Javier Milei: Friend of Foe? Libertarian Debate Night

Jacob Winograd [00:00:18]:
Well, good evening everybody, and welcome back to the LCI Green Room. I’m Jacob Winograd. I am one of the podcast hosts here at the Libertarian Christian Institute. I am the host of the Biblical Anarchy podcast, which you should definitely check out as well of as well as our many other shows, the Flagship podcast, the Protestant Libertarian podcast, the Reformed Libertarians Podcast. There’s a few others I’m sure I’m forgetting as well. Faith Ventures, Faith Seeking Freedom. We got we got a whole litany of shows for you guys to listen to, but this is our live show. So we’re here to you, talk to you guys live tonight.

Jacob Winograd [00:00:57]:
It’s gonna be pretty, I think, good faith, but lively discussion and disagreement on the topic of Javier Millet, and whether or not he is someone that libertarians should be, friendly towards, who we should view as an ally, or if there’s perhaps more nefarious intentions or things going on in the background with, with the, crazy haired Argentinian president.

Jeremiah Harding [00:01:24]:
I like how you said Javier. It’s like fish eggs, but Argentinian.

Jacob Winograd [00:01:28]:
Yeah. Javier Javier Javier whatever. So I got I got 2, so I have someone who’s, I think, 3rd time on the show now, on on one side, and someone who’s brand new to the show. But I wanna give them both an an opportunity to sort of, like, introduce themselves and then sort of give a brief opening statement as to their general outlook on the topic for tonight’s discussion slash debate. We’re gonna start with, Scott. Scott, it’s your first time on the show, and, I have listened to you on the Tom Woods show before. But other than that, I don’t know too much about you. So please go ahead and introduce yourself, just your general background, and, why people might be interested in hearing what you have to say.

Jacob Winograd [00:02:14]:
And then kinda give your opening thoughts as to, how you feel about Javier Millet and what you think about his presidency, and then, we’ll then we’ll give, and then we’ll give Jeremy a chance to open as well, and then we’ll get into it.

Jeremiah Harding [00:02:30]:
Javier.

Skot Sheller [00:02:33]:
Yeah. So, well, thank you, Jacob, and thank you, Jeremy, for being here. It’ll be a fun debate, and, it’s always good to be skeptical and, you know, think these things through. So it’s I’m I’m excited about it. I’m I’m Scott Scheller. I’m a free stater. So I moved from Illinois to New Hampshire, and I’m actually in Illinois right now visiting family. And in 2015, I met my Argentinian wife.

Skot Sheller [00:03:00]:
So my, my wife, I have a beautiful Argentinian wife and, when I essentially adopted her family and ever since then, and even before that I became obsessed with Argentina, I started following the politics, loved to visit there. And, my father-in-law is also a libertarian economist, a free market Austrian economist in Argentina. And when he started, when I first met my wife, there was no such thing really as a libertarian in Argentina. There was my father-in-law and like 5 other people, the word libertarian or liberal they call it was a meant you were selfish and meant that you were not a good person and you got laughed at my father-in-law would constantly be censored and wasn’t allowed to teach what he wanted and didn’t get the promotions he wanted. So through that time, I partly because I just love the country and partly because I always wanted to see how my family was doing. You know? I always wanted to see check up on them and see what the politics were like. I just followed the politics to a great extent. And in 2018, this this new character came onto the scene in Argentina.

Skot Sheller [00:04:22]:
This guy is this brash libertarian guy that that was like taxation is theft, and the currency is worse than feces, and and you you politicians are a parasite. And if you don’t know, Argentina has had 80 years of high inflation. Unbelievable, every every decade is a banking crisis and the country went from a rich country to a poor country. And here where he was telling everybody that, you know, we need capitalism, we need to go away from our mercantilist and socialist, economic system. Well, turns out in in 2020 that Argentina had a lockdown, a really, really nasty lockdown, and this radicalized Malay and he became, he be he started to get into politics because he was so mad about the Argentinian lockdown. They were locking down this country that that was poor, this country where people make $200 a month, and they’re locking them down. And Malay led a revolt against the lockdowns, and he used that to get elected to the congress. And once he got elected to the congress, he gave these grand speeches, and he famously raffled off his salary and became very popular and and and ran for president.

Skot Sheller [00:05:44]:
So he’s decided to run for president, and the other two parties had pretty much disgraced themselves. The Peronist who have been power for 80 years who were fascists, and the center right party which took power for 4 years and was a disgrace, didn’t do one thing. And so Millais runs for for president is a total long shot at first, but then you just see the polls. The polls, Millais doing really well in the polls. Wow. Looks like he might even have a chance to win, and he he’s the only one talking about inflation. He’s the only one talking about the government debt. He’s the only one talking about the things that actually people care about.

Skot Sheller [00:06:29]:
If you list if you watch the other two parties, it was like there was no financial crisis. Even though in 2023, the country hit went through 230% inflation, severe depression, people people starving, 50% poverty, 15% homeless, and it was like there’s nothing. And so Malay becomes president and and gets elected, has this has the weakest government in Argentinian history, and a lot of people thought he couldn’t do anything, thought he couldn’t accomplish anything. And since he’s been president, he has done a he has deregulated the economy to a great extent. He deregulated the the airlines. He deregulated the housing. Housing it housing had national rent control. Once he did that, the the supply of rents and the supply, doubled 212%.

Skot Sheller [00:07:29]:
The the the price of of rentals went down 25%. He he cut spending. He had a historic spending cut. When Malay took office, the week that he took office, the inflation was rising so fast that it was 17,000 percent a year. 1% a day, 17,000 percent of year. The inflation was going crazy. The the week he went into the office, and this is because the previous government to spent, like, started printing money. The central bank had a Leliq’s Ponzi scheme, which was doubling the money supply every 21 days.

Skot Sheller [00:08:13]:
It was at least every month. Every 21 days, the money supply was doubling. The the budget deficit was 6% of GDP. So that the government was having print. Nobody the the the country risk was 29,000 or 2,900%, which put it down with countries almost like Zimbabwe. There was nobody willing to invest in the country. Nobody was gonna give the country money. The country was heading to hyperinflation.

Skot Sheller [00:08:44]:
And what Millet did was he cut spent he had the biggest spending cut in the history of the world for a month. He cut spending 40% in a month. That slowed down the economy, that saved the country from hyperinflation. He he honestly priced the currency, which was, if you’re not familiar, there was 2 rates. The government had a price control and then there was the market rate, and and since then he has, continued to, cut spending and, bring their economy back. They they they the exports and imports were exports and imports were basically illegal in the previous government. You couldn’t import or export. Argentina is an economic prison and literally an economic you can’t start your own business, you can’t export without government permission, you can’t import without government permission, you can’t use the banking system without government permission.

Skot Sheller [00:09:44]:
You couldn’t do anything, and there was a few elites that have been elites for rich elites that have been elites for 40 years, the same business elites for the last 40 years, the same union elites for the last 40 years, and everybody else lives in poverty, and I’ve seen this, you know, it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen people go from middle class to poverty in Argentina, people I know very well, and what was he doing? Trying to exit this prison. He allowed people to export, allowed people to import without government permission, still allowed people to start businesses, and the economy is the inflation is down. He solved the central bank Ponzi scheme. He cut the he he got a budget surplus. He 5% of GDP deficit. He made it a surplus, and they they’ve ended money printing in only a few in, several months, and that’s why inflation is going down and now the country people are actually investing in the country. There’s actually optimism, companies are actually hiring.

Skot Sheller [00:10:53]:
Sorry about that. So he’s done this, with just an impossible situation too. Sorry, guys. But if you can’t hear that,

Jacob Winograd [00:11:08]:
All good.

Skot Sheller [00:11:09]:
Second. But so so Javier and Malay, this is my parents’ house, and they have this cool little clock thing. I apologize.

Jacob Winograd [00:11:18]:
It’s it’s it’s actually, like yeah. It’s it’s sounds pretty cool, actually.

Skot Sheller [00:11:22]:
It is. It’s a cute little thing. But but, I was

Jacob Winograd [00:11:25]:
gonna say, we’re we’re probably we’re we’re we’re probably, if you wanna finish off your thought there, we should probably be one

Skot Sheller [00:11:31]:
of the opening statement. The the and, the the crime in the country, it was unbelievable. I have so many personal stories about my family, just horrific stories about crime. And it in some ways, it’s it’s it’s becoming more safe in Argentina right now. And despite the fact that self defense is prohibited there, and Malay is trying to change that, but the congress actually reject it. So, all in all, the comment you’re going from a country that was that had 50% in poverty. Recent reports actually say poverty is going down in Argentina. I think that’s heroic, allowing people to actually live their lives, from this prison that they’ve had to endure for the last 80 years.

Skot Sheller [00:12:22]:
So that’s why I think Malay is, that’s why I think I like Malay and I’m very proud or happy he’s doing what he’s doing to hopefully liberate the people of Argentina from their suffering that they’ve experienced, especially in the last 25 years.

Jacob Winograd [00:12:38]:
Alright. Thank you, Scott, for your, little opening there. So, Jeremy, go on and, it’s your 3rd time on the show, but, you know, reintroduce yourself for those who, just maybe haven’t seen you yet, and then go into your opening thoughts as to what you think about Malay. And, you can we’re we’re keeping it somewhat informal here, so you can, in your opening statement, if you want, also respond to some of the things that Scott said, if you have a different take on that. Oh, you are still, sorry. I I had muted you. No. Because Because

Jeremiah Harding [00:13:12]:
you muted me, then it unmuted, and then I muted myself because I was typing, and I didn’t wanna be annoying.

Jacob Winograd [00:13:18]:
Okay.

Jeremiah Harding [00:13:19]:
So I will do that because I play black for a reason. I like to hear, like, the perspective of my opponent and, be able to fully understand before I respond. I’ve been taking notes. So the first thing that I’ll say, I am Jeremiah Harding. I have mental illness, and I make that everybody else’s problem. I have, like, strong beliefs in, libertarian, anarchist, etcetera, solutions to problems rather than, you know, the force of the state, central planning, that sort of thing. And that leads me to a coalitionist mentality with the left and anybody else who wants to work toward an actual stateless solution. I don’t believe that to be Malay in the slightest.

Jeremiah Harding [00:14:07]:
And the result of this is that I’ve spoken with and and I’m very familiar with a variety of, sort of leftist positions, and I’m sympathetic to a wide variety of them. Not the least of which is, the idea that certain countries become vassals for, other countries’ power. We are seeing that in play right here in Ukraine, with the US using it as basically a pawn in foreign policy. We are seeing that with Israel being consistently the biggest, forward operating base in the world. The US using it to store weapons and train troops and cops and a variety of other things, and in general, use it as a positional and strategic regional ally for protection of shipping routes and insurance of the, military and, intelligence industrial complexes that the US has waged, around the world. And the reason all of this matters to the Malay situation is he has pledged support to Israel saying that Israel, is right in all they’re doing. He has said that on camera in an interview. He has also said, that, the American libertarian establishment are cowards because they refuse ethical compromise in an interview with Barry Weiss.

Jeremiah Harding [00:15:35]:
And in a variety of other ways, he has demonstrated himself to be an ally of the West, not the least of which is promising to dollarize, having positive meetings with Janet Yellen, and saying that, he’s going to support the, policies of western involvement in Ukraine by holding entire conferences on Argentina’s role in that and giving them surplus military equipment while he’s at it, including, working with Lockheed Martin to spruce up his military budget itself. He’s clearly planning on involvement, which is why he’s angling with strategic partnerships with NATO and a variety of other things that I could mention. And one of the things that that sort of lends me to believe is that the reason he’s so gung ho about AI and the reason he’s so gung ho about the prison industrial complex being enabled by that AI by installing facial recognition cameras everywhere as was stated in the platform, for his presidential candidacy, is because he’s totally on board with the, frankly, dystopian future that the elites want to build for us. This is evil. Additionally, to the evil that, that I presented here, he has made it easier for police to shoot people, and made it harder for those people if they are in a protest setting to defend themselves by both banning masks so that they can be facially recognized and scanned into a database for the purposes of revoking their benefits should they choose to resist benefits that they need because of the previously stated economic, instability and downturns, and also banning, their sticks so that they can not defend themselves even more if they are in a protest setting from the cops who have not only sticks, but the guns aforementioned made easier to shoot them with. He issued those decrees. He’s working with Pat Bullrich, a person he was completely critical of and called a massive authoritarian while he was in campaign mode. And like pretty much any other politician, he has gone back on that, including her in his initial cabinet as part of a compromise program.

Jeremiah Harding [00:17:47]:
And, immediately, she gets on Instagram and starts to well, TikTok and Instagram and all these places and starts talking about waging a war on drugs and making the cartels tremble. This is an authoritarian. He’s not a libertarian. And I by the way, I’m not even reading a script. I’m just schizo like this. So welcome to my mental illness. But the general

Jacob Winograd [00:18:08]:
thing That’ll be that’ll be the next quote I put on the bottom banner here. I’m just Exactly.

Jeremiah Harding [00:18:12]:
I’m schizo like that. Yeah. And so he’s done all of this. He’s doing this AI, like, precog minority report program where he’s, like, doing, like, precrime analysis to decide who’s going to commit a crime. He’s doing all of that while not ending the money printing, but trying to transfer the money printing to the United States government by dollarizing the economy and meeting with Janet Yellen to smoothen the transition. And he’s doing all of that while getting on board with WEF policy. Now the reason I know that all of these things are probably irritants for Scott is because I listened to his, appearance on Tom Woods, and I also listened to his appearance on the Free Thought Project, both of which, provided a competent overview of his beliefs, already in toto, I believe. So, I’m going to generally disagree with a lot of the things he said in those things, and I want to start off this entire thing by setting a tone that one of the reasons he says he got interested in Argentina as a hub for libertarianism is somebody, called Doug Casey.

Jeremiah Harding [00:19:24]:
And Doug Casey, summarizes the general, you know, mentality around investment in Argentina from a foreign perspective, in the article he referenced because, Scott said that he said that it was his favorite place in the world, so that gave me something relatively easy to Google. So I looked that up, and Doug Casey was talking about disaster capitalism. Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine is a book every libertarian should read. But the general, like, environment around, disaster capitalism is you see a place that has been impoverished in some way. You come in with your foreign capital and investment. You seize on their opportunities. You try to wrangle as much support in the region as possible through basically whatever means you can, and then you watch your profits grow because the economy is suddenly dependent on your kind of investment. Now this is something that he has literally said in this article.

Jeremiah Harding [00:20:23]:
I’m not making that up or exaggerating. And he says, you know, that, he says, I admit to being not only delighted but surprised by the election of Mauricio Macri, saying that the previous administration was somewhat, favorable to libertarian ends, saying that living in the country, you basically don’t get any of the tyranny that you get in the cities, and then it’s basically a libertarian paradise. That, the opportunity has been created by the chronic mismanagement of the, Peronist Argentine state. There are many bad things about a disastrously managed economy, currency, and banking system for locals. But from a foreigner’s point of view, they are blessings in disguise. For one thing, a total lack of mortgage money means that the prices of property are real, not inflated by borrowed money. But that means in Argentina prices for equivalent houses and land are, 10 to 20% of those in North America. So, I wanted to preface that, and I also wanted to talk about the fact that because of that mentality, the IMF swoops in on nations, and gives them loans in the form of bailouts from their shoddy economies so that they will be hooked onto the IMF and their programs and western, hegemony.

Jeremiah Harding [00:21:40]:
And they have not only given them one disbursement, but also promised them another should they stay on the leash. And this is exactly what vassalization looks like, and shock doctrine goes over this in a very specific way. And another way that, I want to respond to Doug Casey is his mentality that Auguste Pinochet’s regime was good, which is something that he said in that article. Pinochet was a Nazi. He worked with, literal Nazi, Paul Schaeffer, and, the pedophilic, rapey, anti woman death camps that were run under his regime are hardly an example of free markets, libertarianism, or anything other than overt fascism. But because he scared people enough and enough of them fled or were tortured to death by his regime, he got his way. And he got to flip the entire script, force them onto, globalist banking and the IMF and, like, I think World Bank were very heavily supportive of his regime, and it turned around because he felt made the country fall in line with western powers. And the whole reason that coup was staged by the CIA and the Chicago boys, who Malay has named his dog after, was because those people, were, like, fundamentally blocking the sorts of free market exchanges, and also they were blocking the nationalization of certain industries by the current, government under Chile.

Jeremiah Harding [00:23:17]:
Saying that this is a free market victory has always been something heavily suspect to me because I consider Pinochet to be, you know, an authoritarian dictator because he was an authoritarian dictator. And when you start to praise people like him, which Malay also did in an appearance on, this broadcast. I forget what it was. The background was very blue. I’ll probably have that information by the end of this, but I’m just sort of remembering this stuff. He praised the turnaround. He claimed that it was a victory. This is the kind of mentality that has to stop if we are to get an actual free market.

Jeremiah Harding [00:23:55]:
And meanwhile, Javier Malle is going around schmoozing with the pope, with, Netanyahu, with, Zelensky, with all these world leaders, including Trump. And if Malay was truly opposed to the lockdowns, why would he, like, schmooze so much and be on such good terms with the architect of the American lockdowns, Donald Trump, or Vivek Ramaswami, who was a big pharma bro linked to Soros who wanted, you know, a COVID database. There’s plenty of problems. And just to cap all this off, yeah, the rent market seems to have blown up because he also allowed the evictions to take place that had been frozen for a bit. So a bunch of people are now homeless. A bunch of people who had government jobs are now jobless. A bunch of people who had benefits are now benefitless. And while you said on one of your appearances that he cut 200,000, you know, corrupt programs, I’d need to see a citation on whether or not they were corrupt because so far, all I see is Javier Malay saying, I say so, and that’s not good enough for me.

Jeremiah Harding [00:25:02]:
I know I’m just a foreign gringo. I’m a German Scott up here in the northwest of the country, and I’m sounding an awful lot like one of those liberal commies that the right likes to, say should be thrown out of helicopters by people these people admire. But at the same time, when it comes down to it, I don’t think I’m far off from saying that he has fallen way too far in line with globalist policy to be considered a truly individualist and free market thinker. That’ll be my opening statement. What you got?

Jacob Winograd [00:25:35]:
Alrighty. So I think that where I wanna start, because the the way your opening statements have sort of juxtaposed is that there there’s almost and there there’s connection here, but I wanna start can I take these two things one at a time? The conversation around the economic policies and related some of the domestic policies, but then also his foreign policy and his relationship to, the western powers and whatnot that I think is it was kinda 2 tiered conversation that we’re gonna have here. And I I, for 1, wanna hear, Scott, you respond to some of the concerns that Jeremiah has raised about, the potential for Argentina to become a vassal state under Malay. I have to say that. And, again, as I I think I said at the, before we went live that I’m the reason I was excited to to host this is because I’m I’m fairly ignorant to a lot of this. I only have seen the headlines, and I have not had the time to do much research myself into what’s going on in Argentina and with Malay. But while some of the headlines are good, like, you hear things about cutting spending or cutting government programs and whatnot, the stuff that I’ve been concerned about has been not just rhetorically support for Israel and their war in Gaza and, and and also just generally kind of being fond of of western powers and and western imperialism in general, but headlines suggesting that, Malay wants to, leverage Argentina to actually somehow be in support overtly of some of some of these going on. So I’d like to hear your take on that if you think that these concerns are legitimate and, you know, in terms of both if if it’s an issue that he has rhetorical support and if there’s any credibility to the idea that Malay wants to turn Argentina into somewhat of a vassal state that would be supplying some sort of assistance to these western powers? Oh, and, sorry.

Jacob Winograd [00:27:46]:
You’re still muted. Let me unmute you there. Go ahead.

Skot Sheller [00:27:49]:
Yeah. Well, so Argentina was already a vassal state. Argentina, when you have, the Malay did not take out the IMF loan. So, there’s there’s a lot I disagreed with with Jeremiah. I appreciate the the pushback. I think it’s I think it’s legitimate to to have some questions and pushbacks, but, our the vassal state was 2 two ways. The the government wouldn’t for a 120 113 out of a 123 years, ran a budget deficit. And when you run a budget deficit, you have to print money or you have to take debt.

Skot Sheller [00:28:28]:
And the previous governments took lots of IMF loan debt and they also were taking debt from China. So if if Argentina was becoming anything, it was a vassal state of China. They’re about to join BRICS, and, they’re about to join BRICS and China was has become invested more and more in their economy because there’s just not when nobody will invest in Argentina, China’s about the only country that will do it. Sometimes the IMF, but the IMF had already been the agreement had already been broken because the country is so broke. So to say that Malay is bringing them into a vassal state, Malay is is making them independent. Malay, when you have a budget when you have a budget surplus, when you when you are paying down your debt and you don’t take out any more debt, that makes and you are out in your increasing your improving your country risk, that allows you to sell your own bonds on the market and that allows you to have sovereignty over your country. That’s exactly what Malay is doing. He hasn’t taken out any more debt.

Skot Sheller [00:29:44]:
He has been cutting spending, and, cutting spending and just and so he there’s just doing the opposite of the vassal state and he’s been deregulating his economy. He’s been giving more power and more freedom to the people of his country to do what they want, to start their own businesses, to trade what they want, to do that sort of thing. So he’s giving more power to the people of Argentina, and it’s not like he has he’s not taken on more debt. He’s been doing everything he can to clean up his his government and which it you can say that, oh, we cut welfare payment. Their their inflation was 230%. Their poverty had ridden risen had risen from a few percent to 50% of the economy. Like, the the welfare that was was not even keeping up with, with with with inflation at all. So it’s like you cut, the best thing for the people has been to actually cut the inflation, and that’s been the best thing for the people.

Skot Sheller [00:30:59]:
So, no. Malay has not been turning into a vassal state. He inherited the IMF loan. By the way, he when he was a pundit on the television, he called it the worst thing Argentina ever did. He’s he said that they should be cutting spending, not be and when when you when you don’t take as much, when you when you when you spend more than you’ve taken in taxes, you have to pay for it with either debt or money printing. And they they did plenty of money printing and then they they didn’t have a bond market that people wanted and so they used IMF. But Malay was totally against that and Malay’s actions been totally against it. If Malay was in power when Mercutio Macri was in power, they wouldn’t have taken the IMF debt because they would have not had a budget deficit.

Skot Sheller [00:31:54]:
So to to say that he’s becoming a more of a vassal state is just not true. Now they they were supposed to join BRICS and they did not. They they did not join BRICS, which none of those BRICS countries are good are very libertarian countries anyways. But no, they I mean, they’re not. And regarding to foreign, Israel, Millais been, Millais also talked a lot about libertarian foreign policy is his foreign policy goals and what he have said multiple times is that he wants Argentina to be essentially a neutral state in South America that has no conflicts at their borders, that hit that trades with everybody, that doesn’t have to avoid that avoids war, and you can look no further than Brazil. He and the Brazilian president hate each other. He and the Brazilian president, he told the Brazilian president he would not enter here because the Brazilian president is a corrupt communist. And Malay and guess what? They aren’t at tensions.

Skot Sheller [00:33:02]:
They’re doing they have great diplomatic relationships. They Argentina send them sent them, supplies for, severe flood. Argentinians open open trade routes with Brazil. Argentinian Argentina has has opened airline routes with Brazil. Argentina has been friends with China since Malay. They, they renewed a currency swap. They renewed trade with China and they’ve been fine with China. Even with Russia, they still trade with Russia.

Skot Sheller [00:33:31]:
They still travel to Russia. They haven’t sanctioned Russia. So to to to say that they’re becoming a vassal state, yes, are the right wing in in South America likes the United States. Everybody that’s right wing or libertarian likes the United States because they view the United States as a as a capitalist country. And there’s not one libertarian in in Argentina, believe it or not. This it it that doesn’t like Donald Trump. It just they do. They they had so much crap they’ve they’ve dealt with, and they see Donald Trump who is a capitalist and they they like him.

Skot Sheller [00:34:06]:
Every all of them do. It’s not it’s not just Malay. So, yes, Malay believes in western civilization. He, he he by the way, he his dog is named after Murray Rothbard, not the Chicago Boys and and, other other, economists. So no. They’re they’re they’re he he he’s not creating a vassal state. When you become more independent, when you can actually sell your own debt, when all this all this that you’re you’re not you’re not becoming more dependent on other countries. Unfortunately, they inherited a huge amount of external debt, but that’s not Malay’s fault.

Skot Sheller [00:34:47]:
That’s the previous government’s fault. And, in regard to Israel, they’ve expressed diplomatic solidarity with Israel. However, there’s no attempt to create to, send military aid, at all. And that’s it. They they’ve reached diplomatic solidarity with with Ukraine. Malay’s government has said that they will not send weapons or arms to Ukraine. Now they what Jeremiah was referring to is they had 2 broken helicopters that was given to them by the Soviet Union that had no mil no, capacity for military that they gave them because it was probably cheaper to give it to the Ukrainians than than even than fix it. But that was Malay’s first day of office.

Skot Sheller [00:35:39]:
But it’s but ever since then, Malay’s actually called for arguably called for peace with Russia. He called for reengaging Russia into the world, which is what he talked about at the Peace Summit. So he’s he’s not he’s not necessarily going along with the neoliberal, neocon for an agenda. He doesn’t he said he does not believe in war and does not believe war, believe in solving problems with war, at least our offensive wars, and so I I just I’m not sure, why, you can say that Malay is turning Argentina into a more of a vassal state, and, with dollarization. The country has had 80 years of high inflation. Everything everybody from my father-in-law, and everybody else would love to get rid of the Argentinian Central Bank. Argentinians have have have have $400,000,000,000 dollars $400,000,000,000 stuffed into mattresses and the country is already dollarized for all big purchases, houses, cars, loans, they use dollars. They don’t use the peso because the peso has had 200% inflation.

Skot Sheller [00:37:03]:
The peso has had 80 years inflation, so they want dollars. Dollars is better than gold in Argentina. It’s not Malay. Malay wants a competition of currencies where you can use gold, you can use crypto, you can use the, if he would love to get rid of the Argentinian peso because it’s been abused, but you can use the Brazilian Real, the Chilean Peso. This this is what he calls for but the proud the thing what will happen is that people are gonna use dollars because people love dollars in Argentina and they’ve been through market, through through individual actions, they’ve been collecting dollars and everybody saves in dollars from from the maid to the the business owner saves in dollars.

Jacob Winograd [00:37:48]:
So so let me let me get Jeremiah in here. I have some good stuff, Scott. Jeremiah, let me tag on to something, from the point Scott made just with a a question of of my own that kinda, piggybacks off of the things he he’s been saying. Because the the apologetics, I guess, that I’ve heard, which to me makes some sense, but I wanna get your perspective on it as part of your response here, is that well, if you’re in Javier Malloy’s position and you’re a libertarian and you’re you’re trying to to, you know, push a libertarian agenda, if you’re in South America, you’re you’re looking like, well, I don’t really want to be a vassal state. I don’t want foreign entities trying to control what we do. But it’s probably easier and probably more advantageous for us to, suck up to the western powers than to, deal with the, the BRICS countries and and things like that. And it’s probably also better for my long term, like, if I’m if I’m Malay, I’m thinking, you know, I can either try to get along with the Americans and try to, like, play play nice with them, or I can be the latest victim of American foreign policy and and be, you know, just the the latest in a long list of of, politicians and and and national leaders who have been taken out and, replaced with American in, in installments. So is this, perhaps an instance where we’re making perfect the enemy of of good and, you know, Malaise is just dealing, playing the game with the the cards he’s been dealt.

Jacob Winograd [00:39:27]:
Maybe it’s not ideal, but you you kinda picking the lesser of 2 evils in terms of, both some of the, you know, statements of solidarity with with the western powers, and then also perhaps, that ties into the economic stuff as well in terms of, tying himself more to American the the American economy. So what what are your thoughts there? Also hold on. You’re you’re muted again, Jeremy. And, also, before you respond, there’s a lot of you out there watching, which I appreciate. I think this is a really great back and forth. Please make sure you’re subscribed if you aren’t already, and give this video a thumbs up. I don’t say that enough because I I enjoy the conversation more than I enjoy the, the the, shameless self promotion and grifting. But, yeah.

Jacob Winograd [00:40:12]:
Please give this video a thumbs up. That way more people can see it and watch it because this is a great conversation, on important topics that I hope more people get to to listen to as it continues to happen. So alright, Jeremiah. Go ahead.

Jeremiah Harding [00:40:26]:
So the first thing is, you can pull out of anything. And when it comes down to it, a, he’s got another disbursement to this IMF loan. He could just start paying them back and stop accepting them. He could find a way to do a moratorium. He’s choosing not to. Additionally, he could, state a neutral position on things like Israel and Ukraine. Instead, he is taking the position that these are free market countries and that those are who he’s going to align with. He literally said that, so you can shake your head all you want.

Jeremiah Harding [00:41:04]:
But, the general gist, the general gist of, like, my response here is going to be he has falsely called these countries in BRICS communist. That is a trade alliance. BRICS is a trade alliance among state capitalist countries. Now when I say state capitalist, a lot of right libertarians get that hackles up. Rothbard also used the term to describe any, economy where the government conducts a significant amount of the amount of the affairs in order to actually get the initial property, like acquired, dispersed, controlled, etcetera. And he said that, and our co capitalism, if it’s to exist, needs to differentiate itself from state capitalism. That is basically the state coming in as robber barons to control significant amount of, territory and then distribute it among people and then charge rent in the form of taxation. That’s a loose paraphrase because I don’t think people wanna hear an entire Rothbard paragraph.

Jeremiah Harding [00:42:09]:
But the general vibe is we do not live under free market capitalism. And the BRICS alliance is not communism. It is state capitalism as stated directly by Marx and by, Mao and by anybody who has had any amount of time to think about maybe an alliance that is heavily influenced by central control of the means of production isn’t communist. But, like, let’s be super clear when he calls it communist, that’s not, an actual statement of principles. It’s not an actual statement of, like, the, nation and their economic policy as it were. It’s a sort of philosophical and rhetorical bulwark against, his opponents in his reforms. The general vibe is that as long as your country does not embrace a pure capitalist framework, strictly sort of at least neoliberal and oftentimes very, very economically, like, centrally controlled in the forms of means of production, then you are somehow communist. If you’re not going to allow the rich, for instance, to come in to the territory, control a significant amount of the property, and then, you know, jack up the influence of their people in the region so that the economy improves, you’re somehow a communist.

Jeremiah Harding [00:43:37]:
But if that’s exactly what China was doing in various regions, if that’s exactly what these BRICS people were doing in order to allegedly vassalize them, coming to a poor country, offering them a significant amount of, economic support and assistance, in the terms of military and otherwise alliances, as long as they get on board with the BRICS countries like alleged stated goals, then when it comes down to it, we aren’t opposing that sort of vassalization. We’re just saying it should be vassalized to a different country, which brings me to dollarization. Dollarization was not already happening because dollarization involves complete elimination of their domestic currency, not a competition for it to be, like, you know, gradually outmoded, not a competition on a one to one level, but directly saying that the Argentinian economy is going to be, like, hooked to the American dollar system, thus providing a mass amount of dollar printing and seigniorage to the US government. And the US government then in turn using this increased financial position to, like, broaden relations and cement ties in that way against bricks. Ultimately, I don’t see it as fundamentally different. I see it as 2 state capitalist imperial alliances fighting each other for dominance of the given regions and given political establishments. And I don’t think it’s dramatically different, to support the, like, west than it is to support BRICS.

Jacob Winograd [00:45:18]:
Well, let me let me

Jeremiah Harding [00:45:19]:
In fact, BRICS is currently not doing a genocide and the west is. So I don’t know what to tell you.

Jacob Winograd [00:45:27]:
Well, could could what part of this

Skot Sheller [00:45:29]:
really quickly?

Jacob Winograd [00:45:30]:
Well, you you let let me just, say something quick and then you can respond as well. But I I think the what Scott’s point was, which I’d like to see if you can address that, was that even if maybe in our own opinion as, like, libertarians and we’re just being, like, really objective here, we go like, well, these are just different forms of state capitalism, and is one really better than the other? Okay. But if if, the public perception is that America is more capitalistic and maybe more liberty leaning, would it not be, advantageous for Javier to con like, for his long term goals and ambitions to to be playing into the, what what the, his supporters, you know, think about such things. I mean, again, this is where I I I I’m concerned, like, although Javier Malay, you know, identifies as an ethical capitalist and maybe there’s a significant part of his supporters who might identify that way as well, let’s just be honest. Like, it’s not it can’t be that much different there than it is here where the you know, a lot of people, if they’ve heard of libertarianism, they don’t understand it very well. They don’t have a a complete understanding of free market economics, and so you you you’re fighting an uphill battle, I feel like. So, so, I mean, don’t get me wrong. Certainly, American imperialism has a lot of blood on its hands, both in both past and present.

Jacob Winograd [00:47:01]:
And, and I’m sympathetic to the idea that sometimes these, you know, BRICS powers in Russia are sometimes, you know, not innocent, but they can be, you know, held up as demons in comparison to America being presented as angels, and I don’t agree with that. But is it is it Aviar’s job to sort of, like, weigh in on that, or is his job to how can I harness these things to promote freeing the economy of my own country, which was you know? And and and fighting an uphill battle because he took over kind of a crapshoot.

Jeremiah Harding [00:47:37]:
So here’s the first thing

Skot Sheller [00:47:38]:
that he He’s talked. You you did a you did a good you’re doing a good job, Jeremy, and it’s a good conversation, my friend. Yeah. Well, he’s getting along with the BRICS countries. He’s getting along with Brazil. He’s getting along with China. In fact, they didn’t think they were gonna renew their currency swap with China, but they did because of Malay had extended an olive branch and, has gone along with them. They are trading wheat for the first time to China.

Skot Sheller [00:48:07]:
They’re, even Russia, they’re still You can still travel. Russians can still travel to Argentina. Okay, try to do that to United States. They still can They still are trading with Russia, So here’s Malay’s policy on all of this. He doesn’t believe that he should be able to the government of Argentina should be regulating who the people of Argentina are trading with or doing commerce with. So he actually believes that peep the people of Argentina should have the the free the the right to trade with whoever they want to trade with. So that that’s that’s that and Malay’s Malay Malay doesn’t want to do business with with China. Like, well, he wants he doesn’t want to engage in, like like, government strategic dealings with with China.

Skot Sheller [00:49:05]:
But, you know, he believes in free trade. So that’s why he’s increasing trade with China. That’s why he’s increasing trade with Brazil. So it to me, it’s a it’s a really moot point where which alliance he he’s on in that way as far as trade and the people. He thinks the people he doesn’t believe he doesn’t believe the government should be interfering with people.

Jacob Winograd [00:49:27]:
What what would what would Malay do? So I’m gonna I’m I’m trying to be fair here and play devil’s advocate both ways. Would he allow people to trade with with people in Gaza? Would he allow people to to trade with, you know, other you know, with Iran or other countries who are, you know, generally deemed the enemy of the the American regime?

Skot Sheller [00:49:49]:
Yes. Malay doesn’t believe that the government he, as the government, should control the people his people. He’s a libertarian. So, now with when you’re dealing with some of these governments, you have to go through you have to go through the government. So a lot of lot of these arrangements have to actually go through the government, but he doesn’t believe that somebody’s buying something from Iran or going to Iran to do business. An Argentinian, he’s going to he’s not he’s going to stop that from happening.

Jacob Winograd [00:50:26]:
It has alright. What’s the word you’re

Jeremiah Harding [00:50:28]:
just saying then?

Skot Sheller [00:50:31]:
Well, he’s he he he believes it. Now Are you sure? I there’s there’s I don’t I don’t see any I haven’t seen any so if you’re not prohibiting it, if you don’t actually prohibit it, then you’re allowing it to

Jeremiah Harding [00:50:48]:
happen. If you’re allied with NATO, you’re doing more than prohibiting it. You’re saying that the western sanctions are sanctions that you will at least rhetorically back.

Skot Sheller [00:50:57]:
He’s not. That is part of that is

Jeremiah Harding [00:50:58]:
a part of

Skot Sheller [00:50:59]:
that is a Argentina is not in NATO.

Jeremiah Harding [00:51:01]:
He’s literally saying he wants to. He’s literally saying he wants to have

Skot Sheller [00:51:05]:
a strategic I’m

Jacob Winograd [00:51:06]:
not getting interrupted by the NATO party. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s let’s let’s try to yeah. I mean, I know this is a this is actually a really important topic to to get at, and I wanna give you guys both time to talk about it. But let’s let’s try to take turns here and and and, you know, I I have a stopwatch here, so I’m trying to keep equal time here. So, what’s this this is a kind of an important topic, so let’s I’m gonna kinda keep you guys to 2 minute responses till we get through this.

Jacob Winograd [00:51:33]:
So, Jeremiah, you got 2 minutes, and then we’ll give Scott 2 minutes.

Jeremiah Harding [00:51:37]:
So, in April, Argentina already has started to make moves to join NATO. And, this is from Associated Press that he asks to join NATO as president Malay seeks a more prominent role for his nation. Buenos Aires, Argentina formally requested Thursday to join NATO as a global partner, a status that would clear the way for greater political and security cooperation at a time when the right wing government of president Javier Malle aims to boost ties with western powers and and attract investment. Now that’s exactly what you have to do. In the words of Doug Casey and his disaster capitalist mentality, the goal of this particular kind of alliance is to get, like, more participation and cooperation so that your government can get the support of these governments in exchange for supporting them. It’s a cooperative alliance, and he wanted to join NATO. He’s been pushing to join NATO, for a long time now. And, that would be, like, 2% of his, like, of the budget for the year.

Jeremiah Harding [00:52:42]:
So, like, let’s be super clear here. I wasn’t wrong about that. He, the 450,000 jobs that are now gone because of his policies, Those mean that those people can’t participate in the economy. The mass evictions, including off indigenous land that was granted to natives, he’s reversed that, and a a gradual, like, sort of adoption of this neoliberal shock to shock doctrine and an adoption of the sort same sort of policies that Pinochet had in effect is what we’re seeing again. So when I see this, I’m seeing history repeat and vassalization occur again to the west. I’m saying the answer is don’t vassalize to anybody or beyond anybody’s central bank, even your own.

Jacob Winograd [00:53:29]:
Alright. 10 seconds to spare. Scott, go ahead. You got 2 minutes.

Skot Sheller [00:53:32]:
So, globe, NATO Global Partnership do not have to pay 2% of your GDP. That’s NATO partner NATO membership do. NATO members only only consists of Canada, the US, and and Europe. Nobody else can be part of a NATO member. A NATO partnership is basically like we’re friends. There’s no commitments for a NATO partnership. Basically, it’s it’s like we know in this side of the world, we these people are not our enemies. You know who’s a NATO partner? Colombia, Mongolia, Iraq, Afghanistan, North, South Korea, Japan, not exactly the most warmongering nations.

Skot Sheller [00:54:13]:
Okay? There’s no commitments to a NATO partnership and by the way, he probably they probably won’t even get into the partnership. That’s what they most people don’t believe Argentina will even get into the partnership. So it in, by the way, so, I can’t remember what else you you, you said. But, oh, on on I’m a capitalist. I think you should if you don’t pay your rent, you should be evicted. That’s that’s a good thing. That’s that’s that’s a good thing. I that that’s I’m sorry.

Skot Sheller [00:54:42]:
I’m a capitalist. I think you should be evicted if you don’t pay your rent. And, the the supply of rents have gone up 200%. So no. People more people are actually getting places to live now. 200%, 23, 25% lower. More people are actually getting spots spots to live because they’re cheaper and there’s some higher supply because they got rid of natural national rent control, and this is not true. The latest studies show that poverty has actually been going down.

Skot Sheller [00:55:11]:
Economic wages, real wages are are rising compared to inflation. The problem was the inflation. It if you have 230% inflation, it doesn’t matter. People are getting robbed at 230% inflation. So if you cut the inflation, that’s saving people, and that’s what Millet is doing. That’s the biggest tax and burden. That’s that’s the biggest beneficial thing that people can’t, feel. And trust me, I know people that live in Argentina with this inflation.

Skot Sheller [00:55:44]:
It is miserable. Absolutely miserable.

Jacob Winograd [00:55:47]:
So so, Jeremiah, I think I think to sort of steel man Scott’s point here, I wanna get you to respond to it, and we this will be kind of pivoting from the focus being more on the the global stage and more I wanna focus more now kind of on the micro level of Argentina itself. But and, again, it’s connected, but I think Scott’s point is all this other stuff is sort of secondary to the domestic concerns, especially the economic ones when inflation was so out of control like it was. And so when you look at things through that lens, everything Javier has done has been to get inflation under control because when it’s that high, every you know, any other reform, any other efforts you try to make are are sort of, meaningless, you know, and and maybe maybe it’s unfortunate that we don’t have perfect you know, one of the problems with any conceptualization of moving to a libertarian legal order and a libertarian economic order is that it it does are you gonna have a perfect transition where there’s not, you know, some people on the short end of the stick? It’s hard to conceive of that. Are some people who are, you know, being evicted that maybe, like, they they just are somewhat victims of this economic inertia, like, perhaps, but in the grand scheme of things, you know, it other than a magic Rothbard button, if what Malay is doing is drastically reducing our, their inflation and moving them, you know, not not again, not perfectly overnight, but moving them closer to a true free market, you know, domestically, where would your criticisms lie? Do you think that, he you know, do you disagree with Scott in terms of that the the domestic economic policies have been effective, or is there a different sort of, you know, angle or perspective you would bring to this?

Jeremiah Harding [00:57:43]:
So the first thing I’ll

Jacob Winograd [00:57:44]:
say Let’s do we’ll just do 4 or 5 we’ll do 5 minutes for this and then give Scott 5 minutes.

Jeremiah Harding [00:57:50]:
Alright. So the first thing I’ll say is that he hasn’t cut spending across the board. Ryan Mcmahon at the mazes wire was very clear about that when he wrote that, Malay is not a spending cutter. He is specifically cutting, you know, like spending to the public sector unless you’re the military. So when Mises Wire came out with this article, it was Millet wants more government spending for the military, of course. He he quoted a thing that he wrote back in June, and said, Malay displays no particular affinity for anti interventionist foreign policy, and he’s certainly no threat to the established US domin dominated geopolitical order. Malay is and will likely continue to be a reliable ally of the American security state. More succinctly, we might say that Malay is a CIA approved head of state.

Jeremiah Harding [00:58:43]:
And he goes on in this article, like, I think, like, a week ago. Yeah. 97 so not even a week ago. 9 17, he said, it should be noted that there is no reason why the Malay administration is required to take these positions. Malay could easily stake out a position making Argentina a nonaligned country that refuses to participate in US and NATO meddling in Eastern Europe. He also then, went on to cite an, Associated Press article. And this Associated Press article says that while he’s gutting public spending to things like welfare and things like that, he has also proposed increases to the military budget. And the defense spending package that he’s going for is an increase from 0.5% of the GDP to 2.1%.

Jeremiah Harding [00:59:31]:
And those kinds of changes allowed him to build a massive military industrial complex. And, also, he’s doing this at the same time as making good on his promise to turn it into an AI surveillance state. Because in the platform for his, presidency, his candidacy, when he was still running for office, if you actually read his thing, he wanted a militarized police state, and he wanted, AI facial recognition cameras fucking everywhere. And he wanted those things everywhere so that he could have increased flow of people to prisons, increased flow of, money to the state and not away from it in cutting benefits to people who he believes to be criminals, and, otherwise, in inducing the people to do what he says or lose their very meager benefits they had been relying on. And this is the real problem. It’s not, you know, that people are just being evicted because they didn’t pay their rent and they oh so could’ve. Most of these people were not just slags doing nothing. They were living paycheck to paycheck under a regime that was fundamentally economically interventionist, and more economic interventionism is not the answer to that.

Jeremiah Harding [01:00:48]:
The answer to that is giving them a way out that gives them free market potential instead of, like, just simply cutting the eviction moratorium or cutting their positions or cutting them off from benefits. He could have induced a bunch more, jobs to be in the country before any of that so that the people who wanted to could get on those jobs before they had the rug pulled out from under them. Instead, again, he’s doing shock doctrine. He’s doing disaster capitalism. He’s doing exactly the kind of neo and and neoliberal interventionist policies that provide the foundation for neoconservative takeovers. And the general variety of tyranny that this enables has been seen so many times before and is well championed by, like, everybody from the Bush family to Clinton to, like, Obama himself. We’re talking about policies that directly benefit some of the most in interventionist and imperialist hegemonies in history. This is the spread of empire, and he is enabling that, not going against it.

Jeremiah Harding [01:01:58]:
Bricks is not any better, but they certainly aren’t that much worse. And it’s not a matter of picking between, like, perfect and good. It’s a matter of picking between imperfect options instead of trying to get better than either one.

Jacob Winograd [01:02:15]:
Alright. Yeah. Scott, go ahead and respond to that. I think what if I one one thing that came to mind is that yeah. I mean, I think something I often hear is people talk about, like, you know, phasing out something like Social Security rather than just cutting it, and that if you put people in a state of dependency on the state, perhaps it’s not, you know, libertarian, to, say, like, well, okay. We’re we’re capitalists now, so you were in the state of of of, you know, state created dependence, and now we’re gonna overnight cut those off and expect you to to to sink or swim. You know, may maybe there was a better approach. Do you agree, disagree? You wanna add some to that? Also, we’re gonna have to talk about the people in the comments are are debating the AI facial recognition cameras.

Jacob Winograd [01:03:04]:
So I’ll look up some respond, we we can maybe incorporate some of that into this because I’m I’m interested to know if if if this is fake news or not.

Skot Sheller [01:03:12]:
Can I can I respond?

Jacob Winograd [01:03:13]:
And then we’ll Let’s let’s get let’s let Scott respond, Jeremiah, and then you can you come in.

Skot Sheller [01:03:17]:
Real quick. Jeremiah.

Jeremiah Harding [01:03:19]:
Real quick, though. I’m just

Jacob Winograd [01:03:20]:
gonna say

Jeremiah Harding [01:03:20]:
give him 6 minutes, and then I’ll use one of I’ll use my 6 minutes after that to partially respond to AI stuff.

Jacob Winograd [01:03:27]:
Okay. Sounds good.

Skot Sheller [01:03:28]:
Cool. Cool. So, Jeremiah, do you know what Malay even got in the the first round of the election, or do you know?

Jeremiah Harding [01:03:38]:
It wasn’t high. It was low. And I remember you talking about that in your in your appearance on Free Thoughts, project.

Skot Sheller [01:03:45]:
So he he got 30% now. He if if he wanted to get everything he wanted, he needed to win in the 1st round. But he got 30% and his opponent got 37%. And that’s why he coalitioned with Burrich and Petri, and he needed Macri’s, permission too. And the center right of the country wanted to build a stronger military. The military had since after after the Falkland Islands War, the military had, gone into disrepair, absolute disrepair. Anybody in any in what Ryan and Mick Macon saying that, like the money that Argentinian spend is mostly stolen anyways. So their military gone into disrepair and to win the election he had to make a coalition and he made a coalition with the center right and part of that coalition is they drove some of the agenda and some of the agenda is actually spending money on on military, and probably the NATO thing too.

Skot Sheller [01:04:49]:
So and, Bullrich is to he let Bullrich be part of, taking control of the security. That’s not what his original plan was. That was the coalition government that he he he established. He only has 7 out of 72. 7 senators out of 72 senators. He has 39 out of 275 legislatures. Okay. He has less than 10% left, and I I believe that’s 15% of the legislature.

Skot Sheller [01:05:20]:
He’s got the weakest government in history. No no governors. The governors have been rebelling on him half of the time. So Malay has to make coalitions and making coalitions you have to you have to make some you have to do some stuff that maybe that he his wasn’t originally planned. But yes, the the the the the the government, the center right government wanted more, stronger military, but Argentina was not even it was far below even regional standards in the military. And right now they’re trying to get to regional standards. They’re not trying to create an empire that that is going to to to to to take control of the world. In fact, Malay has said he doesn’t wanna do that.

Skot Sheller [01:06:04]:
Malay doesn’t believe in war. He said this. He does not believe in war, offensive war. So he says he wants to have, essentially a libertarian foreign policy. And there’s, there’s nothing that he’s done that that materially that has, that has broken that. So, so he this is this is why that is that is, going on. And and Bullrich, yes. She she, has engaged in a semi drug war, but they have a a cartel in Argentina that is very brutal cartel that is trying to be its own state.

Skot Sheller [01:06:50]:
It’s a it’s located largely in Rosario, city that I’ve been to. It’s a very nice city and they’re trying to and they’ve been trying and they’ve reduced crime in Rosario 75%. So keep in mind, Argentina does not even have self defense rights. They do if you if somebody is robbing your house and you shoot them, it is you’re not gonna you’re you’re not gonna do well. You’re probably gonna get arrested. You’re probably gonna get sued by their family. It’s not gonna go well for you. Malay is trying to change this, but in in but he has to go through the congress.

Skot Sheller [01:07:29]:
He has to go through the congress to change this. So So what else can he do? He’s trying to reduce crime with the state. Now I can tell you just horrific crime stories that you wouldn’t even believe, okay, And within the last year, and the it is horrible. And part of it is young kids commit the crimes, and they don’t they have impunity. So that’s why they’re lowering lowering the the age of criminality. So you’re not you can’t if you commit a crime, you’re gonna go if you kill somebody, you’re gonna go to the jail, and basically before that you didn’t. So it it it it’s, it’s not exactly he doesn’t have complete control of the government and he needed to win in the 1st round if he did. It’s as simple as that and and, I remember people on his campaign were just heartbroken when he didn’t win in the 1st round.

Skot Sheller [01:08:29]:
In fact, I think they they they almost stole they almost stole the election from him. So he doesn’t have complete control over the security forces. He put Baldridge there. That that wasn’t his original plan. It was gonna be Vishal Royal, his his his, libertarian vice president. So that that’s that’s the that’s the that’s the issue. And, I can’t remember if there was anything else on economy if you can remind me. But, so so, art, you know, so yes.

Skot Sheller [01:09:04]:
He’s he’s he’s reducing crime. He’s reducing the blockages of the roads and the people like him for that and that’s what they wanted. That’s what they voted for him. He said he want he had 2 two goals. He wanted to improve the economy, reduce inflation, and 3, reduce the crime and insecurity. That’s that’s what he said. That’s his whole mandate. It’s not to go around the world.

Skot Sheller [01:09:29]:
It that’s his whole mandate according to Millet. That’s all he says he wants to do.

Jacob Winograd [01:09:33]:
Do you do you think there should have been more of a a gradual phase out of of certain government benefits or or things to alleviate

Skot Sheller [01:09:40]:
the, the problem solved with that. Some government benefits, actually. So, yeah. So, for for example, children get more benefits now than they did because children can’t defend themselves. They the he the the the fact that he’s been cutting welfare is just not true, and the the the evidence that there was a lot of fraud in the welfare is just enormous. I mean, there’s a lot of fraud everywhere. What he was cutting from the welfare was people that were getting welfare that were going overseas on plane trips that had yachts were this, this is just a common thing that happens in Argentina. Any Argentinian would tell you this, that that there’s enormous amount of fraud in the government, and this is what one of the things that was that was cut.

Skot Sheller [01:10:33]:
And it’s it’s, the so the the I’m gonna Now we’re back. Can you move can you move it move me for a few minutes?

Jacob Winograd [01:10:42]:
Yeah. Like I said, that that that, the the the timer came in. The the the sound came in just in time for me to say, let’s give Jeremiah a chance to respond. I mean, I I guess just to to add something in there, I know you’re gonna talk about the AI cameras too, Jeremiah, but, I I I suppose one of the things that came to my mind while while Scott was speaking was, you know, again, do is this sort of like I don’t know. Maybe you’re not I’m a I’m a sports ball guy, so, like, I I think about how in in football, everyone blames the quarterback. And is this a case where I mean, is is there a lot of moving pieces to this Argentinian, government? Maybe, you know, we’re we’re we’re focusing too much on Malay because he’s somewhat of a you know, he’s the leader and he’s kind of a a celebrity figure, but it’s it’s probably, you know, fair to say that not everything the that’s happening in in Argentina and in their government or in their economy is completely within his his control. And we can also, Monday morning quarterback, can say he should do this and do that, but, you know, it’s it’s not a dictatorship. It’s a, you know, a form of of a democracy, and he’s got a coalition build.

Jacob Winograd [01:11:54]:
And, unfortunately, now I know this is gonna you know, you can just respond by saying, and this is why there’s no political solution, and we need algorithm, and that’s a whole other debate, which we can set up another time. But, just in terms of, you know, like, I think you would agree that someone can be libertarian and maybe be trying to employ political solutions, and maybe you don’t agree with that as your preferred strategy. But does that mean that, you know, we we’d announce them as a libertarian or, have an uncharitable reading of of what’s going on there. So go ahead and you got you got 6 minutes on the clock.

Jeremiah Harding [01:12:30]:
Well, the if we’re gonna go with uncharitable readings, I will, I will I will go back to a comment that my my opponent here made, to me in December of 2023. December 16, 2023, he told me specifically, you probably support looting and violence. If we’re gonna talk about uncharitable interpretations, I would say that the pro Malay side has a tendency to knee jerk to his defense, calling people who don’t like his policies communists, the supporters of various evil, and various things like that.

Jacob Winograd [01:13:09]:
Well, that’s I’m not just

Jeremiah Harding [01:13:11]:
gonna deflect though. I am gonna say that it can’t be both ways. Either Javier Mele has all of the power to do these things and is using that power to do these fundamental overhauls or it’s not his fault. If it doesn’t if he doesn’t have the power, then he should have not said that he had the power that he didn’t, or he should make that clear that he actually was wrong about the scope of what he could accomplish, and here’s the new program. Instead of this middle ground where we’re just supposed to accept that the things that go wrong aren’t his fault and the things that go right are.

Jacob Winograd [01:13:50]:
Well, so that’s that’s definitely fair. And I I get, like, you don’t wanna you know, the the the equal concern would be, yeah, exactly that, that he he he can do no wrong, and everything bad that happens isn’t his fault, and everything good that happens is. And and certainly that’s a

Jeremiah Harding [01:14:03]:
the problems.

Jacob Winograd [01:14:04]:
That that’s that’s certainly another extreme that we could fall into as well. But but on the crime stuff, I mean, I don’t know. Maybe this is my more paleo sympathetic side coming out here. But I do think there’s something to the idea that people are going to care less about economic freedoms and care less about civil liberties if the streets are just full of crime. So, I mean, what would you do in that situation where now granted, again, perfect solution is America ends their war on drugs. We we defang the cartels and and and all that, but, you know, I mean, that’s that’s not even within our control here, those of us who live in the US, let alone the, the the president of Argentina. So, what are your thoughts there? I mean, there some of the the crime that that happens there is certainly, you know, there there’s a lot of it and it it’s rather vicious. I I don’t know that I fault people for saying, hey, fine.

Jacob Winograd [01:15:00]:
Promote more free market policies, but we need you to to to get the street a little bit cleaner because no one wants to invest. No one wants to do free trade when they go outside and they’re getting shot at.

Jeremiah Harding [01:15:14]:
Okay. So the first thing that I’ll reply with is if nobody wanted to do that, then why did Doug Casey say that it was his favorite country in the world?

Skot Sheller [01:15:22]:
Never talk to each other.

Jeremiah Harding [01:15:23]:
Because a whole lot of people in that country used it for disaster capitalism. In fact, the whole model that he had was that it was such a great place for foreign investment because of how bad it had gotten. So I don’t know how you can reconcile the boat.

Jacob Winograd [01:15:39]:
Well, hold on. It might be isn’t it possible that it could be good for foreign investors to sort of capitalize off a bad situation, but bad for people who want to actually just work or invest and have their own businesses within the country itself? Like, it kinda seems like you could have both those things be true at the same time.

Jeremiah Harding [01:15:57]:
And that’s the position I hold. And the position I hold is that the foreign investment angle of this is the thing that’s actually causing a boon to the Argentinian economy. The fact that he’s not cutting off relations with BRICS, the fact that he’s going back on his promises to do so, the fact that he’s like not ending every bit of the fed, that he’s not doing the things that he said he would. The fact that he’s walking things back and starting to work with the global military industrial complex. It’s the same thing that happened under the Pinochet regime. And by the way, I have, like, 6 minutes. Right? 5 now?

Jacob Winograd [01:16:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. We’ll say 5 now. Yep.

Jeremiah Harding [01:16:39]:
Cool. So that’s the general gist. I think that Malay is another example of neoliberalization being very tasty to foreigners and very bad for the domestic people living there. And it doesn’t matter how bad it is for the people living there if the foreign investors can continue to astroturf and inflate, the, like, standards of living for them. The GDP will look the same whether it’s a foreign investor making the numbers on the balance sheet or whether it’s a domestic partner. And the general vibe that I have, is that he is choosing the foreign investor model, that he’s choosing global capitalism because that’s the way that it’s running. He’s working with Lockheed Martin to build, like, I think, 20 24 jets, something like that. It’s like a lot.

Jeremiah Harding [01:17:31]:
It’s, and and he’s, like, strengthening his defense budget by a shit ton. He’s doing all of this while in the words of his own platform, creating a national database of people with warrants linked to security cameras with face identification, and promoting its replication in all provinces of Argentine territory. He’s doing this well in the words of the platform, militarizing the police and and stating up, like, position of martial law. These are things that these people have said they would do and have said that they are doing. So when it comes down to it, the these people are making good on the bad parts of their promises and not actually freeing the markets in the process. Getting rid of 200,000, welfare programs cannot all be connected to some jack off with a yacht. It’s just not possible. It’s not happening.

Jeremiah Harding [01:18:27]:
Not everybody involved in those programs had a yacht. That’s absurd. The vast majority of those, like, of welfare programs in Argentina are not had by massive oligarchs or some massively wealthy person. And yes, there’s fraud there. There’s fraud everywhere. There’s fraud in all countries, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a heavy impact to the working class there when these policies of austerity take hold. It’s true in literally every country that this has been attempted in. And when it comes down to it, he is literally creating an AI facial recognition minority report style super state that will predict crimes before they even happen.

Jeremiah Harding [01:19:10]:
And he’s doing this in order to cement the will of the government on the people so that the people cannot defend themselves because they don’t have either the accurate adequate, like, economic or physical means to do to do so, to defend themselves from the government. If he really wanted to, he could start pushing on, like, getting every gun legalized. If he really wanted to, he could end things like their war on drugs. He could get that kind of thing done rather than slashing government programs in the form of, like, you know, giving indigenous people their land back. He could do that sort of thing. Right? Instead, he’s slashing the common person’s programs. He’s not slashing the government jobs of drug enforcement. He’s not slashing the government jobs of gun control.

Jeremiah Harding [01:20:02]:
He’s slashing the government jobs that are beneficial to the poverty stricken. And generally speaking, the people hardest hit by this are not wealthy oligarchs. I don’t know where that information came from, and I have a feeling it didn’t come from anywhere. I’d be interested in an actual citation to that claim. But when it comes to it when it comes to it, I have sources from the Associated Press, Reuters, Mises Institute themselves, all of these, institutions, including, Newsweek Magazine and a variety of others pulled up right now that I’ve been making all of my points with, and I’d like to see him actually cite the idea that this has only been hitting the wealthy and the freeloader because that’s not true. I’ve I’ve directly read accounts. I’ve had to translate them, of course, from 1,000 of Argentinians sometimes a day. And like many, many, many tens of 1,000 over the interceding months of him taking power, talking about how this has hit them really hard and talking about how they’re tired of his police state that he’s building and his prison industrial complex where every criminal there will have to work for the, like, profit of the prison.

Jeremiah Harding [01:21:19]:
This is not a free market position or a free market person, and I’m not Monday morning quarterbacking by saying that Mises would be ashamed of this person claiming any sort of Maizezian principles.

Jacob Winograd [01:21:33]:
Alright. That’s time. Scott, so I I am curious in your answer if you can address and I’m just taking a wild guess here. Is is the the barriers to Malay potentially freeing up the right to self defense, Is it political gridlock? Is it a cultural thing? Because it does seem to me, like, maybe that would be because granted, I’m I’m sympathetic to the whole, you know, Rothbard, clean the streets, that kind of thing. I get the I get the the argument there and why some of the right wing libertarians, I’m kind of a right wing libertarian myself, make the connection that make make the the argue idea that we’re not you can’t make proper economic reforms if the streets are flooded with violence. Granted, you there are long term systemic issues, but you gotta kind of, you know, do some triage at the beginning. But it does seem like, you know, perhaps that Jeremiah has a point that, you know, not just in terms of, not wanting a giant police state, but just also in terms of, you know, creating within Argentina a people who can be more self sufficient and who, are are more able to defend themselves from threats both, from the streets and from potentially their own government because any government can become tyrannical. So I I I’d like you to incorporate that into your response as well What? To the one economic point.

Jeremiah Harding [01:22:55]:
Can I can I have 12 seconds?

Jacob Winograd [01:22:57]:
Alright. You have 12 you have 12 seconds.

Jeremiah Harding [01:23:01]:
Go to, the election site for Argentina official. Go to La Libertadavanza and look up platiforma electoral nacional 2023. That’s where you’ll find the AI facial recognition cameras talked about by him.

Jacob Winograd [01:23:15]:
Alright. That’s 15 seconds. Scott, I will give you 6 minutes and 15 seconds on the clock.

Skot Sheller [01:23:21]:
So, you’re gonna have to remind me of everything he says. So yeah. No. Malay’s campaign was, he he basically wants constitutional carry that you would have in the United States. In fact, it it he had to pull back from this because the center right party was even criticizing him about it. Everybody was criticizing him about it, but this is what Mola believes and I this is what he’s trying to do. And he put a month ago, he put it in a bill to reinforce self defense rights and in your house. So you can just self defend people in your house.

Skot Sheller [01:23:58]:
This is the bill they put through congress. And the first bill, his lei omnibus, which was going through in July in January got rejected. So he tried to do it the first time and it got rejected. So Millet wants to empower the citizens and Millet Millet Millet is he wants to empower the citizens. So, it it’s just it’s not true, that that he just wants the state to to control everything. That just it just it just it just not true. He he would prefer the the the citizens take care of themselves. That’s just that’s just Malay.

Skot Sheller [01:24:39]:
It’s what he’s always believed in. He said it. You could I you can you can quote it. I can quote him a 100 different times saying this. In fact, they that’s what the people we have some Argentineans in the in the comments. They they would they know this. He had to he had he was getting heavily criticized by this. He’s like, everybody’s gonna have an AK 47.

Skot Sheller [01:25:00]:
You know? He’s walking around. He’s like, what is the opponents were saying, in trying to beat him. So and by the way, Malay would probably agree with that. But so no. He he he’s a libertarian, and and he believes that people should have the right to self defense and should be able to carry weapons.

Jacob Winograd [01:25:20]:
What about the, what about the welfare fraud stuff? I I wanna

Skot Sheller [01:25:23]:
make sure you get a chance to respond to that. Argentina is just the the amount of fraud in like, Jeremiah, in 2018, the government was caught stealing 1,000,000,000 of dollars from the treasury. Red handed stealing 1,000,000,000 from the treasury. The amount of corruption in Argentina is absurd. Anybody in Argentina knows this. Everybody knows this. They put their own people on job roles and like, let’s say they, go to they have maternity leave. They continue to pay them.

Skot Sheller [01:25:53]:
The the amount of people that were working that did not do anything is insane. I know people that literally had jobs for the government that didn’t do anything. This is just part of this is Argentina is known for this. It’s so corrupt. You, Millet made a famous statement. I said it on Tom Woods. It’s like first they they, give their wives a job and then they give their mistress as a job and then they give their mistresses families a job and by the end there’s nothing left for the people. And that’s absolutely true.

Skot Sheller [01:26:25]:
It is insanely corrupt country. Everybody knows this And to say that like, yes, they’re they’re probably way more than 200,000 wealth welfares payments that are corrupt. And Would

Jacob Winograd [01:26:39]:
you also concede that there are

Skot Sheller [01:26:41]:
more money than they they don’t deserve it. Okay?

Jacob Winograd [01:26:44]:
Would you also concede that there are definitely some people who had benefits cut who weren’t in that category and that did suffer from it? Even if you might think that’s a minority compared to

Skot Sheller [01:26:55]:
They, this is just not true. They’ve actually increased benefits. They believe it, they’ve

Jacob Winograd [01:27:01]:
actually I’ve seen that in the comments as well. So I Yes.

Skot Sheller [01:27:04]:
I know the garden teams in the comments agree with me. They’ve actually increased benefits to people like pregnant mothers, to children. So yes, this is just not true.

Jacob Winograd [01:27:14]:
Malay also

Skot Sheller [01:27:17]:
helped out the retirees. The retirees were getting absolutely pummeled by the the the Kirchnerist retirement scheme, which was adjusting to inflation every 3 months. So Malay is like, no, we’re gonna adjust to inflation every month. So every 3 months when you have 230% inflation, that’s that’s that’s a real bad adjustment. So no, they just it’s just not true. The Kirschner the the mother of all evils is the inflation. And when you have high inflation, because of all and and apparently I I don’t know if Jeremiah just doesn’t understand how inflation starts. It starts because you print money.

Skot Sheller [01:27:55]:
You you you spend more than you’ve taken in taxes and you print it. And that’s what they were doing. They were doubling the money supply every every 21 days. Malay stopped that. And, that’s been extraordinarily beneficial to the people. That’s the reason why their wages are rising compared to inflation for the first time in a long time. And that’s why in poverty looks like it’s going down, not up. So

Jacob Winograd [01:28:19]:
1 minute.

Skot Sheller [01:28:20]:
Yeah. So 1 minute 15 seconds more. And and here’s another thing. They, what what the government was doing, and this involves the road blockages too. They would give them the welfare payments to these managers of poverty, as Malay calls them, And and they would then give that they they would then distribute the welfare. Okay? So they would give it to these managers of poverty and they would and then they would do stuff like, oh, if you don’t march with us, if you don’t block this road or cause a riot, then we’re not gonna give you a welfare payment. So what did Mili do? He cut them out entirely and he started giving it directly to soup kitchens. So he cut them out entirely and this is what, all the lefties are complaining about.

Skot Sheller [01:29:03]:
Oh, sees he’s doing so much terrible for for for the, for the protest. No. He’s not giving the the the these corrupt, people, these wealth managers of welfare their their where their money, and they’re not. And he’s also not if you cut the roads, you’re you’re he you’re not gonna get you’re not going to get, your welfare because you’re causing a social harm. So, no. You can still protest and everything. So, it just

Jacob Winograd [01:29:33]:
10 seconds.

Skot Sheller [01:29:34]:
It just like it’s it’s it’s mostly, and no. They’re they’re not he’s not trying to create a a, police state. That’s just that’s just nonsense.

Jacob Winograd [01:29:44]:
Alright. So we are running up against the clock. So we’re gonna move, I think, into closing statements. Jeremiah, because you gave the at the beginning, you gave the second opening statement. I’m gonna give you the first closing statement. I’m gonna give you an extra minute so that you have a chance to respond to some of the last claims that were made and then kind of put that all into your closing statements. So I’m gonna give you a 6 minute closing statement, and then Scott will give a 5 minute closing statement to end this out. Overall, gentlemen, just before we get into that, this has been great.

Jacob Winograd [01:30:21]:
You know, a little bit heated. You guys have you know, there there’s been some shots back and forth, but you know what? It’s it it but that’s how debates go, and I think that it’s overall been productive. You both have done a lot of research into this. I can tell. And I No. I don’t know anything. Well, it’s been educational for me, and so, I appreciate it. I think the audience appreciates it as well.

Jacob Winograd [01:30:42]:
And those of you watching, if you haven’t already, please, again, smash that thumbs up button so that more people can watch this great conversation that, we’re finishing up here right now. So, Jeremiah, you got 6 minutes on the clock and go.

Jeremiah Harding [01:30:58]:
On May 24, 2024, fash if Facundo? Facundo? Probably that’s how you pronounce that name. Iglesia, for the Buenos Aires Herald said, that 5,000 tons of food were sitting in warehouses as government cuts soup kitchen deliveries. That food aid was cut after the human capital ministry claimed that half of Argentina’s soup kitchens did not exist. And then in in keeping with that particular thing, the next article says that the court ordered a Malay government to distribute held up food aid to soup kitchens, because that’s actually what happens. He didn’t, like, somehow divert all of this money to the soup kitchens. He just gave it to the soup kitchens grudgingly what was already allotted to them. So when it comes to it, continually being told that what I’m saying is not true while I’m citing real sources that I could even provide a citation list for and probably will after this, debate is over, is not going to be good enough for me, especially since Argentine pensioners from Alpay, aren’t doing too well. And the general system of governance in this regard is not doing well for those who actually need welfare, who are consistently being thrown off.

Jeremiah Harding [01:32:25]:
It’s not that 200,000 people were thrown off welfare. It’s the 200,000, like, welfare programs were cut. That was what you cited in your appearance on Tom Woods. And when it comes to it, what we’re discussing here is something that he said. You are believing something that he said, and I had not been able to find a single source to back up Javier Maly’s claims that every single one of those 200,000 plus, welfare programs was fraudulent. Yes. There’s fraud. There’s guaranteeably fraud.

Jeremiah Harding [01:33:01]:
There’s fraud everywhere. But when it generally comes to, like, the actual facts of the situation, this isn’t real. It’s not real to say that they’re not building a police state. They literally promised they would. They promised a militarization of the police and an AI facial recognition super state in all provinces. They promised that the government would crack down on drugs and make the cartels quake. They promised an alliance with Israel. They promised an alliance with Ukraine.

Jeremiah Harding [01:33:34]:
They promised an opposition to BRICS. They promised a dollarization. They promised an alliance with the American Fed. They promised a whole lot of things in order to get on western hegemony’s roles. So when it comes to it, you can say it’s not happening, but if it’s not happening, it’s because he’s breaking his promises. And I think that this is one of those many situations that when somebody tells you who they are, you should believe them. Instead of saying that they’re not keeping their promises to do all of these gradually terrible things for the economy, Maybe we should just say that they are and it’s a problem and that it’s a problem that’s the potentially better choice between 2 problematic outcomes. But I disagree with that as well because I don’t buy the false binary dichotomy that the, solutions were either, the people go hungry and are thrown off of their programs or the programs continue to inflate and become as fraudulent as possible.

Jeremiah Harding [01:34:35]:
There’s a middle ground between those two extremes, and I think that middle ground would have been a lot less shocking to the economy. Again, people should read Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine. They should do it because it’s a good book, because it talks about neoliberalism’s effect. It talks about, Reagan and Nixon and all these people who are building the new foundation for the Bush style regimes. And ultimately speaking, this is what we’re dealing with. A regime that does not care for the actual libertarian needs of the people that is not trying to free the economy, but instead trying to make sure that the economy is controlled for the interests of the capital class. And those people in the capital class who are making it very difficult for domestic investment at the benefit of foreign investment. People like Doug Casey who say that they come in on a white horse with their giant briefcases of money to buy large sums of land and other resources so that when those appreciate in value, they’ve got good investment portfolios.

Jeremiah Harding [01:35:41]:
That is a vulture mentality that has circled the globe for a long time now and has benefited those who have at the expense of those who have not. And by that, I mean the state, because we live under state capitalism as a global paradigm, not communism as the neoliberals would have you believe in order to believe that they’re on the side of liberty. When it comes to it, like, this is a textbook example of using freedom style rhetoric in order to soften the blow of anti freedom policies. It’s the same thing of Trump’s make America great again, where the paleo strategy talking a big game about freedom while supporting David Duke and Pat Buchanan. When it comes down to it, you cannot be a freedom advocate and an advocate for fascist policies like Auguste Pinochet, and we must become as far away from that as possible if we are ever to smash the state or become anything closer to Jesus.

Jacob Winograd [01:36:44]:
Alright. 15 seconds to spare. Thank you, Jeremiah. Scott, go ahead. You got 5 minutes on the clock.

Skot Sheller [01:36:52]:
Yeah. So what has Millais done? He’s he’s largely in almost entire largely done a libertarian policies. He’s cut government spending. The gov every every dollar of government spending is a dollar that comes from the people. Every dollar of government spending is is a dollar that comes out of the pockets of the people either through inflation or through taxes. He cut government. He had the biggest spending cut in, world history according to the IMF. That’s the biggest that’s the biggest, increase in freedom to the for the pockets of Argentinians in world history.

Skot Sheller [01:37:30]:
You he’s he’s he’s had massive deregulation. He they’ve they deregulated the running market. They deregulated car registries. They deregulated warrants. They’ve deregulated things that that help Argentines. And the reason why elites and people do really well is through regulations because regulations as Joseph’s as Joe Stigler, found out, it’s called regime capture, that regulations make it more expensive for everyday common people to compete with the the big companies. And that’s why Argentina for the last 40 years has had the same business leaders, has had the same union leaders, and now they actually, through deregulation, the people actually have power. They the people have power to actually run their lives.

Skot Sheller [01:38:20]:
So this is what Malay is doing. Malay has has been increasing the freedom of Argentinians, and having in the country is terribly undercapitalized. They don’t have enough capital. You need capital to increase wages. You need you need tools to increase lit wages. If you don’t have tools, then you’re you’re not going to, get wealthy. And they don’t have much wealth in Argentina. So you’re so yes.

Skot Sheller [01:38:49]:
Getting outside foreign investment is really important for Argentina. Without it, they’re not gonna your economy is just not gonna grow. And Malay has has lowered the country risk from 2,900%. You can look at this all up. Everything I’ve said, you can just look this all up. To it’s I think it’s around 1300 now. And that has allowed people to, be interested in investing in Argentina. He he has, not been extremely militaristic on foreign policy.

Skot Sheller [01:39:20]:
Just it’s just not true. There’s not a cent than he spent given to, any country for foreign policy except 2 totally depreciated helicopters that had no, militaristic value. So outside of that, he’s given no money to foreign policy for for to foreign wars or or anything like that. So, so Malay has done things that have that are libertarian. And, my opponent is, is talking about nitpicking things that he says he’s going to do, or he thinks he’s going to do. But the fact is that he’s been cutting spending. He’s been cutting the regulations. He’s been, he’s been helping.

Skot Sheller [01:40:07]:
He’s been cutting inflation. He stopped the central bank Ponzi scheme. He he’s been helping his people and everything he’s done on the the economy has been libertarian. There’s nothing that he’s I I he’s really done that hasn’t really been libertarian. Even, making sure he has a budget surplus that, that, that is honest policy that increases the, the, the, the attractiveness of the, the country and, and reduces the, the money that is being printed. So it just, it, it just it just, the fact is, is that inflation is down from potentially 17,000 percent to this month. It was like 3.8% per, on a on a monthly on a monthly on a monthly level. So they’ve he’s reduced we he’s reduced inflation.

Skot Sheller [01:41:05]:
He’s he’s giving money back to the people. He’s giving them freedom and he’s allowing them to trade. And he’s been a pretty good neighbor to his to the countries around him and to the rest of the world. He’s not being a belligerent militaristic leader. That’s just not true. So overall, Malay has despite despite the fact that he has got the weakest government in Argentinian history, despite the fact that he has no governors that, that are are his par policy party. He’s created a coalition that is actually improving the lives of Argentinians by giving them their liberty back. And I, you know, it’s funny, a lot of libertarians criticize Malay that he’s not cutting welfare spending.

Skot Sheller [01:41:54]:
The the libertarian the libertarian policies actually cut well spent welfare spending. So, I’m not even sure why you’re arguing, you know, that that Malay is is is, you know, complaining that Malay is is, you know, maintaining the welfare.

Jacob Winograd [01:42:12]:
Alright. Well, thank you both, for those closing statements. I don’t know if any politician perfectly executes on their promises, but here, Jacob Winegar of the Biblical Anarchy Podcast delivers on my promises, which is giving you, the audience, a debate of a high caliber quality, I would say, between 2 libertarians on whether Javier Marley is a friend or a foe to liberty. I don’t have my mind made up yet. I I think that, the answer is probably that it’s complicated. Like like many things, there’s probably a lot of good, and there’s probably some things he could be doing better. But, I’ll have to look more into this and research some of these topics that were a little bit more contentious. But, Scott and Jeremiah, I really appreciate your time tonight.

Jacob Winograd [01:43:01]:
If you guys just wanna quickly, plug where people can find you, if they wanna look more into things that you’ve done, and then we’ll close out. So Jeremiah, you wanna go first?

Jeremiah Harding [01:43:13]:
I’m in the bushes behind your local house. So the general

Jacob Winograd [01:43:17]:
Shiela Buff?

Jeremiah Harding [01:43:19]:
Yes. But no. Because he he he you know, honestly, his hair isn’t as good. He needs to get, like,

Jacob Winograd [01:43:25]:
something that’s true. He got up his hair game.

Jeremiah Harding [01:43:27]:
Yeah. He’s got and he’s gotta get, like, a really, like, large beard because he he got the beard for a little bit there, but only got, like, an inch. You can’t do that. You got it. I want to see that is Shia LaTouffe if you know what I’m saying. Yeah. So so the general thing that you can find me at is like I’m annoying on various parts of the internet and I have done words for Agora’s Nexus, Free Thought Project, and various other places, and I’m doing some stuff within our community. I might be working on a game at this point because it’s a developer is a salty sour, and it would be funny to produce a game that, was better than his.

Jeremiah Harding [01:44:09]:
But the general vibe that you can find, me at is anywhere that there’s a conversation that needs some antifascism or some conspiracy theories, I’ll probably be there. So if you want a worse day every day and a little bit more mental illness in your feed and certainly a a whole hell of a lot more sonic, feel free to follow me at insanity is free in various places.

Jacob Winograd [01:44:33]:
Awesome. And, Scott, anything you wanna plug or tell people where they can follow you, before we sign off?

Skot Sheller [01:44:39]:
Come come visit New Hampshire and, the free state project. I started a community center along with many other, free staters, and that’s called The Shell. So you can always hang out with me there. Would love to see you come out sometime, Jeremy and Jacob, Jeremiah and Jacob. And, yes, some come visit come visit New Hampshire. It’s a it’s a great place for for Liberty, and we have a lot of really cool people here. My my Twitter is, Banger Shell at Binger shit, Banger Shell 11. So I’m shell Banger on face on Twitter.

Skot Sheller [01:45:15]:
So, follow me if you want to. I if you want my commentary on Malay, sometimes if I see something that I don’t like, I’ll I’ll write a little article and, post post different post different, different different economic and, indicators in the country country and that sort of thing. So follow me if you, wanna learn more about Malay and the the situation in Argentina.

Jacob Winograd [01:45:41]:
Awesome. Alrighty. Well, thanks, gentlemen. Appreciate your time again. Appreciate the audience for listening in. I don’t know if I have any well, I think I have so for the Biblical Anarchy podcast, this will also be a live stream. I have a conversation coming up next week, but I don’t have it in my calendar. I think it’s Monday, 23rd with Hodie, which is funny.

Jacob Winograd [01:46:05]:
I just did a, roundtable with Hodie and Jeremiah last week. Now Jeremiah is here for a debate. And then Hodie is here to talk with me some more on some more Christian, centric topics next week pertaining to, biblical interpretations of marriage and sexuality and all that. So that’ll be an interesting conversation. I don’t have any other live streams planned yet, but I got some stuff in the works, so make sure you’re subscribed. Make sure you’re following me at biblicalanarchy on Twitter or x, whatever you wanna call it, because that’s where I promote most of this stuff. And that’s all we got for you tonight. So thanks for tuning in.

Jacob Winograd [01:46:42]:
Thank you, again to our 2 participants in this debate, and we’ll talk to you next time. Take care. Take care.

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