 Depressing news. Chile. Chile, which has one of the freest economies in the world, a top 20 economy, sometimes a top 10 economy in terms of freedom. Chile, who has gone since the early 1980s till today, over the last 40 years, from the poorest country in Latin America on a GDP per capita basis to the wealthiest country in Latin America on a GDP per capita basis, just elected a real socialist, a pretty radical socialist, as president. Now, this is in spite of the fact that in the midterm, in the two months ago, in the elections for the parliament, the center right did very well. So it's going to be interesting, like the inner play now. But in a battle between Gabriel Borek, who's young, 35 years old, very cool, I hear, very socialist, in an alliance with the Chilean Communist Party, committed to rolling back almost all the reforms that made Chile wealthy, that made Chile successful. Committed, committed, to rolling back one of the great achievements in economics in political economy in the last 40 years, which is the privatization of Social Security in Chile. Chile has a private Social Security scheme. And he is now committed to rolling back, to eliminating that, to putting it back into the hands of government, which is, it's hard to express the extent to which that is tragic, horrific, disturbing, disgusting. So the private pension system, which was privatized by the brother of the current president of Chile decades ago, the new president is committed to doing away with that. And the Chilean people have voted for this. Now, part of the problem is, part of the problem is that the person he ran against in the election was a white, right-wing religious nationalist, narrow-minded conservative, rightist who actually on several occasions has expressed longing for the dictatorship of Pinochet. So you have two candidates, a right-wing nut who, Catholic, very religious, reestablish a lot of the restrictions in individual liberty, who admires Pinochet, a brutal dictator, who happened to have the right economic policies almost by chance, or a leftist, Marxist, young, cool hip who's promised to be moderate, but is going to undo all the stuff that led to Chile's prosperity. Who do you vote for? In this case, I probably would have voted for the religious nut if I was in Chile. But this is the possibility of left versus right. Suicide by collectivism on the left or suicide by collectivism on the right. Choose your poison. Choose how you want to die. This is why we have to fight collectivism of left and of right. This is why our only hope globally is to resurrect a classical liberal or free market right. And if we don't, then we'll be left in situations where we have to choose between crazy collectivists of the right or crazy collectivists of the left. And sometimes we'll choose the crazy collectivists of the left and we'll die that way. And sometimes we'll choose the crazy collectivists of the right and we'll die that way. But we are positioning ourselves to where all our choices are evil. And when you, I'm talking to you who know who I'm talking about, when you support the crazies of the right, when you rally around the crazies of the right, the collectivists of the right, you are responsible for these crazy nutty choices. I mean, given Trump's first four years, he should have been challenged by a Republican and he should have been, somebody else should have run in this instead of him in 2020 and beaten Joe Biden. But it's because he's so popular among Republicans. Nobody did it. Nobody would have won. And thus was stuck with Joe Biden. And of course, here I'm talking about the midterms again, the 2024 election, they better be somebody better than Trump on the ballot. And again, otherwise you're stuck with choices like Chile. And what happens is what we're getting today is the left becomes more left. The right becomes more right in a collectivist sense. And you're stuck with two bad options. And that's what we got in Chile. Since it's really bad news in Chile, I visited Chile for the first time in, when was it in 2019 before COVID. I was looking forward to going back, I was planning to go back in 2020. It is a wonderful country, beautiful country. And it's a country that has done phenomenally well under somewhat free market policies. But it is an example of, if you don't defeat Catholicism, if you don't defeat religion, if you don't defeat altruism, it's really hard to hold on to freedom and capitalism. Fundamentally, religion is antagonistic to freedom, antagonistic to capitalism. And you see it in Latin America, they take two steps towards free markets, and then their religiosity kicks in and they back off towards the socialism, which was much more consistent with their religion. And you see it everywhere. And Latin America is a truly sad place as a consequence. I think I've told you this. Argentina in 1914 was as rich as America. 1914. I mean, America was pretty rich on a capital GDP. Maybe the richest on the wall. And Argentina was just below. And since then, Argentina today has, I don't know, 20%, 15% of the GDP per capita of the United States. Bad policies. Bad governance has horrific consequences. As we know, when we see Venezuela and yet a number of Latin American companies from Ecuador to Chile are trying to become the next Venezuela, become the next Venezuela. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. 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