push whatever the candidates towards debating and talking about free market ideas. But Tista says, come soon, Iran. I wanted to come in December, but they've cancelled my trip. So in late November or early December, it looks like my trips can cancel. So, you know, I'll probably be coming in March, April, May, something like that next year. All right. Wow. I mean, very, very strange. I mean, he's obviously red-eyed Rand. He's, you know, he also thinks he's a weird guy. He also thinks that Ben Bernanke is the greatest Fed shaman in all of history and is a huge admirer of Bernanke's. That's just weird and wrong, but okay. So he's kind of an admirer of monetarism and this is why I think he actually trusts the dollar because he trusts the people at the Fed somehow when he really shouldn't.