 Mille was sworn in as president of Argentina. I mean, this was an exciting event, a huge upside, huge potential. And, you know, inspiring in many regards. He is a guy who came out of nowhere, an economics professor, a real free marketer, an end cap, so we'll forgive him that for now. And somebody who really is presented an agenda for liberating Argentina's economy from decades, decades of really 70 years of a statist, authoritarian, socialist-like, fascist-like governance. Mille is a breath of fresh air. He is, you know, a real potential revolution. And somebody who is more consistently free market than I think any president of a major country has ever been. So to some extent, though, there is a real, a lot writing on this to the extent that, to the extent that a lot of people are placing a lot of hope and a lot of hoping for success, I mean, Mille, and I think to some extent, if he fails, the extent he fails, it will be more than him being judged. It will be the whole idea of free markets, of economic liberalism. So this is a big deal. This is a big deal. So a few things, I want to say a few things about this. One, the task he has taken on himself is massive. To take an economy as corrupt, a statist, as dominated by the state, an economy with 150% inflation, an economy that has been dysfunctional again for decades and decades, it's gone through periods of relative sanity, but overall being thoroughly dysfunctional. A country that is so where socialism and expectation for entitlement is deeply ingrained in the population, right? The population might have voted, a majority might have voted for Mille, but he is gonna have a vocal, a super vocal, aggressive, maybe even violent minority that will oppose everything that he does is gonna be unbelievably, so taking that economy and liberalizing it, liberating it is immensely difficult, objectively, immensely difficult. What do you do first? Do you cut taxes? Hopefully not. Do you do with capital controls? If you do it first, you get a huge massive flight of capital. That won't be particularly good, but if you wait to do it later, you create a whole other set of problems, you know, which Argentina is facing right now. Do you cut government spending immediately, dramatically? That is gonna create a lot of unemployment, a lot of unemployed, government employees. I mean, the previous government has engaged in massive government spending, deficit spending, massive deficit spending, in building infrastructure all over Argentina. All those construction workers now lose their jobs. So do you do that first? Do you do it gradually? Do you, you know, which jobs do you eliminate first? The people out there or the bureaucrats in the office? Mele has promised to dollarize the Argentine economy and to close the central bank. Do you do that now? Do you do that later? When exactly do you do it? How do you do it? How do you dollarize? What is the mechanism I would you? And you could go on and on and on. I mean, regulations. Do you eliminate them all at once? Do you do it slowly? What about corruption? How do you, you know, fight corruption, get it out of the system? And then there's privatizing the airline, the energy company, the railroads. I read a quote from a pilot who said, if he's gonna try to putz around with the airline, there's gonna be blood in the streets, basically, he said. Union's very strong in Argentina. So first, let's set it up. He is facing massive challenge. A massive challenge, and I haven't even mentioned that I think $42 billion in dollars, not in pesos, debt to the IMF, debts to China, debts internationally, dollar denominated, where those dollars gonna come from. There's no money. There's literally no money in the coffers. So what does he do, and this is gonna be the real challenge, so the first thing he's done, the first thing he's done is he's worked to grow his political base, which is smart, right? The first thing he's done is expanded his political base beyond what you would call kind of the libertarians, the radicals, and expanded it to include center-right conservatives in Argentina. And here, he's tapped a lot of the people in his government. He's got a small government, but a lot of the people in this small government are actually people coming in from the center-right, rather than from the libertarian side. He's got a bunch of people from Marci, Marquis, I'm pronouncing his name, former president who was a complete failure. But then, like is the most important person, the economics minister is a guy from that administration that failed completely, which I think he had to do politically, because he has to have a base in parliament, and at least now he has the support. He's also backed off some of the more radical proposals he made, for example, he said he would get out of the Paris climate accord, that climate change was basically a hoax. He's not doing that, he's now sent somebody, he's sent somebody to cope, 28, and is gonna abide by Paris accord. He is, he said he would break relations with China. He's not gonna break relations with China, he's the Chinese ambassador, was at his inauguration, and he's trying to be cordial to the Chinese. He said he would close the central bank. It's now clear that he's not gonna close the central bank anytime soon, he might do that, he might do it, but I think he realizes that that cannot be the first thing he does. He needs to bring more dollars into the economy before he closes the central bank, before he dollarizes, there actually have to be some dollars. So he has to, the first thing he has to do, and I think he realizes that, is reduce government spending. I wish some Republicans learned something from him. So the first thing he wants to do, he says he wants to do and should do, and I agree completely, is reduce government spending. I would add to that, dramatically reduce regulations. And as quickly as possible, simplify a crazy, complex, and insane tax system. I mean, if he could implement some kind of flat tax, that would be huge in terms of getting rid of some of the corruption, a lot of the corruption happens through the tax system, and simplify investments and the lives of Argentinians. So I think there's a huge amount of upside in getting that right. In first, cutting spending, cutting regulation, cutting a lot of regulation. Again, the sequence in your cut regulation is important. I hope you have somebody good who understands the process by which you cut it. Getting rid of simplifying the tax code, and ultimately getting rid of capital controls, but again, that's gonna have to happen over time. He has to first build confidence in the Argentine economy, in the fact that he's cutting spending, in the fact that, oh, and one other element that he should do first, right, together with cutting spending, he should do from day one, privatization. He should be immediately starting the process of auctioning off state-run enterprises across the board. Now again, some of them you need to do smart, some of them you just need to do quick. Like the airline, zero reason Argentina needs to have an airline. Zero reason Argentina should have an airline that's owned by the government. So just privatize it with the alternative being, just closing it, shutting it down. Plenty of other airlines will fly into Argentina if the Argentinian airline goes away. There's plenty of competition in Latin America. So try to sell it, sell it to the highest bidder. It doesn't matter where they're from. This is another important thing about privatization. Don't just sell it to Argentinians. Sell it to whoever's willing to pay. So sell the airlines, sell the trains. Trains are a little trickier because they're perceived to have monopoly power. It's not easy to privatize trains, but privatize them and then energy, everything you can privatize. Everything, all the low hanging fruit, that is the low hanging fruit that are bringing foreign exchange, that are bringing dollars, and that'll get stuff off of the books. These are overwhelmingly losing enterprises under government control. So to reduce government deficits, bring in money and reduce the number of bureaucrats you have to have. And then on top of that, then turn around and start cutting. Now, one of the first things he did was more symbolic than real, but important symbolically, is that he's already cut the number of government departments from 21 to nine, to nine, yes, to nine. Now he originally said there would only be eight. I'm not sure what additional department he saved, but anyway, they're nine from 21, that's huge, but this is the point. If all you do is cut the departments but consolidate their activities under fewer departments, you've done nothing. I mean, you've maybe gotten rid of one small layer of bureaucracy. What really needs to happen is those department needs to be shut down. And shutting them down means shutting down their activities. That means firing their employees. And until we start seeing dramatic, large-scale reductions in actual staffing of these, it doesn't mean a lot. It's symbolic, important, symbolism is important, but what you actually want to see is people being laid off. And then secondarily, budgets eliminated, budgets gone. And that, he's gonna need Parliament to help him. So I think he's bringing in Parliament to the session. I think they go into session in two days, I think on the 13th, with the idea of cutting government spending dramatically. In his inaugural address, he focused very much on there's gonna be a lot of pain, and this is really, really, really important. And this is a final point I wanna make because I'm spending a lot of time on this. There's gonna be a lot of pain. There's no way to do this without a lot of pain. And the pain will be felt by former government employees, but not just massive numbers of people in the private sector who have become dependent on government law, just contractors, poor people, if you cut social spending. It's gonna be widespread throughout the economy. And it's gonna be, and they're gonna be strikes, and they're gonna be demonstrations, and they're gonna be riots. And one of the most important things he is going to have to be do, and he's gonna have to do it well. And here, I think his years of being a television commentator and being just in the public eye will help. He needs to be a master communicator. He needs to be able to communicate the message, what he's doing, why he's doing it, why this will pay off. And it was great that he started off in his inaugural address by saying, there's gonna be pain, none of this is easy. Before we can resurrect this economy, we're gonna have to go deeper into recession. And he said, there's gonna be stagflation, stagnation and inflation. It's gonna be super ugly. I think that's good. I think that's right. I think there's no choice. That is reality. You can't transition. You have to pay the piper for all the bad stuff that's happened. There's no easy way. And this also involve massive redistributions of wealth. Now, I'll just note that he's not the first person to do this. Others have done this before, whether in Latin America, whether in Chile, to some extent Peru, in Eastern Europe. So he's got models from which to learn from. He would like to go further than any of those experiments went. And that's great. But, you know, start. You gotta start with somewhere. And so, I mean, courage. He's got smart people around him. I hope he doesn't sell out. And I just wanna make one last pessimistic point and then we're on. And that is, if he succeeds, not in turning Argentina, unless if you haven't, because, but if he succeeds over the next four, five years and I can't remember what the second election is, it's assumed four, or in dramatically shifting Argentina to a free economy, it gets spending under control and everything's moving forward. And yet he holds to this radical agenda of what he wants to do in the next four years. He might very well lose. Because the reality is that the Argentina culture is not quite, I don't think ready and prioritizes a radical laissez-faire economy. They just wanted to get rid of the crazy. If he gets rid of the crazy and puts it on a right path, you could see him actually, you know, struggling from a public, this is Churchill winning World War II and then losing the next election. Anyway, let's hope that isn't the case. But let's hope first that he succeeds because the Argentinian people, it would be important. And I think just important generally to see somebody moving towards greater freedom as a means to greater wealth is gonna be huge. So good for him. And good luck. Good luck to me late.