 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds on reason. Last week, Argentina's newly elected libertarian president Javier Millay gave quite the speech at the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos. The speech drew a lot of attention in the media and online, at least our corner of the social media world because the World Economic Forum has earned a reputation as kind of the ultimate global elite clubhouse in a world turning increasingly populist and nationalist. So where exactly does Millay fit into this new world? For this episode, Liz and I wanted to go through his speech together and try to figure that out. We've invited Argentine political scientist, Marcos Falcone, who's project manager at Argentina's Fundación Libertad to help us out with that. Marcos, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Zach and Liz, for the invitation. Sure. And before we get into the speech itself, I thought it would be helpful to talk a little bit about the World Economic Forum and what it stands for, what its goals are, and kind of talk about Millay's presence at that conference in Davos. Millay's introduction was given by none other than our favorite super villain-esque German professor, Klaus Schwab, founder of the WF. Let's hear a little bit of Schwab's introduction. It's for me a great, great honor to welcome Javier Millay, as you know, the freely elected president of Argentina. I think you sometimes, people would say with more radical muscles, that you introduce a new spirit to Argentina, making Argentina much more related to free enterprise, to entrepreneurial activities, also to bring Argentina back to the rule of law. So we have a very extraordinary person among us today. And of course, we are all eager to listen to you, and again, a very cordial welcome to the World Economic Forum. All right. So generally, pretty cordial, Millay is radical, but he's bringing markets and the rule of law to Argentina, so maybe not all that bad. The WF is not contrary to some of the theories out there, some sort of communist organization. They're not reflexively hostile to markets. They just, in my view, look at them as tools to achieve certain social ends, because they're corporatists. And I have to imagine, you know, having watched the speech that he was not expecting what happened next, because we'll see soon that Millay goes directly for the jugular of what the WF is actually all about, or maybe he just doesn't care. He's 85 years old, maybe, you know, just want to yolo, spice things up, see what happens. Any thoughts, Liz or Marcos, about just kind of the WF, Klaus Schwab, Davos? I mean, they're sort of cringe technocratic central planners. So I have to believe that with the amount of control they exert over the rest of us, surely they exerted lots of control over pre-vetting the speeches, which makes me think that Millay went off script a little bit. I don't know, you know, whether or not that's true. There's not really any indication as to what happened. But that's sort of the only explanation I can come up with that explains how Millay got so delightfully fiery in his speech in a way that is sort of an indictment of some of the things Klaus Schwab stands for. What about you, Marcos? It's the WF, like, what does it mean to you, if anything, as someone who's living through the economic turmoil in Argentina? It doesn't really mean much to me personally. But here in Argentina, there was a lot of expectation about Millay's speech, particularly because of the idea that he could mirror the speech that former Brazilian Macri gave in 2016 when he took office, when he had just taken office like one month prior, just like Millay. And back then, this was like the reintroduction of Argentina into the world stage, right, into the world of free enterprise. And so there was some expectation as to whether Millay would mirror that speech or whether he would go off script, as Liz said. Though, I mean, we'll talk about the speech later, but the speech itself is not that different from the speech that we as Argentines have been hearing consistently from Millay in the past years. It's remarkably similar to lectures that he has given out loud to whoever would listen in different cities in the country. I was actually part of one of them in my hometown, Marvel Plata, in the summer of, I think it was 2023 last year. He was just touring the country and lecturing about economics and freedom. And some of the contents of those lectures were remarkably similar to the speech that we saw at Davos. So to what degree did this actually mirror Macri's speech? Well, I would say that it did in that they both favored free enterprise and freedom in, you know, on paper, but Millay went after the WEF scores, values, or not core values, but many of the interests that they have taken in past years in a way that Macri did not. I mean, Macri was all for, you know, fighting climate change and the progressive agenda in terms of civil liberties, whereas Millay was clearly like he opposed all that, he was clearly against all that. So and he was much more radical in arguing in favor of capitalism because Macri's speech resembled, you know, this idea of Klaus Schwab and others that capitalism is at the service of something else, you know, that we value capitalism because of the, because it is a means to a different end. Whereas Millay argued, in my view, at least, that capitalism is good in itself because it allows us to do whatever we want with them, which is not, I think, what the World Economic Forum stands for. So in that regard, it did not mirror Macri's speech. There were similarities and dissimilarities, but I think this this was a much more radical speech, which is what I would expect from a libertarian and anarcho-capitalist president. Yeah, and that's why I think it is important going into this to understand the values of the WF and to not get distracted by some of the strange theories about the WF. And I'll not so humbly recommend one of my previous videos on this called Forget the Great Reset, Embrace the Great Escape, that kind of lays out what the WF is actually all about, which is not necessarily a nefarious agenda to turn us all into transhuman AIs or something like that, but more so a kind of managed... That wouldn't be that bad. A kind of managed version of capitalism that has become known as stakeholder capitalism, where you put aside kind of the previous like Milton Friedman conception of capitalism as just delivering value to the shareholders of a company, to expanding the mandate of a company to deliver to so-called stakeholders, which could be environmentalist groups or labor groups or any other kind of interest group that you could come up with here at Domestically. Elizabeth Warren has been one of the outspoken proponents of this. She's proposed, you know, I think 40 percent worker ownership or worker representation on corporate boards in California. There's been attempts to kind of rebalance what a corporate board looks like. And so that's why I ultimately described them as corporatist. And I think in kind of the furthest, the most extreme instantiation or example of where this heads would be China, where they actually put government party officials on the corporate boards. So the stakeholder is actually the government itself. And that gets into, you know, outright fascism. So can lead to really bad places. China has like the opposite of separation of state and business. It's also disturbingly intermeagled in a way that I think a lot of Western audiences just totally misunderstand. Yeah. And in the at the 2022 Davos conference, Xi Jinping was the kind of keynote speaker who kicked off the conference and Klaus gave them a fairly glowing introduction there as well, which I found kind of disturbing. But before we move into Malay's speech, let's play one more clip just to get now that I think we've laid out a little bit of what the WF is about and what Davos is about. Klaus Schwab actually is on the record with his opinion about libertarians and where libertarianism fits into the new world order. So let's roll that clip from the 2017 World Government Summit in Dubai. We are at historical crossroads. We face the backlash of millions of people, particularly in the West, who feels that globalization is not working. Fixing the present system is not enough. Now, there is, of course, a anti-system, which is called libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives. It's the mental system and we see certain elements of this now in the new U.S. administration. If we want to go forward, we need a completely new thinking. We have to integrate into our future. Policymaking is the notion of multi-stakeholder concept. So big challenges which we have cannot be solved by governments alone, but they cannot be solved by business or civil society alone. We need new ways of cooperation, of very flexible cooperation. I wish you a very good World Government Summit. Thank you. OK, so again, new flexible ways of cooperation between public and private. That's kind of what I was alluding to earlier. And then, you know, his assertion that libertarians are anti-system, which, you know, we are, yeah, we are anti your system, the one you're selling to a bunch of monarchs in the UAE that leads you to open your conferences with odes to the wisdom of Xi Jinping. I could not imagine a better endorsement, honestly. But, you know, we again want to be really clear about what the WF is and isn't. And, you know, even Klaus Schwab has acknowledged, you know, these these changes in that these technological changes that have driven political changes and made it much harder to have top down control. So he does at times talk about the need for subsidiarity, the need to have, you know, more localized versions of control. And he's he's not really at this point advocating for some sort of one world government, but more so that local and national governments kind of come in under the WF umbrella and kind of we we have this common view of governance and these sort of common tools and consensus to kind of manage the future. But I just want to open the floor to both of you for any additional reactions to Klaus's view of libertarianism. I have a lot of disdain for Klaus Schwab's description of libertarianism. I think, first of all, libertarians exist on this massive, glorious spectrum. There's obviously Rothbardian and cap types who very much hate the state and do want to smash the system in a very major way. There are also, I think, on the other side of the spectrum, a bunch of libertarians who look at the current system, which involves an awful lot of crony capitalism and subsidies doled out to various companies that are sort of in these bidding wars for contracts with the government, and they look at that and they say, why is it that any time government sort of taints everything that it touches, you know, any time we look at a project either done in collaboration with a government or by a government agency itself, we see it completed, you know, two years later than they had anticipated and massively over budget in any other sector that would be totally unacceptable. And so a lot of libertarians look at the state of affairs at present and say, well, government, like look at the results, government is not in many cases delivering to nearly the degree that they say they will. And to us, that indicates that we need to privatize more things and allow markets to, you know, conduct more affairs than the government. The thing is libertarians, I think, are so frequently portrayed as these like naive people who think that absolutely everything will be perfectly solved once we get the government out of the way. And I think libertarians actually frequently realize that there will be short term pain points in the same way that I think Malay is sort of setting Argentina up for realizing that that is what will happen in order to get inflation under control. In the short term, there will be massive unemployment. There will continue to be people living, you know, 40 percent of the country below the poverty line, right? Like that is not going away tomorrow, but he will move things in the right direction and will pursue a means of getting inflation under control. And I think libertarians, that's the thing that people really miss. So I think Klaus Schwab is totally misrepresenting what libertarians stand for and a lot of the critiques that we make. And he's placing an extraordinary amount of faith in government collaboration as a thing that creates efficiency and creates good results. And I think I'm interested in what results he's looking to because I don't see it. Yeah. And Klaus, I mean, Malay, as the first kind of self-described elected libertarian head of state is now starting to be a stand in for a lot of for, you know, well, I guess we're going to start to see what libertarian governance looks like for the first time. And, you know, you talked about all these different types and strains of libertarianism, Liz and Malay is an interesting blend of several of these strains, maybe a synthesis. And could you talk about the practical and cap, right? Like he is in what he actually believes an anarcho capitalist and that he also realizes that he actually must get stuff done and that there will be a long transition from the current system that Argentina has to where he's looking to go. Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about that, Marcos? The blend or the type of libertarian in that Malay has been as a sort of public intellectual and now is as a elected politician or he was elected politician before, but elected have state. Well, he's definitely pragmatic because when he was campaigning, he was all for, well, of course, you know, an archetypal capitalism, libertarianism, but now that he's president, he doesn't talk publicly that much. I mean, the Davos speech was actually one of the few instances in which we have listened to Malay since he became president. The other important time was when he took office and he delivered a speech that was that was libertarian spirit in which he also warned about not just short term or a bit of pain, but he warned of a lot of pain because of the situation in which the country finds itself. But it's interesting because this the measures that Malay is proposing through a decree first in late September, late December, now through a law, through an omnibus bill that is being discussed in the House of Representatives, which we can talk about later, are libertarian in some aspects and in some aspects, not so much, right? So he is pushing for deregulation to a point that no prior government has ever done and that is extremely positive. And he's trying to go against crony capitalism and he's trying to go against, you know, these corporates that say that they claim they defend capitalism, but they don't. They just defend their own businesses and in some aspects, Malay is just being orthodox, you know, and not that libertarian, but rather classic conservative, right? Like trying to achieve, for example, a fiscal balance. Argentina, I mean, he inherited a fiscal deficit that is pretty high and he's now trying to reduce public spending but also increase taxation. So it's funny because he claimed, Malay claimed before the election that he would cut his arm before sending, before proposing a tax hike, but his government actually is proposing a tax hike right now. So a tax pick on who? Those are exports and imports, is that right? Well, yes, on many exports, although there's negotiation in Congress, which has eliminated these taxes for some sectors. But also today, as we speak, the government is sending out a law on the income tax that was repealed. I think it was four months ago with the votes of Malay himself in Congress while he was campaigning. The government is now trying to reintroduce the income tax. And of course, it's going to try to make it much, I mean, it's trying to make it less costly for the families, for individuals. But it is definitely reintroducing. There's no way around it. So that's why I'm saying in many aspects. I assume this is because they are in such a fiscal hole right now. Correct. As you said, dug by his predecessors that they're doing everything they can to balance that budget and that in the short term, at least is going to require both raising revenues and, you know, cutting spending. Correct. Have we checked? They're also like maybe he's making good on his promises. Is he a one armed president now? Who knows? But that's why the government is also proposing that taxes go down after next year, after 2025, so that the country stabilizes this year and the next year the government can continue with the with the downtrend in terms of revenue. But so far, you know, that there's going to be pain. He said there will be pain. And well, the unions are actually protesting today. Mila's got his first general strike, national strike on Wednesday, January 24th. Only 40 days, less than 45 days after he took office, unions have never done anything like this. They waited for five years before striking with the Christina Kirchner government, for example. So you can imagine that there's going to be turmoil and protesting. And there definitely is. What will this accomplish? The protests in the streets, I want to talk about this more later. But I'm curious, like, you know, I was reading about how it's some, like, 200,000 who are expected to be protesting in the streets of Buenos Aires today and obviously people protesting all around other Argentine cities. But also, like, there's a massive protest planned in like Berlin for Argentine expats living here. I know New York City has protest planned where I live. San Francisco has protest, right? Like, this is a massive thing. But what does this do? Is it just this work stoppage? I mean, I know unions have a lot of power in Argentina, but Marcos, what's the effect going to be? Yeah, they basically try to prevent workers from going to work. So this is why if people who if demonstrators find open stores, for example, in downtown Buenos Aires, they will probably try to force them to close. So it's kind of ridiculous. The government has actually called. I mean, the government put in place a phone line where people can denounce whether they're being forced to stay at home and not go to work by a union representative. And they claim that they have received more than 60,000 reports of people who have been threatened not to go to work because the country needs to strike against the lay. So there's a lot of violence involved, implicit and explicit in this strike. But what they try to accomplish is mostly symbolic, I would say, since the omnibus bill is scheduled to be or debated and then possibly approved shortly, they want to show that there is unrest, that the people are against this law, that the law shouldn't pass, that the decree that Mille signed in late December must be overturned by the courts. And they want to show the world. And this is why they're also striking in San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Rome. They want to show the world how terrible, you know, Mille's policies are, which, of course, they're not. But this is typical. They did this to Macri, too. Even when Macri's policies were not as pro-capitalist as Mille's. So why wouldn't they do this to Mille? It's a little bit of a protest, yeah. It's a little bit of the same as the US phenomenon, which is where for years and years, whenever a presidential election came around and it looked like a Republican was going to win, Democrats would claim, this is the most important election of your lifetime, get out the vote. And so then finally, when the Trump phenomenon sort of rose up, they were claiming this is the most important election of your lifetime. And I think a lot of people meant it a little bit more. But to some degree, it's this saga of the boy who cried wolf, where it's like, you already did this four years ago and you're going to do this again in four years. And I'm just like on to the whole routine of it. And it seems like in Argentina, it's kind of the same thing with how angry unions get and the degree to which it's just regardless of whether you're Macri or Mille, they're going to come out in full force and talk about. I was seeing some posters circulating that were like oppose the IMF, the pro IMF Zionist government of Malay. And it's just like, what? Like, it's just nonsense. Yeah, no, as long as the government is not Peronist, they will protest. That's what they do. And we're going to dig into some of the substance of Mille's legislative agenda and those decrees near the end of the conversation. But one thing that stood out to me in your answer, Marcos, was you were talking about the fact that Mille has not been giving a lot of public statements or speeches since being elected. I find that really interesting because it's like when Trump was elected, you know, there's been a lot of comparisons in the media between Trump and Mille, which are largely ill founded. But I think it's a lot of it's based on their perceived temperaments and their rhetorical style. And there was this big question mark after Trump was first elected of like, OK, now that he's president, is he going to act differently? And the answer was no, not at all. Mille, on the other hand, it seems like there is a sort of a pivot and maybe a seriousness or like devotion to the mission that would or focus that that was not there for Trump. And so it's it's interesting that his his first one of his first big speeches is this one. And and I noticed in watching it that it was also and people will see this as we start to play the clips, it seemed a little more controlled. I mean, it was very, you know, he's reading from a script. He's not doing the fiery Mille thing that we see on television clips from his campaign and before that. So let's let's just get right into the speech and make some observations about both the style and substance of what he's saying. So we'll we'll first run his opening statement. Today, I am present to inform you that the Western world is facing a significant threat. It is in danger because those who are supposed to defend the values of the Western world are co-opted by a worldview that inevitably leads to socialism and consequently to poverty and economic deprivation. Unfortunately, like you said, this this and I should have mentioned this at the top. We are running a these clips are actually an AI translated version of Mille that is meant to sound to approximate the tenor of Mille's voice. So some clever person ran the transcript through one of these AI voice generators and created this, you know, this AI approximation of Mille's voice and that it actually sinks his mouth to the word. So this is a weird, you know, 2024 thing that we're doing here. I just wanted to disclaim that as as loudly and forcefully as possible and mention that as always, we will link to our sources and the original transcript that you can watch to but we did check and, you know, it's it's it's accurate with the transcript that the WF posted. But we just thought for audio and video purposes, this would be like the best way to consume this. That aside, his opener there really is like you said, Marcos consistent with the message we've heard over and over again, which is that this is kind of an existential battle between individualism and collectivism in all its forms. I think I think we continue. Yeah. No, I just wanted to say, I think if I'm not mistaken, I think Mille was photographed as he was entering the plane that took him to Davos with a copy of individualism and economic order by Friedrich Hayek. So I think that tells you, you know, about the spirit that he wanted to convey with that speech and he did. Absolutely. Liz, anything else for you want to keep going? Let's go. I need more Malay. All right. All right, let's go. In recent decades, motivated by some well-intentioned desires to help others and others by the desire to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. We are here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world, but rather they are their cause. Trust me, there is no one better than us Argentines to provide testimony on these two issues. When we embrace freedom in 1860, in 35 years, we became the world's first dominant power. 35 years, we became the first world power. While when we embrace collectivism over the past 100 years, we saw how our citizens began to systematically impoverish themselves until they fell to the 140th position in the world, 40 in the world. But before we can have this discussion, it would be important for us to first look at the data that supports why free market capitalism is not only a possible system to end world poverty, but also the only morally desirable system to achieve it. OK, so he's saying that the arc of Argentinian history there is sort of a case study in what happens when you embrace and turn away from free market capitalism. Would you be able to flesh out a little bit of that political and economic history for us, Marcos? Just give us the last like 200 years of like your time. Yeah, take us back in like three minutes in like two minutes. Right. Yeah, thank you. Well, but we lays right in that Argentina is sadly a remarkable example of what happens when you steer away from capitalism and free markets. Argentina back in the in the late in the late 19th century was among the top economies of the world. It was second only to the US in terms of the countries that received the most immigrants, millions and millions of Europeans, basically, but also people from from Asia came to Argentina during that time, among them my own ancestors from Italy and the ancestors of basically all of us who live here today, because this was a country where you could thrive, you know, where you could just, you know, buy a piece of land and work your way towards the middle class and get yourself a home and buy yourself a home, get a stable job and be able to save. And this is because Argentina was a country that was open to the world, where trade, international trade was very important. This was a country where restrictions to economic activities were low. There wasn't a lot of corporate corporatism. The role of the state was very limited. Public spending was not super high. We had no central bank. We had no inflation. And we just basically welcomed anyone who would want to come to Argentina and live here peacefully. Beginning in the great. Stick out to me about Argentina's origin story. Is it seems like on the note that you're hitting there, there are also, you know, have been for a long time. These like little ethnic enclaves, you know, with so much immigration comes, yes, some amount of assimilation and becoming Argentine, but also at the same time, sometimes little communities of expats and there are still these little towns in Argentina where people speak entirely Italian or entirely German or entirely French or what have you. And I think there's an interesting, correct me at any point if I'm wrong, but I think that that's a really interesting thing. And then also Argentina used to be pretty like natural resource rich, right, with a lot of agriculture and just like so much to export. Is that correct? OK, that's correct. In terms of assimilation, I would say that, you know, you having towns where people speak a language different than Spanish, that's not something that you will find today. You could find that at the beginning of the 20th century for sure. And you can find towns today where, you know, the last names of everyone will be German or, you know, Italian or Spanish. We will see this correct or Weismilla, you know, like Zaks or you will find, you know, architecture that is entirely Bavarian, you know, that's that's actually Vichy and Albelgrano were the Oktoberfest as hell, of course. You will find ethnic enclaves like that. But the country, but people assimilated pretty well. I wouldn't say that there were, you know, communities that were left out or that decided to stay out on purpose, but they they assimilated pretty well. But the main problem begins with the with the Great Depression and then in the 1940s with the rise of fascism, because if you think about it, Argentina is the only country in the world where 80 years after the downfall of not system and fascism, there is still a very popular fascist party because Juan Perón was a general in the army, in the Argentinian army. He studied under Mussolini. He traveled to Italy while he was president and basically put in place the same corporatist model, fascist model to manage the country's economy. Right. And so this is the time where free enterprise capitalism started to be left out, basically. And this is a time where the government stepped in and this is a time where public spending rose, where taxation rose, where many people started fleeing and capital started fleeing. This was a trend that was opposite what had happened in the past, say 60 or 70 years. Suddenly, people wanted to leave the country and not come in. Argentina stopped receiving immigration, basically. And we started having a succession of governments one after the other who would fight because they claimed that the prior one had not been as leftist as the new one. Right. Because even the opposition embraced this Pairanist model because Pairanism was so popular and it was popular because Perón basically handed out all of the money that the country had until there was no left. And of course, there was also no incentives for generating wealth. Because if you're just going to confiscate it the way he did with nationalizations and confiscations and measures like that, well, of course, no one's going to want to give you anything in the future. So, yeah, this is how Argentina started falling in the indices of economic freedom, but also in terms of GDP per capita, for example, because at the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was very similar to Australia and Canada. These are two countries that are also small in terms of population. They're also huge in terms of the land that they have. But the trajectories have been very, very different. Australia and Canada are part of the first world, if you will, today. They're rich nations. They have their problems, but they're nowhere similar as Argentina, where we have a poverty rate of about 50 percent. So Argentina is indeed a perfect example of what happens when you basically abandon capitalism and liberalism in the old sense. And so I'm glad that Millay talked about this at Davos. And that history likely helps explain partially why Millay is so attuned to the ways that collectivism can come from many different directions. It can come from parties that are more rights-leaning or left-leaning. And Argentina seems like has had mixtures of both of those things. And, you know, we'll get to his definitions of collectivism in a minute. But let's roll the next clip, which is about capitalism itself and why he thinks that it is worth in Argentina embracing. When studying per capita GDP from 1800 to today, what is observed is that after the industrial revolution, global per capita GDP multiplied by more than 15 times, generating an explosion of wealth that lifted 90 percent of the world's population out of poverty. We must never forget that by the year 1800 about 95 percent of the world's population lived in extreme poverty, while that number dropped to five percent by the year 2020 prior to the pandemic. The conclusion is obvious. Far from being the cause of our problems, free market capitalism as an economic system is the only tool we have to end hunger, poverty and destitution throughout the planet. There is no doubt that free market capitalism is superior in productive terms. The left's doxa has attacked capitalism for its moral issues, for being according to them, as its detractors say, unjust. They claim capitalism is bad because it's individualistic and collectivism is good because it's altruistic towards others. And thus they strive for social justice. But this concept that has become trendy in the developed world recently in my country, it has been a constant in political discourse for over 80 years. The issue is that social justice is unfair and doesn't contribute to general well-being. On the contrary, it's an inherently unfair idea because it's violent. It's unfair because the state is financed through taxes and taxes are collected coercively. I love the point that he's making there, which is that collectivism is coercion. Collectivism is coercive. Collectivism is not altruistic. And for whatever reason, that mythology of collectivism as altruism has just seized people's imaginations for so many decades. You know, the young and the old alike. And I really love how Malay is just throwing cold water on all of this and saying, absolutely not under no circumstances. Is this actually the thing that truly maximizes good? This is something that coerces other people and uses, you know, ill-gotten gains, money stolen via taxation to attempt to enrich the masses in a way that frequently tramples all over people's individual needs and desires. To me, it's just the perfect encapsulation of so much of what is wrong with the West. And he's referencing empirical data to to support that, which is on his side. You know, we love our our world and data charts here. This is the hockey stick showing, you know, massive growth of world GDP over post industrial revolution. And then, of course, the plummeting share of the population that's living in extreme poverty. So he's he's making that argument, that empirical argument that which is very well supported, that markets have brought prosperity to the world. But then at the same time, saying, you know, that the left's attacks on this are ill-founded and based on this notion of social justice, which he thinks is flawed. And I saw a lot of conversation and pushed back to his criticism of social justice. But you mentioned, Marcos, that he came with, you know, Hayek under his arm there. And Hayek has also was also a staunch critic of the concept, the idea of social justice as at the time put forward by people like John Rawls, which is, you know, the idea that, you know, if we put on a blindfold, we want to kind of adjust society so that, you know, the veil of ignorance. You are not that if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy, you know, your life isn't miserable. And so part of the role of government and pursuing social justice is to lift those people at the bottom and kind of rebalance past injustices. You know, Rawls' whole theory is basically like regardless of your station in life, you ought to be comfortable with the, you know, are you comfortable with the system that governs you because whether you're a pauper or peasant versus, you know, claus schwaab, you ought to, you know, believe that the system serves you equally. Yeah. And the critique of that, of that, you know, it, you know, there's it's a it's a very strong philosophical argument that it's hard to pick apart. But, you know, Hayek's critique of this, and I assume Milais, he doesn't really go into it in this speech, is that by focusing on this this notion of social justice, which somehow never really gets like concretely defined, you're kind of inviting intervention after intervention, which then creates new injustices and you're on this like treadmill of constant, you know, rebalancing of past injustices where this is so true. Right. Like if you look at what's happening in the United States right now and I want to open the floor up to Marcos to tell us what's happening in Argentina and how Malay believes this like obviously correct thing. But like in the United States, this is what's happening, right? We have the entire legacy of slavery and then Jim Crow laws and racial discrimination and, you know, extraordinarily horrible treatment of black people on the part of white people. And then what you had was this very brief sort of Obama era of like aspirational color blindness, where it kind of seemed like, oh, finally, you know, there's pretty solid racial advancement of minorities. And in fact, we are moving toward a system where perhaps it is the content of your character and not the color of your skin. That is actually the, you know, maybe we're moving toward a more meritocratic society. And then for whatever reason, we just scrapped all of that. And circa 2012, 2013, 2014, we've moved into this era of like very toxic race relations, where now there's, you know, political correctness and wokeism and de high efforts to basically do a fern of action on mass with no real end in sight, which was an interesting thing because the Supreme Court when issuing decision about a fern of action years ago, specifically had liberals and conservatives on the court who were basically saying, hey, maybe a fern of action is only permissible if we have a sort of sunset clause built in understanding that this is not this should not be the permanent state of affairs. And yet now it seems like in the US it will be. And so my point is just we went from having horribly fraught race race relations in the United States to then looking like we were actually going to move past that decently well to now just putting band-aid after band-aid over this thing that ends up creating far more toxicity being seated by this effort on the part of the government generally to fix what ails people is the same thing playing out in Argentina. Yeah. So in Argentina, we don't really have that many race issues itself, just because we this is a pretty homogeneous country. We are receiving immigrants this years in past decades from neighboring countries and they're sometimes culturally different from us, if you will. But the race relations aren't really an issue. But what is an issue is in terms of social justice is that the measures that pernism, that pernist presidents, but also others have taken, you know, with the goal of helping out the poor have backfired, basically. So intervention after intervention has created a state of affairs where a person can receive, can basically make the same amount of money if they are on government subsidies, that if they work and that is absolutely terrible because then why would you want to work? Right? If you if you just if you can just get money from the government and do nothing, why would anyone work? And so you create, you know, generations of people who don't work, who are used to receiving government handouts and who will protest if you try to take them out. You know, if you try to tell them, you know, you're going to make less money if you stay at home and do nothing than if you go to work. And so that backfires, you know, in the name of social justice, you create more poverty and you create a culture of a toxic culture of not working, which is what Millet is trying to go after. But I wanted to add based on what Zagwitz was showing us, you know, in terms of the graphs, you know, the data that Millet was referencing that I think we must stress how important it is to look at this data, you know, this global data and take a step back and look at what capitalism has done, you know, in the world in recent centuries, you know, recent millennia, because here in Argentina, for example, I saw when after Millet's speech, I saw some people on the left who were trying to ridicule Millet for saying that the world had basically not grown before 1800, which is basically true if you look at the hockey stick, right? And so this is something that people don't know. Liz was talking about, you know, earlier about people protesting against the pro IMF Zionist government of Javier Vendee, which is totally total nonsense. But it if I could ask something to these people, is it that, you know, would you prefer to to live in this age or, you know, in the, I don't know, in the 15th century? Like, pre-plumbing, pre-running water and electricity and so on. Correct. An internet and abundant supply. Right. It's just so basic. The progress that humanity has made, this is why I love taking a look at the human progress website by Cato, too. The progress that the humanity has made is so remarkable that we we need to repeat it, you know, all over again, because otherwise people keep complaining, but we forget how far we've come, particularly in countries like Argentina, where we have seen the climb. We can't forget the progress that other countries have made because that's not magic. That's just, you know, basic economic literacy. So I just want to stress that, too. No, I think that's a that's an important point to stress. And it, you know, to be fair to that, you know, there are there is a group of libertarians who do embrace the idea of social justice, because they say that those of us who care about this empirical data and point to what capitalism free markets have done are actually saying that, yes, if you apply the veil of ignorance, then having markets is what will improve society the most and lift up those at the bottom. You know, you can point to that extreme poverty chart and say, you know, this is social justice. But I guess where I start to run the problem is that when it's applied in the real world, it's always about it always seems to turn to, well, it's not quite achieving this exact outcome. And so we need some sort of intervention to rebalance the scales based on this class of person or that class of person. Whereas libertarians, we, you know, the classic way to to the classic metric or, you know, approach you would use is just justice, like and justice is about individuals being wronged and being made whole. You can have class action lawsuits, which kind of, you know, groups, individuals who have all been wronged by the same party together. That's fine. But once you start getting to these broad capacious terms like social justice, it just opens the door to all sorts of kind of backfiring interventions. Well, there's also another strain of libertarians that I think is maybe a little softer towards social justice because there is a sense that, you know, the government has committed horrible atrocious injustices against certain groups. And we can pretty cleanly identify who those groups groups are across history. You know, you look at Japanese Americans being interred in concentration camps, essentially in the United States. You look at black descendants of slaves in the United States. And I think sometimes libertarians who are softer towards social justice look at that and say, well, wait a second, if we're in any way consistent and principled in our opposition to government coercion, look at the horrific coercive action that governments have taken against these groups of people over time. But the way in which I think they're ultimately really wrong is that attempting to solve this via other government means based off of what we know about how incompetent government pretty much always is. This won't actually solve the problem, nor will it ultimately quell people's complaints that there's sort of some sort of grievance, that they have some sort of grievance or that there's been some injustice perpetrated against them, right? Like I don't think anything will ever fully make people whole again. And I think it's very hard to suss out which people even need to be made whole. And you get sort of into a situation where we've got a system for doing that, which is taking things to a court and so like if you're a family that has been wronged by the federal government, your family was interred during World War Two or you're a black family whose whose land was taken by eminent domain. Like there are methods for achieving justice, but it has to be much more on an individual case by case basis, rather than a blankets approach, I think. Yeah, in a sense, the OG eminent domain was like, you know, enslavement. But, you know, we can cope over that. And then there's also issues of like the government promising, you know, 40 acres in a mule or what have you and then failing to deliver on certain promises throughout time. So like I can understand people's intense rage and how that is consistent with libertarianism or seen as consistent with libertarianism. I think some of the trouble lies in how you unravel those grievances and how you redress them, basically. And I think a lot of the times the social justice friendly libertarians don't answer those in a satisfying way. Let's move forward to the next part of Malay speech, which is digging into why the West is in jeopardy. Now, if free market capitalism and economic freedom have been remarkable instruments to eradicate poverty globally and we are presently experiencing the most favorable period in human history, it is worth inquiring why I assert that the West is in jeopardy. The main problem of the West today is that we not only have to confront those who, even after the fall of the wall and overwhelming evidence, continue to advocate for impoverishing socialism, but also our own leaders, thinkers and academics who sheltered in a misguided framework, undermine the foundations of the system that has given us the greatest wealth and prosperity in our history. The theoretical framework I am referring to is neoclassical economic. The issue with neoclassicals is that since the model they fell in love with doesn't match reality, they attribute the error to the supposed market failure instead of revising the premises of their model. Market is not just a graphical description of a supply curve and a demand curve on a graph. The market is a mechanism of social cooperation where property rights are voluntarily exchanged. Thus, considering this definition, discussing market failure is a contradiction in terms. There is no market failure. If transactions are voluntary, the only situation in which there can be a market failure is if there is coercion present. And the only one with the ability to coerce in a generalized manner is the state that possesses the monopoly of violence. Each time you want to correct a presumed market failure, inevitably due to not knowing the market or because you have become attached to a failed model, you are opening doors to socialism and condemning people to poverty. So this is where he's going right to the heart of what the WF is all about. They're they're not the WF is not a leftist organization. It is, I don't know, a neoliberal or, you know, he's called neoclassical where they embrace markets on the whole. But they see lots of market failures and say that, you know, there's a there's a need for a strong, robust government intervention to deal with those market failures, things like, you know, pollution, climate change. The government needs to intervene in Malaya saying, no, you're wrong. Davos crowd. And we're going to do things a different way in Argentina. Is that more or less are we on the same page with like our interpretations here? I think so. Yeah. I think, you know, he was definitely criticized because of this part, because of the part where he says that there can be no market failure, you know, by neoclassical economists in Argentina, just because they well, of course, they claim that they are. And I think the phrasing could have been differently in that. People individually can definitely fail in the market. It's just that, you know, there's nothing that's that can be systemic, that cannot be solved by the market itself. But but, you know, in other than that, I think I think your interpretation is right. And I think, you know, what Millay is saying is again, is very similar to what we have been hearing in Argentina. It's just at this time, you know, because it was in Davos, it caught, you know, people's eye all over the world. So and I'm very glad that I did because otherwise it would have been just us, you know, listening to his preaching, if you will. But but but now it's all it's also you. So do you consider him to be a sort of like high priest of Argentine libertarianism? Like, what do you think of the sort of proselytizing? Do you like it? Do you find it creepy? Do you fear that he'll develop this cult of personality in the same way that many other leaders throughout Argentine history have? Um, I'm a bit afraid of that cult of personality because I think many people follow him, you know, and not the libertarian ideas that he preaches again. And I think that can be that could be bad in case things go wrong, for example, if he doesn't deliver because then people who follow him will not be able to criticize him whenever he fails, you know, whenever he does something that's wrong, many people today, for example, I see that they they don't want to criticize the government because of anything, even if they make mistakes, you know, just because they want to they want to support me all the way. I don't think that's that's very healthy because that can lead him to believe that he can, you know, do whatever. I do believe, of course, he's a libertarian and I have confidence. I mean, I voted for him like all the times, you know, the primaries and the general election and the runoff and I would vote for him again. But I want him to, you know, be faithful, you know, to the libertarian idea. In that regard, I think he was more like a priest when he was campaigning again. He's not talking much right now. I think that's very strategic. I think he has definitely adapted to being president. Which is a good thing, because there was this, you know, concern that the sack was talking about earlier, that he would be, you know, like Trump, but he would just keep talking as president all the time and doing nothing. But he is not one of those. I think he is like strategically receiving, you know, from the public eye as the nasty, you know, job gets done, basically, because, of course, you know, raising revenue for the government is something that, you know, would be unthinkable under a libertarian government. But again, his priority now is to stabilize the country, you know, avoid hyperinflation and then, you know, transform the country. So I think that's why he's not talking much. But he can, if things, you know, turn right for him, if he is able to deliver, if this law that he is sending out to Congress gets passed and we start to see a recovery, you know, an economic recovery in future months, I think he can be, he can go back to the, you know, to the priest role from which he has receded in recent months. It's going to be interesting because he's staking out that this is a very doctrinaire, libertarian position that really differentiates him from the kind of more liberal governance that the WF would suggest, where he's saying, literally, there's no such thing as a market failure. You know, this I and so it's kind of like where the policy rubber meets the road for a libertarian, because there will be situations where some sort of voluntary transaction results in an externality, it results in something that costs other people something and kind of the doctrinaire, libertarian approach to that as well. They should be compensated through, they should be able to bring a suit. They should be able to bring a torch through the courts and get compensated for that. That's not at all how the modern world is governed. We're governed via regulation to avoid those that kind of extreme liability from like an oil spill or air pollution or something like that. So it's going to be, I think, where it's like something to watch and kind of like empirically observe, like, you know, it first of all, will be able to to apply that in Argentina, which we can talk about later because we can get into the politics. But then if he does, what happens when some sort of environmental cost is incurred? Let's go to the next clip. Let's keep let's keep forging ahead. And this one is where Malay starts to get into the culture wars a little bit, which we've heard him weigh in on in the past. Libertarianism already establishes equality between sexes. The cornerstone of our creed states that all men are created equal, that we all have the same unalienable rights granted by the creator, among which are life, liberty and property. This radical feminism agenda has led to increased state intervention, hindering the economic process. It provides jobs to bureaucrats who haven't contributed anything to society, whether through women's ministries or international organizations promoting this agenda. Another conflict that socialists pose is that of humans against nature. They argue that humans cause harm to the planet and that it must be protected at all costs, even advocating for population control mechanisms or supporting the controversial agenda of abortion rights. Unfortunately, these harmful ideas have strongly permeated our society. Neo Marxists have managed to co-op the common sense of the Western world. They achieve this through the appropriation of the media, culture, universities and, yes, even international organizations. The final case is very serious as it involves institutions with huge influence on the political and economic decisions of the countries in these multilateral organizations. Fortunately, more of us dare to raise our voices as we see that if we don't confront these ideas head on, the only possible destiny is more state, more regulation, more socialism, more poverty, less freedom and consequently a worse quality of life. So maybe this is me giving into the feminist agenda, Liz, but I want you to take this first, given kind of how that clip started off. Well, I tend to go back to the old like Ruth Bader Ginsburg line, amusingly, which is like I ask essentially I ask for no special favors. All I ask is that my brethren take their their feet off my neck. And it's very much I think the thing that's interesting is that today's feminist movement has sort of yassified or girl bossified the Ruth Bader Ginsburg mythology into something that like she didn't actually believe. She was legitimately this very old school, second wave feminist type that's just like a quality between the sexes. That's all you need. You don't really need special treatment beyond that. And that's where I stand. I mean, I don't feel as though my life is made in any way worse by dint of being a lady in the United States and the developed world. I mean, that's just a laughable premise to me. And I'm really sick of a lot of female complaining to that effect. I don't think there needs to be any sort of government intervention on my behalf to attempt to secure any sort of special treatment for me. I mean, I have a wonderful life and I don't need the state to be involved in any way. I also tend to agree with Malay on issues like abortion. I mean, him talking about the population control agenda and the degree to which abortion is very socially, you know, permissible in. I know in Latin America, it tends to be regarded a little bit differently, though Argentina, I think it's perhaps in some ways more in line with the United States here. But like I don't feel free by being allowed to exercise my right to kill my fetus up until week 24 or 25 in the state of New York, where I live. I don't feel free doing that. I think many other women disagree with me, but, you know, I see that as an innocent, right-sparing individual that I believe the state has a compelling interest in protecting. And I believe that feminism can be consistent with that belief. And I feel empowered by being a mom and joyful. So, you know, I'm a little bit of a Malay stand on this front. You guys might disagree. Marcos, it seems like the the economics has obviously taken the front burner at the beginning of Malay's administration here. Like, does do these cultural issues still are they still like how at play are they in Argentina at this point? Well, some of them definitely resonate. I wouldn't say that the ecological agenda is much important. I don't think it is. Although what Mille says, I think it's very important, you know, because it is often, you know, assumed that the planet has rights, you know. But, you know, if you take a step back and think about it, you're like, well, is that right? Like, isn't it humans who have rights? I mean, we can debate, you know, which what rights we have, which ones we don't. What is a right? But but does the planet have rights? I mean, can we do can we take measures, you know, coercively with the force of the state in the name of the planet that will harm humans? That that's if you put it that way, you know, it's it's very interesting. And I like that rhetorical, you know, phrasing that the way that he presents these issues in terms of feminism. I think that that's an agenda that resonates more here in Argentina. Mille has been at least partially consequential with his speech because he demoted the the ministry for women that had been created by the former president by former president Alberto Fernandez. There was a ministry. The number of bureaucrats had skyrocketed in that ministry. There was public spending wasn't super high compared to other. Expenses, but it was still, you know, sizable. What did the minister do? Well, that's a good question. I would say that they focus more on, you know, holding seminars and, you know, conversations and then bringing people together and talking basically about, you know, tea parties and yeah, correct. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, there were also some like mini scandals, you know, like, I don't know, I remember one time someone someone said and it was true, you know, we everyone got to see the the invoices afterwards that the ministry was buying trash cans, you know, at like 10 times the price, the market price. So like, you know, it was just basically used to spend money hire a lot of people who, as Mille said, don't contribute to the economy, but also not necessarily to solving a problem. Even if that problem is real, you know, the problem of violence against women, although there's also violence against men. But I mean, Mille has been consequential. He shut down the ministry of women. He can he cannot do much about employees per se because public employees are guaranteed stability in their jobs here in Argentina. So that's that's tough. That's very tough for any president who wants to fire people, basically, because they can only fire the people who they who have been hired for a short term, you know, for a defined period of time. Otherwise they can't do anything. But at least the ministry is shut down. And then there's this question, this lingering question on abortion. We don't really know what's going to happen with abortion. Abortion is illegal in Argentina. It has been so since 2018. It is free. Also, you can you can have an abortion and abortion at a public hospital and private hospitals are forced to perform abortions, even if they even religious, even Catholic hospitals. Yes, and that is that was one of the points of the law that was, you know, the most criticized back when the law was passed. But, you know, Mille received a lot of support from pro-life movements. And for many of these movements, abortion is the key and maybe the only issue that they care about. So I anticipate that there will be a renewed discussion on abortion in Argentina, maybe not this year, but next year. I think the priority right now is the economy. I think the government is smart enough to to concentrate all of their efforts on the economy. But at some point, I think there's going to be inside pressure from within the government to reopen, you know, the discussion. Well, one thing I wanted to ask you about, Marcos, is, OK, so years ago, I was in Marine in Colombia and I stumbled across a thing that I had never seen before, which was an abortion related protest in the streets with attractive young women who seemed urban, educated, well dressed, et cetera, and, you know, some older women, too. And my I didn't know Spanish very well, then I honestly still don't know. But my first assumption was that they were are, you know, protesting in favor of making, you know, allowing abortion in favor of pro-choice and favor of abortion rights. Then I talked to some of them and learned actually, no, it was just this massive pro-life rally, which sort of demographically was confusing to me because I've never seen, you know, you wouldn't go to the streets of Manhattan or Brooklyn and see a bunch of women wearing, you know, nice clothes who went to, you know, Ivy League schools or whatever who are advocating, who are marching in the streets in favor of the pro-life cause against abortion rights, right? So, you know, that's obviously a different situation like Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Chile. I know they all have their own distinct on the ground culture surrounding abortion. But what's that dynamic like in Argentina? Is there a significant contingent of like women my age who are in that pro-life camp who are vocal about it? Or is it pretty monolithic where people of a certain sort of type from certain places regionally sort of map cleanly onto the pro-choice or pro-life cause? Like tell me about what it looks like there. So I would say that Argentina resembles the U.S. rather than Colombia, at least in this respect. It is usually, you know, if you find a I mean, if you find people protesting on the street and they look like they're, you know, middle class or upper middle class or they're likely to be in favor of abortion. But there are also some circles, you know, some traditional like particularly in the city of Buenos Aires, you know, very traditional Catholic circles where there's strong opposition to abortion from from the upper class. You will find those people, too. But usually if you see a demonstration against abortion, it will be people who, you know, are not as wealthy as the ones who are protesting in favor of it. But you can have these mixtures. You can definitely have it. It's not as monolithic, perhaps, as in the U.S., but it's also not as upside down as it can be in Colombia. Interesting. Yeah, that's definitely I almost wonder whether there's like a continuum that could be created of different countries in Latin America and the degree to which they do or do not model the U.S. on this because I've paid a little bit of attention to abortion politics in Mexico. And I'm really curious about how that's going to shake out, especially because in a lot of these countries that we've mentioned, you know, in the United States, we saw the Dobs decision a little bit ago, a few years ago, that reversed essentially 50 years of Roe v. Wade being the law of the land where abortion was broadly permitted with fewer restrictions placed on it in many cases with abortions allowed up until, you know, the end of the second trimester in many, many states, a later point in pregnancy than many other countries around the world. But the thing that's really interesting is we've seen in a lot of Latin American countries, it's only been in the last five years or so that abortion has been made legal in a lot of these places. And that's sort of an interesting, like I'm curious about what that dynamic will look like going forward. And to some degree, it's like the right feels less enduring and less entrenched if, you know, it was only sort of enshrined in law within the last few years. That's something that can still very much be changed, I think. And I mean, the political results of Dobs here in the US have been very mixed for, actually, I would say negative for Republicans, because, you know, these it turns out lowering the limits to abortion to, you know, a few weeks is not very popular here. And I that that's, you know, if Argentina is going to roll it back countrywide, like, you know, that would be very different than what happened here in the US, where it was kicked back to the states. And I imagine there would be quite a quite a backlash to that kind of move. Well, we've also seen an interesting backlash, an interesting thing in the United States, which is where the mechanism by which these rights are decided has sort of, as it's become, as the right has become imperiled, the mechanism by which people are looking to decide it has shifted, like we saw instead of this being decided at the legislature level or via, you know, executive order, we've seen, like in Kansas, for example, the constitutional amendment being added and people coming to the polls to vote on this. So then basically you have this backlash effect where people are enshrining this in a more enduring way, which I think is kind of the opposite of what a lot of pro-life Republicans thought would happen. Yeah, for sure. And then on, you know, stepping away from abortion for a second on the culture war front, I do wonder if Millay could be someone to chart a course on, like, what a libertarian version of engaging in these looks like and how it differs from the conservative version, because he does seem to be pretty focused on just like the government agencies. I mean, he even says in that statement, like, libertarians are fully for equality between the sexes for equality before the law. And, you know, all all these issues we talked about earlier with, you know, the history of black Americans or Japanese Americans, like redressing all of those grievances is a tough thing to do. And it like it's something we're still coping with here in America and that has to play out in the social realm. And that might involve different affirmative action schemes or what not in the in the in the private sector. But the more that we entrench this in the public sector, just it seems like the more divisive it it it's becoming in America. You're continually dividing people into these official government categories and Malay is on a mission to undo that in Argentina. And it's maybe something for American libertarians to keep an eye on his his approach to that. We have a couple more clips to get through. Let's go to his next one, which is on socialism and what he says is the socialist takeover of the West. To many, it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has embraced socialism, but this view is only ridiculous if one limits themselves to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which states that it is an economic system where the state owns the means of production. Today, states don't need to control means of production to control every aspect of individual's lives. With tools such as monetary issuance, debt, subsidies, interest rate control, price controls and regulations to correct alleged market failures, they can control the destinies of millions of human beings. This is how we have reached the point where, with different names or forms, good parts of the politically accepted offers in most Western countries are generally collectivist variants. Whether they openly declare themselves as communists, fascists, Nazis, socialists, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, Keynesians, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists. In the end, there are no substantive differences. Everyone argues that the state should control all aspects of individual's lives. If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, free competition, free price systems, if trade is hindered, if private property is attacked, the only possible destination is poverty. So this goes back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, the melee kind of broadly defining collectivism and putting all these different variants of collectivism into one bucket. It reminds me of the Hayek's thrust in the road to serfdom, the idea that once you start down the road of excessive planning, you end up in a really bad place, regardless of the political packaging that it's in, whether that's right or left wing. Anything else to say on that portion before we move to the final melee clip, Marcos? Oh, I want to listen to the final one. I want to find out which one you picked as the final one. Okay, this is his closing statement. Let's see how Malay wrapped this up. To summarize, I want to convey a message to all entrepreneurs present, don't be intimidated by the political cast or the parasites who live off the state. Don't yield to a political class that only wants to prolong its power and preserve its privileges. You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary era of prosperity we have ever experienced. Don't let anyone say ambition is immoral. If you earn money, it's because you provide a superior product, better price, contributing to well-being. Do not yield to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonist of this story and know that from today, you have Argentina as an unconditional ally. Thank you very much and long life freedom, dumb it. Long life freedom, dumb it. That's why I end all my phone calls. Every time I get off the phone. Yeah, a very eye-in-rand ending to that. How does that make you feel, Liz? I mean, I feel extraordinary joy swelling deep within my soul every time I hear Malay say, long life freedom, dumb it. No, I mean, I think it definitely strikes objectivist tones at the very end. And I think it's actually, how insane is it that this stands out to such a degree? Because we've had so few great communicators for the idea that, like, no, greed is good. Maybe not in such sort of brusque blunt terms. But to some degree, I think it's important to sometimes call a parasite a parasite, a leech-a-leech, and to say, you know, we don't need to have this parasitic relationship with the state. We should not have countries that have that type of system. If you want to pursue making the best possible product and selling it to willing consumers, do that. That's a good thing. That's a cool thing. That's an honest and admirable thing. I think in the U.S., we saw this bubble up a little bit in the sort of 2013 to 2015 era. I know Arthur Brooks has been a huge proponent of this, the former president of AEI. He wrote that wonderful book called The Conservative Heart. Very much espouses this gospel. Preaches to use your word, Marcus. This idea of, no, it's actually totally consistent with being a good and moral and honorable person to believe that, you know, pursuing, making money and pursuing voluntary means of organizing and pursuing things out far outside of the state, trying to, you know, make as much money as possible and then being very charitable with how you use it and not expecting the government to be fixing all of the problems, but rather thinking about more creative and more efficient ways of solving that in your communities. That's a good thing and that's something we need to see so much more of. So I kind of love the degree to which Malay is really disabusing people of the notion that the only way to be an altruistic, moral, good person is to favor the state giving people handouts. There are so many other ways to be an altruistic and moral person and I think people like us would probably say that favoring redistributive means of providing for the poor ends up not actually providing for the poor and it ends up coercing a lot of people in the process. There is a better way and for whatever reason, a lot of people really struggle to articulate that. I think Ayn Rand articulated that a little bit, but in a pretty obnoxious and horrible way and I think Malay is frankly doing a much better job. Yeah, it's like he's telling all the business people in that audience, don't give in to the temptation, don't embrace this WEF, quote unquote cooperation between the private and public. You need to just embrace your inner entrepreneur. He's also buttering them up a little bit, right? Doing a little bit of that. It's a rejection of crony capitalism, which is what you wrote about in an article giving the overview of Malay's early days, Marcos. You called it Argentina's offensive against crony capitalism, which we will link in the description here, but maybe we could close out this conversation with you just recapping that. Why is Malay on an offensive again? Why is crony capitalism really ultimately what's in his crosshairs? Right. Well, I think he is going against crony capitalism because he understands that capitalism is supposed to be based on free enterprise and that entrepreneurs are social benefactors, like he said, in this Randesky closing speech. That's one thing I liked about, I mean, I like the speech overall, but I like that part in particular because he's telling entrepreneurs, you know, businessmen to not be ashamed of themselves, basically, because this is a question of guilt. Why do they do this? Why do they embrace collectivism if they have been so popular, you know, by playing by the book? And many times it's because they're guilty. At least this is what we have seen in Argentina. Of course, there's also people who have, you know, stolen wealth, basically, from the people because the government has allowed them to do so through monopolies and privileges, regulations. And right now, Malay is going against this. He's going against crony capitalism because he's trying to open up markets in different aspects, you know, he's trying to, for example, he's trying to liberate the housing market, which in Argentina had been virtually, you know, shut down because of regulations. Nobody wanted to put, you know, an apartment out for rent because, you know, you weren't able to, you weren't able to update, you know, the fees that you charge in one year in an economy with 200... Basically, they had rent control on it. Yeah, they had rent control in an economy with 200% inflation, you know, that's absolutely insane. But Malay is going against crony capitalism because he is basically trying to tell the businessmen that have lived off of government support, you know, you are done. This is over. I mean, we need to move forward and the people need to be able to profit, you know, not just companies because of regulations and privileges. So for example, he's imposing an open-skies policy and he's rejecting price minimums that were designed basically to benefit Arellinas, which is the state, the government-owned airline. The most terrible airline on the planet. Exactly, which is inefficient, which loses hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And this hurt low-cost airlines. And so it was people, you know, regular people were being forced to pay more to fly. But there's other examples. There was the national winemaking policy law, you know, which set maximum prices for wine producers, which limited, you know, the amount of wine that they produced in a country which is supposed to export wine, you know. We even had something that was called like the supermarket shelf law, you know, which regulated how products needed to be displayed in supermarkets, like literally, you know, so that there would be always, you know, 30% for Argentine products and basically telling consumers what to do, you know. Unions, for example. Unions were allowed to keep money, to retain money from employees who didn't even want to be unionized if they wanted to opt for private health care, for example. Because in Argentina, unions offer health care by themselves. But you can opt out of that. But if you opt out of that, before Malaysia's decree, if you wanted to opt out of the union provided health care system, the union would still keep money just for transferring now that money to a private insurance. So it's dozens, hundreds of regulations like this, you know, the regulation that says that supermarkets cannot sell aspirins, because it is only pharmacists who can do it, you know. It's an insane amount of regulations that were overturned by the decree, or there likely to be overturned by the omnibus bill, and which is, you know, the core of Malaysia's agenda today. He's going against crony capitalism, and he means it. I hope he means it. I hope all of these things change, and I hope that, you know, it is the consumers who benefit from capitalism and not cronies, not the friends of government. And every single one of those thousands of regulations or privileges that he's going after, just yeah, this is off some special interest, which likely explains why we're now seeing this massive mobilization in the streets and keeping an eye on that and on all the developments and hope that you'll come back and keep us updated on what's going on there, Marcos. Thank you, Zach, and thank you, Liz, also. Yes, thank you, and thanks for everyone who tuned in. We will see you back here next week. Thanks for listening to Just Asking Questions. 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