Category Archives: Libertarian

On December 10, 2023, Javier Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, was sworn in as president of Argentina.

Milei, best known for the hair that he claims is combed by Adams Smith invisible hand and an eccentric and irascible demeanor, promised to end the countrys economic woesprevalent in the last 80 years but heightened in the last couple of decadesby launching a full-blown libertarian economic program of privatization, deregulation, and tight monetary policy. On the way, he would rid the country of the unholy marriage between socialism and wokeism that has assaulted Argentine institutions over the last 20 years.

After 100 days in power, has the wig, as he is known, laid the foundations for a libertarian populist revolt, or is his project showing early signs of foundering?

Milei is a culture warrior, which is why, despite being a radical libertarian, he has rallied conservatives and nationalists behind his agenda. But make no mistake: Most Argentines voted for him hoping he would fix the economic mess the country has been in since the early 2000s.

On the macroeconomic side, some of the measures are working. Monthly inflation fell in both January and February, after reaching its highest point in decades in December.

Milei promised to achieve a budget surplus (before interest payments) of 2 percent this year, after last years 3 percent deficit. So far, so good: The first two months of the year brought surpluses, the first in more than a decade.

Moreover, Argentina has an exchange control. Milei has not eliminated it yet, seeking to reduce the gap between the official and black market exchange rates (it now sits at around 20 percent) and improve the macroeconomic output of the country before eliminating it. Foreign reserves have increased by over $7 billion and the country-risk index has dropped significantly.

But this all has come at a cost.

Milei reduced energy and transport subsidies drastically. He also cut down on transfers to provinces. And, even though he has been raising spending on retirement pensions, he has done so by less than inflation, which means that, in real terms, he has also cut down spending.

In the first handful of days in his government, he devalued the peso by over 50 percent, causing inflation to skyrocket.

This has of course worsened the situation for Argentines, at least in the short term. Fifty percent of the country is in poverty and the economy is set to shrink by 4 percent in 2024.

Milei has been clear since day one that things in Argentina had to get worse before they got better; so far, his approval ratings are still relatively high, sitting close to 50 percent. He has achieved this because most Argentines believe the castethe left-wing elites of the countryare to blame for the economic woes.

How long will Mileis popularity last? That remains to be seen.

One of Mileis key problems is that he doesnt have enough parliamentary support for some of the most radical proposals in his agenda, such as labor reform and some deregulation policies. In fact, his party only holds seven seats in the Senate (which has 72 senators), and 41 representatives (which has 257), hardly enough to pass any kind of legislation.

He depends on PRO, the party of former president Mauricio Macri, some smaller parties that hold some seats in the House, and some breakaway members of opposition parties to pass legislation, which has proven difficult in his first 100 days in government.

In less than two years, Argentina has midterm elections, renewing parts of both houses of Congress. If Mileis plan to stabilize the countrys economy has not worked by then, he may suffer a defeat that will end up derailing the rest of his term.

In fact, Mileis lack of legislative support has not allowed him to take advantage of his popularity to pass essential elements of his agenda.

His first 100 days of government have been marked by two main measures: the Omnibus Law and the DNU.

Milei sent to Congress an all-encompassing bill with 664 articles that covered everything from fishing permits and privatization of state companies to shutting down the National Theatre Institute and reforming the pension system. This gave the opposition, and even some of his supporters, enough reason to pick the law apart, until Milei eventually withdrew it. He will likely try to pass it as individual laws, slowing down the process of reform.

Mileis DNU (Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia, Decree of Necessity and Urgency in English) was passed in December and was almost as all-encompassing as the law above. It covered labor market regulations, increasing interest on credit card debt, and reforming pharmaceutical companies.

Being a presidential decree, it technically does not need congressional approval. However, if both houses of Congress vote against the measure, they can strike it down. The Senate already voted against Mileis decree, but until the House followsand it is unclear whether it will, as Milei might reform the decree to garner some supportthe decree remains on its feet.

Labor reform is key to Mileis success. After the state bureaucracy built by the Peronist left, the trade unions are perhaps the most significant element of the caste Milei seeks to tear down. Mauricio Macri, today one of Mileis most important allies, was president between 2015 and 2019 and tried to enact some of the same reforms; he was derailed by both the Argentine congress and the all-powerful labor unions that constantly called for strikes against Macri and to close main roads of the country.

Unions in Argentina are closer to a mafia than to organizations built to defend workers rights. For example, the truckers union has had the same president, Hugo Moyano, for 36 years. His eldest son is the vice president, while a daughter and a son are part of the work. Another son used to run a union for toll workers before becoming a congressman. The family has owned some of the most important football clubs in the country and has a political party close to the Justicialista Party, the traditional Peronist party in Argentina.

This family, allied with the traditional left of the country, is able to freeze the transport of food and oil in the blink of an eye, as they did under Macri.

Milei, so far, does not seem intimidated. He has shown a very un-libertarian impulse to wield state power to achieve his political endsand this is what scares the left and makes the populist right stand by his side.

Mileis long-term goal is dismantling most of the Argentine state. Make no mistake, he sees himself as an Argentine Reagan, tasked with becoming a libertarian hero. Many of his economic formulas seem to come out of the IMF rulebook, and he believes in international free trade with passion. Without the antics, Milei might seem like a product of an American think tank.

But what makes him different is his muscular use of state power. Milei is not afraid to wield public powerwhether with far-ranging decrees or by using legitimate force to stop protests that threaten the stability of the state and his reformsto achieve his political goals.

This has been particularly clear with unions: Milei tried to pass legislation to make union affiliation voluntary (it is currently compulsory and automatic) and also wants to allow companies to fire workers who take part in street blockades during protests. However, both are still frozen in the courts with all his labor reform until the Supreme Court decides on the matter.

Similarly, he has suspended all government publicity in media for a year, which was the main source of income for many privately-owned media outlets that served as parasitic propaganda entities on behalf of the government.

For years, Peronism enlarged the number and size of organizations that depended on the state through government funds or beneficial regulations. These organizations entered into a parasitic relationship with the caste. Milei has started eliminating these privileges. Lawyers are now not needed in some fast-track divorce procedures, which used to be an easy source of income. Artists relied on government funds to produce works that no one saw, and Milei gutted them. Fishermen and sugar producers relied on regulations, subsidies, and tariffs to sell their products, and unions depended on the automatic enrollment and payment of dues of their members to continue accumulating power.

Moreover, even though he is playing it smart (for example, by delaying the elimination of the exchange control or discussions on the dollarization of the economy), he is riding his popularity to enact the strongest, most painful reforms he needs to pass.

He does face a big challenge: If Congress stops his decree and does not pass his reforms (or they are stopped by the courts), Milei may run out of time. The Argentine people are becoming poorer by the day and their patience might not be great enough to wait until he can strike a deal in Congress or to see if he wins a congressional majority at the midterm elections.

He has floated the idea of holding a referendum to pass his reforms. Even if it is a non-binding consult, it might put enough pressure on some congress members to accept part of his reforms, and he seems popular enough to win such a referendum.

Also, his goal of maintaining a fiscal surplus might prove to be harder than expected. The recession is affecting tax revenues, and savings on energy subsidies were due to deferrals, not a budget reduction.

Milei has another front of opposition: provincial governors. None of them are members of his party, and many rely on generous discretional transfers from the central government, which Milei has reduced dramatically. Governors hold a significant level of power within their parties, meaning they can influence members of Congress from their parties to not negotiate with Milei and also continue challenging his agenda in the courts.

The last major challenge he faces comes from within: Mileis banner is the economy, but his brand also includes the fact that he is a culture warrior, which is why he was able to garner support from conservatives and nationalists despite his defense of gay marriage and drug legalization in the past.

He quickly delivered by closing the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism, which was widely considered a do-nothing organ that existed simply to keep members of the ruling party as employees and fund left-wing propaganda. Milei also banned inclusive language and any reference to gender perspective in government documents and eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity.

Nevertheless, these were mostly symbolic measures. Milei has not been shy to use state power to cut relations with its parasitic entities and eventually reduce its size. On the socio-cultural side, he seems to do the same: eliminate, cut down, reduce. But if Milei wants to fight the culture war and enact a long-term change, it seems that negative movements, focused on reduction and elimination might not be enough.

If he fails at his task of reforming the Argentine economy, his presidency will end up feeling like a fever dream. And to succeed, he might have to let his populist impulses overtake his libertarian mind.

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One Hundred Days of Libertarian Populism in Argentina - The American Conservative

Argentinas new president, Javier Milei, has been in office for just over 100 days. Since his inauguration on Dec. 10, Mr. Milei, a far-right libertarian, has been on a mission to end what he has described as an orgy of public spending by previous administrations that left him with the worst inheritance of any government in Argentinas history.

The extreme libertarian program that Mr. Milei says will make Argentina great again along with his unruly hair and tongue has attracted countless comparisons to Donald Trump and won him high praise from Mr. Trump and other powerful admirers. Elon Musk indicated that Mr. Mileis speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year was so hot that it distracted from the act of sex.

But this political outsider is having a harder time convincing his fellow Argentines of his vision. A self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist, Mr. Milei won the presidential race in November on promises to end Argentinas sky-high inflation through a free-market transformation of the state. So far, hes failed to deliver: Inflation doubled during his first month in office, though it has slowed down recently. Poverty rates have shot up; retail sales have plummeted. Mr. Milei has both faced widespread protests on the streets and hit a wall in Congress, which has twice so far rejected the plans he says will transform Argentina into a world power once again.

All of these headwinds have left a troubling question hanging over his new administration: Who is the real Javier Milei? Is he the economic visionary who won over voters and prompted Mr. Musk to predict that prosperity is ahead for Argentina? Or is he the power-hungry villain that tens of thousands of Argentines now march against on the streets, chanting, The country is not for sale!

This much is certain: Mr. Milei is no Donald Trump. While his anti-establishment persona and inflammatory rhetoric invite easy comparisons to the former president, Mr. Milei is a product of a long South American history in which authoritarianism has been the norm and democracy the exception. Although he embraces some elements of the Trump populism flowing from North to South America including the Dont tread on me Gadsden flags he likes to pose with Mr. Milei is more archetypal South American caudillo, or strongman, than Trump aspirer.

Mr. Milei, like the Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chvez, his ideological opposite, is seeking extraordinary powers in the name of saving his country. For decades, Argentina has been held up by free-market economists as one of the worlds pre-eminent examples of how progressive economic policies can lead to disaster. The argument goes that while Argentina was ruled by conservatives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was among the worlds top economies, before left-leaning governments came to power and bloated spending with unaffordable social welfare programs, generating Argentinas chronic inflation problem. In his Dec. 10 inaugural speech, Mr. Milei waxed nostalgic for this long-ago time, boasting with undisguised exaggeration that Argentina was the richest country in the world and a beacon of light of the West.

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Opinion | 100 Days of Javier Milei - The New York Times

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reportedly considering making the switch to the Libertarian Party presidential ticket after struggling to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states.

Over the last few weeks, Kennedy has been in talks with Libertarian Party Chairwoman Angela McArdle over the third-party ballot process, Politico reported. Kennedy initially launched his campaign for the presidency as a Democrat but switched to running as an independent in October. While Kennedy is not a libertarian, as an independent, he has encountered several hurdles trying to get his name on the ballot and has sued several states for early deadlines which he has called unconstitutional.

Its go time, but if he whips as we call it whips for votes, then he could do it, McArdle said. Kennedy is a real dark horse.

Each state has its own laws on what is required for independent candidates to get their name on the ballot, causing candidates who belong to neither political party to face numerous ballot access challenges.

In many states, including Nevada, Kennedys petition secured the required amount of signatures but is still not eligible to be on the ballot because the petition did not include a vice president. The only state that has yet to confirm Kennedys name on the ballot is Utah.

Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party is already on the ballot in 36 states, according to Ballotpedia. A spokesperson for Kennedy said his campaign is keeping all options open.

However, Kennedys pro-Israel stance could be a major deal breaker for the Libertarian Party, whose members are anti-war, McArdle said.

Kennedy has been a staunch supporter of Israel, telling Reuters last week that Israel was a moral nation, and questioned the efficacy of a ceasefire in Gaza, saying that prior ceasefires have been used by Hamas to rearm, to rebuild and then launch another surprise attack. So what would be different this time?

I think to his credit, he does want to come to a consensus and find some agreement, McArdle said. So that argument may still be sorting itself out. But the majority of our members are going to say no to funding Israel and to enabling any of the death and destruction thats happening in Gaza. And its a pretty hard line.

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Kennedy has garnered enough signatures to get his name on the ballot in Nevada, New Hampshire, and Hawaii, according to his campaign. His American Values 2024 super PAC announced last month that Kennedys campaign had collected the required amount of signatures in South Carolina and in key swing states Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia.

Ron Nielson, a former campaign manager for libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, told the Hill earlier this month that if he accepted the nomination for the Libertarian Party, that would probably change a lot of heads and that there are people in the movement that would support him.

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RFK Jr. in talks to run on the Libertarian Party ticket to ease ballot challenges - Washington Examiner

Last week, I started posting about my investigation into the apparent implosion of the Libertarian Party. You can read my previous posts here, here, and here. In this post, I try to draw some conclusions, and I hope to hear your reactions.

When you talk with leaders from each side of this conflict its clear that even though both camps are much, much closer ideologically than theyd admit, ultimately Aristotle was right humans are fundamentally political creatures. The entire episode reminds me of a conversation I had at one of my first Liberty Fund conferences when I was hired, directed by Pierre Lemieux. I was talking with a conferee who was eyeing me suspiciously and asked me, which economist I preferred, Mises or Hayek. I told him that as a political scientist I was more drawn to Hayek, and this prompted him to label me a socialist, turn away from me and find someone more orthodox to chat with.

The broad contours of a liberty-based political movement would be simply less government and more personal freedom and responsibility in realm x. One would hope people could compromise on the range of constriction on government and expansion of individual freedom somewhere between 100% and 5%. But for more than 5 decades the Libertarian Party has been unable to create a broad consensus on how to pursue those goals. That leaves the world without the prospect of seriously considering more liberty during public deliberations over governance alternatives. Elections, admittedly highly imperfect ways to decide governance, are worse for not providing voters with a wide range of options and choices. The frustration for observers and non-combatant libertarians in this conflict is that we face an upcoming election featuring two deeply unpopular, anti-liberty candidates. The fear that libertarians will findno representation in this election is not invalid.

Before the infamous Aleppo moment, there was a world in which Gary Johnson and Bill Weld might have done even better in 2016, regardless of who won. But after the meltdown, Welds statements were hardly consistent with what most libertarians believed. Frustration and unrest caught up with the Old Guard. Conversely theres no reason to believe that maintaining a hard core, dont tread on me, Rothbard/Paul line is the only way forward for the party. The question has been how to bridge that gap and maintain the energy and enthusiasm that the Mises Caucus brings with the mainstream demand for a more professional, unified LP during national and state elections. In theory, the two sides need each other. If Nick Sarwark and Steven Nekhaila are both right, the energetic, idealistic, younger crowd complements and needs some of the experience and pragmatism of the Old Guard. Conversely, the Old Guard wont win by strategy alone. There wont be success without a motivated core.

If recent events tell us anything it is during crises, periods in which voter dissatisfaction is at its peak, that non-mainstream alternatives are taken most seriously. For evidence of this, look no further than Javier Milei, who just became the president of Argentina, armed with many of the ideas of intellectual libertarian economists. His election only happens in a context that creates the unique conditions for a highly unconventional alternative an economic basket case. Is libertarianism likely to win in the short term? No. But one can easily imagine current fiscal and monetary policy leading us closer to a crisis, if not of Argentine proportions. Might that be the LPs moment?

One unique feature of the US is our federal system, and the LPs decentralized nature will provide an interesting experiment for comparing the two approaches. In theory, we should see if one model, the Old Guard or Mises Caucus, is more successful in state and local races over the next few election cycles. That might be a useful guide for the future of the party, and allow for different versions of the ideas to flourish is the remarkably diverse political geography in the US.

Or perhaps libertarianism, or the liberty movement generally, is ironically, simply unsuited to solve collective action problems. A group of strong-willed individuals- whether they are raised on Austrian economics, Ayn Rands novels, or John Stuart Mills defense of liberty with limits, will frequently disagree on the foundation of individual freedom and limited government, and not be amenable to compromise and consensus building. It is not merely cat herding; it is the equivalent to teaching a group of cats synchronized swimming.

Libertarians will be well served to heed the prescient words of James Buchanan on this matter. Buchanan wrote in 2005, that while collectivist ideas at that time were largely in disrepute, he believed that the appeal of such governance was undeniable because individuals typically want to evade personal responsibility for their personal circumstances and challenges. If the participants in this conflict looked in the mirror they might very well know deep down who to blame for the failure to coordinate and compromise. Its not the other side; it is themselves.

G. Patrick Lynch is a Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund.

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When Will the Libertarian Party Have Its Moment? - Econlib

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is weighing the possibility of joining the Libertarian Party amid difficulties in securing ballot access ahead of November.

Kennedy left the Democratic Party in his long-shot bid against President Joe Biden in October to become an independent candidate. But getting on state ballots is an expensive challenge for independent candidates, and Kennedy has looked into ways to gain access with fewer voter signatures.

Kennedy announced in January he was creating a new political party the We The People party to get on the ballot in six states with a lower signature requirement than those running unaffiliated. Recently, American Values 2024, a pro-Kennedy super PAC, said they gathered enough signatures for Kennedy to appear on the ballot in Arizona and Georgia.

While the Libertarian Party was on the ballot in all 50 states in 2016 and 2020, its unclear where itll be in 2024. Kennedy told CNN that he is talking to the Libertarian Party, adding he has a really good relationship with the party. He spoke at the California Libertarian Partys convention last month, further fueling speculation.

Multiple strategists and people with inside knowledge have said Kennedy is warmly received by the Libertarian Party, according to sources speaking with the Hill.

Theres a buzz going on, and theres a lot of interest in him, said Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnsons former campaign manager, Ron Nielson.

If he were to say that he were to accept the nomination of the Libertarian Party, that would probably change a lot of heads, Nielson added. There are people within the Liberty movement that would like to help him.

Kennedy dismissed a party affiliation switch over ballot access, speaking at a hotel in Costa Mesa, Orange County, at the end of February, alongside other potential Libertarian candidates.

Im not worried about ballot access. Were going to have ballot access in every state, Kennedy said at the Libertarian Party of California convention, per the New York Sun.

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As Kennedy weighs his options, Angela McArdle, the Libertarian Party chairwoman, has questioned how well the party aligns with Kennedy. In an interview with ABC News, McArdle acknowledged conversations between the two but said they dont have every single issue in common.

I think that he shares some things in common with us values-wise on our platform that are really great, McArdle said, such as his view on free speech as an anti-vaccine activist. But we dont have every single issue in common, and thats something that my party members and the delegates have to seriously consider.

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RFK Jr. sparks speculation of switch to Libertarian Party for greater ballot access - Washington Examiner

Journalist Nate Silver burst onto the national scene in 2008, when he correctly predicted 49 out of 50 states in that year's election, outstripping all other analysts. Hisformer websiteFiveThirtyEight became a must-visit stop for anyone interested in political forecasting and helped mainstream the concept of "data journalism," which utilizes the same sort of hard-core modeling and probabilistic thinking that helped Silver succeed as a professional poker player and a staffer at the legendary Baseball Prospectus.Reason's Nick Gillespie talked to Silverabout the 2024 election, why libertarian defenses of free speech are gaining ground among liberals, his take on the "crisis" in legacy media, and his forthcoming book, On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Gillespie: Your Substack is called Silver Bulletin. You've put a lot of work into that title, didn't you?

Silver: No, I took about three seconds doing it, and now it has some brand equity, for better or worse. I'm afraid to change it.

Gillespie: You're like American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg. First thought, best thought?

Silver: It's hokey and stupid and I like that. It's unpretentious, right? I've workshopped internally better names that some corporate branding consultant would prefer, but I just like the cheesiness of it.

Gillespie: On November 8, you had a fantastic discussion where you used Friedrich Hayek's libertarian cri de coeur "Why I'm not a conservative" to talk about a crack up on the left side of the political spectrum. Friedrich Hayek wrote "Why I'm Not a Conservative" as a postscript to The Constitution of Liberty. In it, he talked about how in America, the terms conservative and liberal didn't quite make sense the way they did in a European context. Classical liberals or libertarians over there were often in America coded as conservatives, whereas they were quite liberal in a European context, pretty revolutionary and radical.

With that as a backdrop, you applied that Hayekian framework to contemporary U.S. politics after the October 7th attacks on Israel to your piece titled "Why Liberalism and Leftism Are Increasingly at Odds: The Progressive Coalition is Splitting Over Israel and Identity Politics." Can you talk about that?

Silver: There are a lot of dimensions to it. One thing I did internal that helped is that I asked our friend ChatGPTnot the woke one, not Google Geminito define liberalism, leftism, progressivism, libertarianism, and "wokeism," which is a term that is not as commonly used as others. If you break that down, issue by issue, you realize thatliberalism is kind of closer to libertarianism than it is to leftism or to more woke modern variants of that.

Gillespie: Why did it take an event like the October 7th attacks to make that visible?

Silver: I went to the University of Chicago and London School of Economics, and I took all the European Enlightenment history classes, and read a lot of political philosophy. To me, it's always been rattling around in the back of my head. I think journalists should take more political philosophy classes. These ideas remain very important and very pertinent to many debates that we're having today. But if you write a Substack, it might seem off the cuff, but you always have a lot of ideas rattling around in your head.

I had half-drafted versions of this post, and an event like October 7thI'm not super polarized on Israel or anything like thatbut you have a news hook, you have a moment which is like an emperor has no clothes moment where these university presidents are so clearly out of touch with the American mainstream, and people feel like they have permission to say this now after holding their tongue in a lot of previous events.

It's a news peg or a news hook about things I think a lot of people had observed for a long time, which is the kind of Hayek triangle between what I call liberalismbut you can call it classical liberalism or libertarianismand then what was socialism but might be now more social justice leftism, and then what was conservatism is now more like MAGA-fied, particularly illiberal conservatism.

Gillespie: Is progressivism, or wokeism, or identity politics the same as socialism minus economics? Then you're left with identity politics, or what's the defining attribute of that cluster?

Silver: No, I think reorienting the leftist critique around issues having to do with identity, particularly race and gender, as opposed to class, is interesting. I don't get into every detail of every debate, but when you have The New York Times at the 1619 project, the traditional crusty socialists didn't like that very much. That was a sign as an anthropologist about how even leftism and the new form of leftism are different in important respects.

Gillespie: Where are conservatives on this? If there's a crack up on the left between what might have been called liberalsfor lack of a better termand progressives, there's MAGA on the right. What's the non-MAGA right? Is that analogous to what's going on on the left?

Silver: As you pointed out earlier and as Hayek points out, America's weird in that we were the first country founded in Enlightenment values: the rule of law and free speech and individualism. The market economy is something that comes along right at this time. The Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment are very closely tied together historically. So if you are appealing to traditional American values, you're appealing to values that are fairly lowercase libertarian, certainly liberal values. [Sen.] Mitt Romney [RUtah], a Republican, says he likes liberal democracy and uses that term correctly like people should. It is weird in that they are traditional American values.

I'm not a fan of almost anything about Donald Trump. I don't think it's the most constructive form of conservatism. And I do believe in technological and societal and economic progress. I think it's very important. It feels like there aren't very many people who do believe in progress anymore. One of the fundamental factors in all of world history is that for many, many centuries, millennia, human [Gross Domestic Product] GDP grew at 0.1 percent per year. You kept up with population growth, barely, if that. The beginning of the late 18th century, there was a take off toward growth. That coincided with both the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. Which came first is a big debate in economic history. But there was progress when there hadn't been before. People don't know that basic history.

Gillespie: Every year, our cars get a little bit better, our phones transform from something that was plugged into the wall to something you carry around in your pocket, everything is getting better. Yet, we are in kind of a dank mode right now, where people on the right and the left think we have material progress but everything else is terrible, or we don't even have that. What's driving that?

Silver: There are good data driven arguments for secular stagnation.

Gillespie: Can you define that?

Silver: The way it's used informally is to mean that progress is slowing down or maybe not really happening very much at all, or that there are a lot of headwinds. There's a more [former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury] Larry Summers technical definition. But GDP in the Western world grows now at 1.5 percent per year, whereas it peaked at 3.5 percent in the 1960s for example. Life expectancy in the U.S. has stagnated. That's not very good. IQ is a contentious topic, but IQ has stagnated. Mental well-being has declined by various measures. Many European countries have not seen their economy grow substantially in many years. There is lower fertility around the world, which I think is something that the left doesn't like to talk about, but is certainly an important dimension. Political dysfunction is on the rise.

That thesis is actually fairly well constructed in some ways. But the constant doomerism on all sidesif you have a political quadrant, everybody has something they're deeply worried about. A certain type of person thinks that AI is going to destroy the world, which by the way, I take somewhat seriously. That's a different debate. I had dinner with a group last night and they're like, why would you bring children into this world because of climate change. I think that view is wrong.

Gillespie: How do you think these intra-ideological issues on the right, the leftand that's not particularly among libertarians, we don't want to talk about a right-left spectrum because it tends to leave us outbut how do you think break up on the left and the right is going to play out in the election season coming up?

Silver: In the short term Democrats have going for them is that Trump unites both the liberals and the left. That left-liberal coalition, which partly formed under [Barack] Obama in 2008, in part because people were sick of [George W.] Bush, carried forward unsuccessfully with [Bill] Clinton in 2016 and then [President Joe] Biden successfully in 2020.

Trump really unites people who would otherwise be at loggerheads over many issues. But this time, I'm not sure. I am not trying to articulate an editorial position on Israel-Gaza stuff. But if you have terms that are being tossed around like genocide, that's a sign that people [are] very serious. That's not in the bluffing stage. Maybe I won't vote for Biden, who by the way is 81 years old.

Gillespie: He presents as like 79 or 80.

Silver: He's doing above average for an 81 year old. I don't really want a 78 year old president either.

Gillespie: Are we finally seeing a kind of breakdownnot of the two-party system, because it's always going to be two partiesof the way Republicans and Democrats talk about the constellation of issues that define them. Is this the end of the road for that iteration?

Silver: When the end comes, it will come more quickly than people think. But I wouldn't bet on it happening in like the next five or ten years. In some ways, the parties have become more efficient about building their electoral coalition. It's a remarkable fact that in American politics, each party gets about half the vote. If you get 48 percent versus 52 percent, it's almost considered a landslide these days.

Gillespie: In 2016, it was about 80,000 votes across three states that changed, and it was about 40,000 votes across three states in 2020.

Silver: In a country of 300 million people. Its remarkable elections are that close. It has to do with the efficiency in some ways of the political system. They do it by enforcing more and more orthodoxy. There's no a priori reason why your view on taxation, and abortion, and Gaza, and marijuana legalization, and ten other issues needs to be tied together. But you flatten out this multi-dimensional space into two parties. One difference now versus a couple of decades ago is that the public intellectuals, maybe it's too generous a term, but the pundits are more partisan than the voters. They're the ones who enforce partisan orthodoxy. I'm basically a good center-left liberal. In some rooms in New York, I feel like I'm the more conservative person in this room, probably one of the most woke.

Gillespie: You're practically a stooge of the Soviet Union here.

Silver: Yeah, exactly. But if you break from Orthodoxy, there's a very efficient policing of people who piss inside the tent and dissent from the coalition, and have the credibility to say that out loud. Because you can influence people if you're willing to just speak your mind. It helps to be established where you're not afraid of anything.

Gillespie: A couple of weeks ago, we saw an outpouring of anger that Vice magazinewhich up until about two weeks ago had been seen as a charnel house of sexual harassmentsuddenly went bankrupt. People were saying, "I can't believe we lost the last outpost of great journalism." Similar things have happened before: when Sports Illustrated finally went belly up, the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that nobody read, is cutting staff. What's going on with the legacy media? Is that in any way tied to what's going on in the political identity space?

Silver: In an effort to be nuanced and textured, I think it's 80 percent secular economic forces where you have this advertising bundle that was very powerful in that probably wasn't a natural occurrence per se. It was a form of economic rent, more or less, that subsidized the industry. My parents would walk down to the store and buy The New York Times, even growing up in Michigan. I respect traditional journalism, but I think it's mostly an economic story. It's hard because I think journalism does create, in theory, social utility. I'm not sure I think that journalism should be funded by governments, though it is in many countries.

Gillespie: When you say you're not sure, do you mean you know it shouldn't be?

Silver: Here's my idea, which I'm stealing for one of my future Substack posts. I think universities should runmaybe it's a bad idea. I don't know. It sounds like a bad idea. What if universities bought newspapers? Because newspapers are categorically more useful than academic papers.

Gillespie: Because they have comic sections.

Silver: But they are producing journalism in real-time. They're the first draft of history. They're read much more widely. The writing is much, much, much better. Harvard, you take the fact that members can actually write and communicate with the public and have them write for The Boston Globe instead of for some obscure journal.

Gillespie: University of Miami or a party school could take over Vice. It's a brand extension, for God's sake.

Silver: For once, as the most left-wing person in the room, we could agree probably on the many things I think journalists do wrong. I think it's not great that local journalism has been hit so badly. I'm a big fan of Substack. I make money from it. You realize your marginal revenue product a little bit more explicitly. There is always an implicit deal where if you go report from the front lines of Ukraine, that's not actually going to be narrowly profitable. You always had subsidization of enterprise reporting and foreign reporting from cooking and homes. The editorial section, where you pay pretty well. They get lots and lots of clicks, or Wordle or whatever games. If that bundle breaks down, The New York Times has been doing well.

Gillespie: You created FiveThirtyEight. Could you walk through the stages of death that went along with it. When FiveThirtyEight launched, it was a phenomenal resource that was doing things that other sites weren't doing. You ended up moving to The New York Times with it, and then to ABC and Disney.

Silver: We were under license to The New York Times. We got hired by The Times for three years, and then I sold FiveThirtyEight to Disney/ESPN in 2014, which intercompany transferred to ABC News.

Gillespie: Within a little bit more than ten years, you went from starting something fundamentally new that made a major impact on legacy media into giant news organizations, and now is in its Biden years, let's say, where it's taking the afternoons off.

Is that a tragedy or will something else come up? Is it the fact that you could do that because there's so much more possibility and capacity for new things? Are you better or worse off being at Substack for the moment?

Silver: The latter question is easier. I feel much better off. I just have like a little extra pep in my step being independent again. You're probably making the same income, it might be from six different sources of the texts that are more complicated, but it's very nice to have an incentive. If you write a good Substack post, people will subscribe to your blog and you get money in your bank account. That actually feels good, to have actual incentives to work hard and to develop an audience.

The problem with ABC News and Disney is that it was basically run like a socialist economy. Obviously, this is a well-run business in some ways, but we were so small relative to their scale that they didn't care one way or the other. If you make $5 million or lose $5 million, why do they care? It's like one day of theme park receipts at one theme park somewhere in the world. It's actually really bad, though. It makes you kind of a client of the regime. Your capacity to stay there depends on the goodwill of people who are able to kind of write off an x million dollar loss a year.

We had good economics for a subscriber business. We have loyal, high-net-worth readers who have a differentiated willingness to pay, and who have been around FiveThirtyEight for a long time. It could have been a good subscription business, but Disney was literally like, "Well, we are launching Hulu Plus. Therefore this would interfere with that." No, it wouldn't. But when you're in a very large corporation and you're some subdivision of a subdivision of subdivision, it's not run very efficiently. Disney is not one of these cultures, like a friend who works for Amazon. Amazon will micromanage everything. It can be good or bad in different ways.

But Disney is all about scale, scale, scale. You know, the National Football League and theme parks and nine-figure budget movies. If you're like a little tiny barnacle on the Disney whale, you'll just get ignored till the politics change, and they have to cut staff and wear this division that no one ever even tried to make a profit with. I think we could have. Of course, at some point, you get cut.

Gillespie: Is it an absolute loss when The LA Times shrinks? Or are you confident that new things will crop up that will perform either the same function or the function as it needs to be done now, rather than what a daily newspaper did in 1970 or 1980?

Silver: Substack is great. Social media has, although complicated, democratized things in a lot of ways. It's the upper middle class, like a lot of things, it's gotten quite squeezed. Things like local reporting, the fact that the very obvious and kind of comical, like George Santos story, didn't get a lot of pick up, for example, like things like that are going by the wayside a bit. I think we can have a few more blind spots: Is it like in my list of ten biggest problems in America right now? No. Top 25? Okay, maybe. I think it's bad. People have a desire to express themselves. There are some outlets, like The New York Times that are still doing very well.

Gillespie: You wrote in a November essay that free speech is in trouble. Young liberals are abandoning itand other groups are too comfortable with tit-for-tat hypocrisy. Why are young liberals abandoning free speech?

Silver: What I would call Enlightenment liberalism are still relatively new ideas. They've been with us for a few centuries and not more than that. In some ways, they're counterintuitive ideas. The notion is that if we are a little bit more laissez faire, and let people do what they want, the free hand of the market will generate more wealth, and we'll all be collectively better off. It sounds too good to be true, except it mostly is true, empirically over a long period.

But, there are a couple of things: One, which is relevant to my book, is that for the first time in history, the younger generation is more risk averse than older people. They're having less sex. They're doing fewer drugs. Less can be good or bad, I don't know.

Gillespie: It's so bad, they're having less sex than Joe Biden.

Silver: He apparently is doing quite well. I am not somebody who says that there are never any tangible harms from controversial speech. Look at [novelist] Salman Rushdie, free speech can actually have effects. It's a powerful thing. But if you're so risk averse, you just want to maintain harmony. I think that's part of it. Right. Also, these are not people who grew up with the memory of the Cold War or certainly not of World War II.

Gillespie: Or mass censorship. When you think back to the idea that books like Lady Chatterley's Lover, or Tropic of Cancer, or Ulysses really weren't legally published in America until the late '50s, early '60s?

Silver: If you're like 23 or something, even dumb stuff like the Dixie Chicks in the Bush years. People even forget about that kind of thing.

Gillespie: Why do you think other peoplenot woke progressives, but conservatives who constantly talk about the Constitution, or perhaps even libertarians in certain circumstancesthink "let's be hypocritical in order to own the libs." What's going on there?

Silver: One of the universal truths about everything in life is that if you have a longer time horizon, you almost always benefit from that. People are trying to win the argument to feel satisfaction in that immediate moment or that hour. They think, "If I get into the left on things, not the left actually, it's kind of more kind of center-left partisan Democrats about Biden's age," and they think, "Well, if I can dunk on Nate Silver about Biden's age, then I'll win the argument." But the problem is, it's not an argument between you or me. Seventy percent of the American electorate thinks Biden is too old, very reasonably so I might add. Eighty is just above the threshold anyone should be commander in chief. But they're trying to win the argument and not win the war.

Gillespie: This might be an impossible question to answer. It's kind of a chicken or egg thing, but are we more talking about present short-term things? Because that's the infrastructure. That's social media. That's the way cable news operates now. Or have we conjured those things in order to win quick arguments in the idea that that will transform society?

Silver: It's three things. It's partly human nature, partly the nature of modern media, and partly the fact that people are not in politics for truth-seeking reasons. They're in politics to win partisan arguments and to enforce orthodoxy because you have two parties that are taking this 20-dimensional space and trying to collapse it all down into two coalitions that may not actually have all that much in common if you start to pick apart differences. You need useful idiots to enforce those hierarchies.

Gillespie: Why are you different? Your entire career, going back to your work on Baseball Prospectus and elsewhere, you've been more data-driven. Data will tell you whatever you need it to tell you, right? Why aren't there more journalists like you who are trying to ascertain reality and then tease out trends and meaning, as opposed to those who bulldoze things into what they want it to be.

Silver: It's funny because now I feel like I'm more of a traditionalist. When I went to The New York Times in 2010, they were very concerned that I said I had voted for Obama in 2008, which I thought was just a matter of basic transparency. I would make the same vote again, to be sure, but that was a big problem that I had been open about my political views at all. It comes full circle now, where if you don't kind of express your view on every issue, then you're seen as being suspect potentially. But the world is dynamic, so it's possible to overcorrect. I think there was or is truth in the left critique of both-sides journalism. The truth is certainly not always, especially for a libertarian, just somewhere in the middle. You people aren't centrist. It's a different dimension.

Gillespie: It's a very different dimension that some people will claim doesn't even really exist. You certainly can't find it on any map.

Silver: I think even some of the more woke versions of itat least I think that it's to some approximation true that white men have a lot of power in the media and, of course, that's absolutely true. But when you don't give people credit for being willing to adapt, if you read The New York Times today and compare it to 2013 or something, it's a vastly different paper now and you have to adjust to that moving target and not to the same standard. Give people credit for being. This is part of why the free market is right: it gives people credit for being intelligent and within their domain, relatively rational. I'm the only smart person in the room.

[Similar to the] COVID-19 stuff. The early dialogue about masks where [former Chief Medical Advisor Anthony] Fauci [says] "Later on where I tell people masks are worthwhile, but let's say they don't really do anything. We need them for essential workers." People don't really notice that we're telling a good, noble lie. That shows contempt for people.

If you play poker, then you know that, although bluffing is a part of poker, if you're inconsistent, you're allowing yourself to be exploited by your opponent. Your opponent's smart. If you were only playing a certain hand a certain way with a bluff or with a strong hand, then you will be exploited by your opponent, as opposed to treating them as intelligent and adaptable and more sophisticated. You should treat people as being intelligent. It's a much more robust strategy than to assume that you're the only worthwhile and smart person in the room.

Gillespie: Can you talk about your book On the Edge, which comes out in August. What's it about?

Silver: The book is called On the Edge. It's a book about gambling and risk. It covers a lot of territory. It follows my journey where before we ever covered politics, I played poker online for a period of time in the mid-2000s. It starts out in the poker world.

Gillespie: Why did you stop that?

Silver: Because the government passed a law called the [Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act], which is what piqued my interest in politics. It was tucked into some unrelated security legislation at the end of 2006. I wanted the bastards who pass legislation, who are mostly Republicans, to lose. And they did. Democrats had a good midterm in 2006. And well, they fucking took away my livelihood. What am I going to do now? I wound up starting to write about politics.

Gillespie: And now you are simping for Trump. What a strange world. To write On The Edge you did a phenomenal amount of interviews and research. Can you talk a little bit about the scope of that?

Silver: It starts out in poker and sports betting but gets into areas like venture capital, gets into cryptoI talked to our friend [FTX founder] Sam Bankman-Fried quite a bitgets into effective altruism, gets into a lot of the AI stuff. It's a fundamental book about a certain type of nerd.

Gillespie: It's an autobiography.

Silver: Sort of. But they're taking over the world in a lot of ways. They're the ones who run tech and finance. Tech and finance are eating the world. It's an insider's tour about how people like that think. There were like 200 interviews. I did a lot of trips to Vegas, which was fun.

You're trying to immerse people in the topic and get people a front-row seat. I'm not a big network access guy, but I'm flattering myself here, because I think I am fair. I think people will talk to me that would not talk to other people. I am talking to some of the top Silicon Valley [venture capitalists] VCs on their own terms and unguarded ways because I'm not coming in with an agenda apart from trying to understand them. The book is very critical of some things. But I think it's fair. It didn't preconceive what it wanted to say before I actually did the reporting, the interviewing. I think that'll be reflected in the work.

Gillespie: To go back to Hayek, my favorite work by Hayek is The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. He worried that the French Enlightenment got everything too mathematized, and ultimately, people were just data points in other people's grand theories and you erased them if they mess up your equation. Are we too quantified in this world?

Silver: There are a few dimensions of this. One is like the dubious claims to have scientific authority and say, "Oh, we are just doing what the data tells us." You saw this during like COVID-19 and whatnot. You see this with the concept of misinformation, which is often entirely subjective. That's one dimension. The book also gets into utilitarianism a little bit and effective altruism, where they try to quantify everything and you run into problems with that.

First of all, I build models for a living. I build sports models and election models, tried to bet on them myself and in a sense, a game theory of poker strategy is kind of a model. Building a model is pretty hard. There are lots of ways to screw up. There are lots of omitted variable biases. It might be another overcorrection thing where like 20 years ago the world needed to become more data-driven. Now it's become like a little bit of a, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail kind of problem.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credits: Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Sandy Carson/ZUMA Press/Newscom; 157014269 Ilnur Khisamutdinov

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Nate Silver: Libertarians Are the Real Liberals - Reason

For every other issue on the planet, libertarians fervently believe Milton Friedmans old adage, There is no such thing as a free lunch. But for immigration, Friedmans wise words suddenly fly out the window.

Libertarian think tank scholars would have you believe that importing cheap foreign labor is a win-win for everybody. Employers get cheap labor, immigrants get higher pay, and consumers get cheaper goods and services. American workers arent hurt, the libertarians claim, because native workers wont do the jobs foreign workers will, and they actually benefit by using cheaper services to allow them to work longer hours in higher-paying professions (e.g., a lawyer who can work more billable hours since he can buy dinner instead of cooking it himself).

The libertarian case that adding to the supply of cheap labor never reduced native wages was always wrong. Harvard University economist George Borjas eloquently explained why years ago here.

But now, the Wall Street Journal is even reporting that cheap foreign labor has other drawbacks, too. In an article titled Rich Countries Are Becoming Addicted to Cheap Labor, Tom Fairless reports:

Many business owners say that bringing in low-skilled foreign workers has become essential, as local populations age and labor forces shrink. To some economists, however, dependence on imported workers is approaching unhealthy levels in some places, stifling productivity growth and helping businesses delay the search for more sustainable solutions to labor shortages.

Fairless continues, A 2022 study in Denmark found that firms with easy access to migrant workers invested less in robots. Research in Australia and Canada suggests that migrants could keep weak firms alive, weighing on overall productivity. Labor productivity growth has been sluggish across advanced economies in recent years. In the U.S. and U.K. farming sectors, productivity has flatlined for a decade or longer. In Japan and Korea, which have more restrictive immigration policies, it increased by around 1.5% a year, OECD data show.

Even Milton Friedman himself famously said in a 1999 interview, You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state. And the United States spends over a trillion dollars every year on welfare.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Lower wages for native workers, billions in debt from unfunded welfare programs, and now, lower overall economic growth.

Yes, mass immigration is great for employers and the immigrants who come here. But lets stop pretending it benefits everyone.

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Even immigration is no free lunch - Washington Examiner

A minor political party is attacking food safety rules in response to Pennsylvania regulators search of a raw milk farm.

The Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania adopted a resolution in early March calling for food freedom, declaring the right of individuals to buy, sell and eat foods of their choice free of government regulations.

The resolution also calls for the repeal of ineffective and unnecessary food safety regulations and of licensing requirements for small food producers.

The statement is a response to the Pennsylvania Ag Departments search in January of Amos Millers Bird-in-Hand farm.

The visit was part of an investigation into two foodborne illnesses suspected of coming from his raw dairy products.

The state subsequently secured an injunction to keep Miller from selling raw dairy products as it pursues a lawsuit to stop his practice of selling raw milk without a state-required license.

Miller has become a cause celebre for critics of government regulation, who have in turn taken some heat for their position.

Late-night host Stephen Colbert recently mocked Donald Trump Jr. for tweeting favorably about Miller.

Millers supporters say his products have helped them deal with serious health conditions and they understand his products arent state-inspected.

Public health authorities say studies have not shown health benefits from raw milk, and say raw milk carries a heightened risk of bacterial contamination compared to pasteurized milk.

Milk pasteurization has drastically reduced the number of foodborne illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Libertarian Party of Pennsylvanias guiding principles include individual liberty and personal responsibility, a free-market economy, and non-interventionist foreign policy.

The party says it defends everyones right to engage in any activity as long as it doesnt violate the rights of others.

As of November, Pennsylvanias 42,000 registered Libertarians made up 0.4% of the states electorate.

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Libertarians Call for 'Food Freedom' in Response to Amos Miller Farm Search - Lancaster Farming

Watertown voters can cast their votes in the Presidential Primary on Tuesday, March 5, but the ballot includes some local officials, too.

The Presidential Primaries are Tuesday, March 5, 2024. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. To confirm your precinct location, please go to theSecretary of States Where Do I Vote webpage.

Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarian voters have multiple candidates to choose from for the Massachusetts Presidential Primary. Unenrolled voters can choose which partys ballot to cast their votes.

President Joe Biden has two challengers on the Democratic ballot: Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson.

Several names appear on the GOP ballot, but only Donald Trump and Nikki Haley are actively campaigning. Chris Christie, Ryan Binkley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Asa Hutchinson, and Ron DeSantis have suspended their campaigns.

The Libertarian Party has several candidates: Jacob Hornberger, Michael Rectenwald, Chase Oliver, Michael ter Maat, and Lars Mapstead.

Democrats and Republicans can also cast their vote for local candidates.

Each partys state committee is allowed to elect one man and one woman from each of the Commonwealths 40 state senate districts. According to the Secretary of the Commonwealths website, members of the state committee work to: promote the aims of the party Work in cooperation with the national party committee and with ward and town committees, and Organize and work for the nomination and election of party candidates.

The Republicans have contested races for State Committeeman and State Commiteewoman. John Hickey of Boston faces John Umina of Belmont for State Committeeman, and Catherine Umina of Belmont is running against Eva Webster of Boston for State Committeewoman.

The Democratic candidates, Steve Owens and Jessica Nahigian, are running unopposed. There are no candidates on the Libertarian ballot.

The Dems ballot also includes candidates for Town Democratic Committee. Town committees range in size from 3-35 elected members. Their duties include: representing their party at the local and neighborhood level, promoting the objectives of the party, and working for the nomination and election of party candidates, according to the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

Watertowns Town Democratic Committee has 35 members. There are no candidates on Republican and Libertarian ballots.

If you have questions, please contact the City Clerks Office at 617-715-8686.

See the Precinct map (PDF)

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2024 Presidential Primary Information: Ballots Have Other Races, See Where to Vote - Watertown News

Argentina's President Javier Milei speaks during the opening session of the 142nd legislative term, at the National Congress, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 1, 2024. AGUSTIN MARCARIAN / REUTERS

Argentina's libertarian President Javier Milei, in his first policy speech to parliament Friday, March 1, said he would push his package of sweeping economic reforms whether or not legislators back it. "We are going to change the country for good... with or without the support of political leaders, with all the legal resources of the executive," Milei told lawmakers, who have stalled his project of deregulation and budget cuts. "If you look for conflict, you will have conflict," he told them.

Milei offered a recap of his first 82 days in office, in which he devalued the peso more than 50 percent, slashed state subsidies for fuel and transport, cut tens of thousands of public service jobs, and scrapped hundreds of rules in his bid to deregulate the economy.

"I ask for patience and trust," Milei said. "It will be some time before we can perceive the fruit of the economic reorganization and the reforms we are implementing."

Many of his planned reforms face challenges in court, with more than 60 lawsuits underway by labor unions, business chambers, and NGOs, while Argentina has seen massive protests by citizens who fear Milei's plans will leave them poorer. "We have not yet seen all the effects of the disaster we inherited, but we are convinced that we are on the right path because, for the first time in history, we are attacking the problem by its cause: the fiscal deficit, and not by its symptoms," Milei said.

In recent weeks, Milei has reached out to influential provincial governors, party leaders, and former presidents to forge a "new social contract" for the country, based on ten principles, including a "non-negotiable" balanced budget, "inviolable" private property, and public spending reduced to the "historic" level of 25 percent of GDP.

Faced with parliamentary reticence, Milei scrapped almost half of the initial 664 articles in the sweeping deregulatory measure issued after he took office, then withdrew it altogether.

But the president has vowed to return his bill to parliament. And he has threatened to pass his reforms by presidential decree if lawmakers do not fall in line.

Argentina is grappling with severe economic struggles after decades of mismanagement that has driven poverty levels to nearly 60 percent and pushed inflation to an annual rate over 200 percent.

Milei, a 53-year-old political outsider, won a resounding election victory last year on a wave of fury over a financial crisis marked by rampant money printing and fiscal deficit.

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The government claims some of Milei's changes are already bearing fruit: In January, Argentina reported its first monthly budget surplus in 12 years while boosting foreign currency reserves from $21 billion to $27 billion.

But as annual inflation continued to bite, the poor were hit hard as Milei also ripped away generous transport and energy subsidies and froze aid to 38,000 soup kitchens pending an audit.

Milei insists Argentina has to swallow a bitter pill to rescue the economy, and has warned the population to brace themselves for things getting worse before they get better.

Le Monde with AFP

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Argentina's libertarian President Milei warns parliament that he will govern 'with or without' political support - Le Monde