475. Threat From South America | Axel Kaiser
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Hello, everybody. My wife, Tammy, and I recently had the privilege of touring through Mexico and South America. We didn't tour, obviously, through the whole continent. We went to a couple of places in Brazil and to Chile and

and to Mexico. And I met some very interesting people along the way, which is always something that happens, including the gentleman I'm talking to today, Axel Kaiser Behrens von Hohenhagen. He's a Chilean-German lawyer, a master in investments, commerce and arbitration, master of arts and doctor of philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. It's a very good university.

He is co-founder and president of the Foundation for Progress in Chile, one of the most influential free market think tanks in Latin America. He's also a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute in Washington and director of the Friedrich Hayek Chair at Adolfo Ibanez University from 2016-20.

to 2024. So why are we talking? Well, I thought it would be good to bring everyone an update on the political and ideological situation in South America. Now, that's an impossible thing to do, obviously, in the course of a 90-minute podcast, because it's very complicated to talk about a whole continent. And much of what we focused on was to do with the events that are transpiring in Venezuela.

where the age-old conflict between what's essentially a crooked, corrupt, propagandistic society

draconian communist totalitarian state and the people and the opposition to that state is transpiring. And so we walk through the situation in Venezuela. There was a recent election there. The incumbent, the aforementioned totalitarian Maduro, apparently lost and is very unlikely to give up power. Why should anyone care? Well,

The world's a small place now, and what happens everywhere

has an effect that's local. If South America is destabilized, you can expect a lot more trouble, for example, at the southern U.S. border. And by a lot, I mean a lot. I mean millions of people. And if the communist dystopians and their Iranian, Chinese, and Russian propagandistic backers and troublemakers get their way, there's going to be plenty of dystopia in South America. And

Don't be thinking you're going to escape unscathed from that because you're not. And so we talked about Venezuela and we talked about Chile and we talked about Argentina and Malay, the new government there. And so we talked about different schools of economics as well and what influence they all had in the way that geopolitical affairs lay themselves out. So join us for that and learn along with me about what's transpiring today

with our southern neighbors. Well, Dr. Kaiser, let's just jump right into it. Let's talk about Venezuela. Maybe you can give people a bit of an update about the current situation and then we could delve into that historically. Then we'll move into the topic of South and Central America more broadly. So give us your thoughts on Venezuela.

Well, it's a very sad situation we are living now. I started my career in Venezuela, in Caracas, back in 2005. I was studying the socialist revolution in Caracas, and I came to the conclusion that Chávez had come to power and he would never leave, which is what usually socialist dictators do.

And at the time, my friends in Venezuela had the hope that they could vote him out. It never happened, as we all know. And what we really are experiencing is the consequences of decades of socialism. You can vote socialists in, but you cannot vote them out. This is one of the main lessons that you have in Venezuela, especially if you have weak institutions.

And what we do have now, it's a horrible regime. It's a tyrannical dictatorship that has been there for decades already. And Maduro is systematically engaging in human rights violations. He stole the election. We all know that. A couple of weeks ago. And the friends we have there, they are fighting on the ground, literally risking their lives.

A good friend of mine was recently arrested by the Maduro regime with no, you know, warrant or whatever. I mean, just the police came to her house. They took her to prison. And who knows what they are doing to her. And just because she was posting some content on social media,

And the problem that Venezuela poses for the whole region, and not only Latin America, but also the United States, is that the Maduro regime, it's a big narco dictatorship.

So they are in bed with the Cartel de los Soles. They are running the Soles cartel, which is the Sun cartel. And they are exporting cocaine everywhere. And not only that, they are in bed with the Iranian regime and with Russia. So they're being supported by Russia, Iran, and also by China.

So I think this poses a security threat to the United States because they have, you know, Hezbollah has training camps in Venezuela. And if you have these open borders with Mexico, I'm sure they have infiltrated people coming from Venezuela to the United States that are not the regular criminals that you can see nowadays operating in New York or other parts in the United States.

These are also Islamic terrorists. I'm pretty sure that you have some of them now that came from Venezuela via Mexico into the United States. So this is a dramatic situation. And I have a message from the group of Maria Corina Machal, because I've been in contact with them. She's the opposition leader. She's a good friend of mine, to the international media. They are really very upset by the way that the press operates.

in the Western world has been covering all this. And they have a double standard when it comes to left-wing dictatorships as compared to not left-wing or right-wing dictatorships. And you have several newspapers like El Pais in Spain, for instance,

that have called Maria Corina Machado a far-right extremist, which is complete nonsense. She is fighting for freedom and democracy. And then you have other media like the New York Times who have been very biased as well

And they sent me a message and I'm using this platform and they thank you, Jordan, for this interview because they need the support of the international community if you want a transition to happen in Venezuela, which is looking increasingly unlikely with the passing of time. So it's very sad and this is poisoning the whole region. And also, I think it's going to be a

big problem for the United States if they don't push enough to get rid of Maduro right now, for the reasons I already mentioned. All right, so there's a lot in what you just said, so let me take it apart piece by piece. You said, for example, that if you vote in the socialists, you don't get to vote the mount, and so...

We probably want to draw a distinction, or at least have a discussion about socialism versus communism, or a discussion about whether or not that distinction is even reasonable. It's definitely the case that in some Western countries, more left-leaning regimes are voted in and voted out with some degree of regularity.

Canada has a socialist party, the New Democratic Party, and it has never won an election federally and is unlikely ever to do so, I would say, because it never seems to gain more than about 20% of the population. But it's certainly run many provinces and, you know, often not cataclysmically, sometimes even intelligently, depending on who it was that was running the show, let's say.

And then, of course, people tend to presume that countries like Sweden and Denmark and Norway are socialist countries, even though fundamentally they adhere to free market principles. So do you want to distinguish first for maybe some definitions? What do you think the difference is between a socialist country and a communist country? And how should people draw a distinction?

Well, I would distinguish between social democracy, which is, you know, the left that we have usually in the Western world, in the developed nations, people like Trump.

Biden or people like Justin Trudeau, people like that who can be very far left when it comes to the woke issues and all of this value conflicts that we have now in the West. And I believe that they are responsible for endorsing an ideology that will end up destroying the West if they are successful in the end.

they are not these revolutionary socialists that we have now in Latin America or that we used to have in the Western world during the Cold War. Like you had them in Italy and France, you had them in Germany, you had terrorist groups that were fighting against the establishment being funded by the Soviet Union and so on. So I would make a distinction there. And also, if you have countries with more solid institutions,

Even within Latin America, they are never able to achieve their goal of concentrating power in their own hands. Like Chile is a good example of that. We had a constitutional referendum a couple of years ago, and the left proposed a very radical constitution, a very woke constitution, but at the same time, communist constitution. And over 60% of Chileans voted against that.

So we were saved by this decision in the referendum. So they failed in their attempt to control power. So I would say in the classical definition, socialism and Marxism used to, or communism, they used to be more or less the same during the Cold War. I mean, it would be hard to argue that a socialist was not at the same time someone who believed in the

in the Soviet Union type of system, central plant economy. This is a point that Hayek and Mises were making during the Cold War, fighting against the socialists because the socialists were arguing for a central plant economy, which in the end would have destroyed all sort of political liberties and democracy as well. So,

I would distinguish more, as I said, between the Social Democrats and within the Social Democrats you have also more extreme type of people than others.

and the socialists and communists. And even if some political parties have the name of socialist, nowadays they are more like social democrats than true socialists that are inspired 100% by the Marxist and Leninist doctrine that they followed in the times of the Cold War. So that's a distinction I would make. So what we could say, just to clarify this further for everybody watching and listening, is that in countries like

I think the Scandinavian countries are probably the best example of this. The first thing we should note is that they're relatively small countries, and until recently, they were relatively homogenous ethnically, and that makes governance more straightforward. The systems simply aren't as complex because there are fewer people and

There is more of an implicit consensus on which way is up and which way is down, let's say. But the Scandinavian countries, like Canada, the classic socialists, were really free market people, all things considered, believed in private property, more or less, but were more interested than the libertarians or the conservatives in producing a broad and encompassing social safety net.

And so most of the political action in Canada had to do with the expansion of the social safety net. And that was what the left-wingers and the labor union types were pushing for with a certain degree of success. And the distinction you're drawing on, and you referred to a couple of Austrian economists, Hayek and Mises,

is that the communists go full-fledged planned economy, the full-fledged planned economy route, and they are not in favor of private property. They believe that an untrammeled free market system

it ends up concentrating economic power in the hands of a very small number of people and that replacing that with a planned economy would fix that problem which it certainly doesn't and can't and i know the austrians who you referred to also make the case that a planned economy is something that appeals to people who are very presumptuous in their intellect because

The fabrication of any given commodity, consumer item, let's say, or commodity for that matter, is complex almost beyond, well, it's complex beyond comprehension unless you have a distributed system of pricing to make rational, intelligent decisions. Your economy will eventually grind to a cataclysmic halt.

So I think about it as a computational problem, right? And I think this fits in very well with the Austrian economist's line of thinking. It's like, do you want to have a distributed network of computation, each person calculating their own hierarchy of values, each person with the eyes on the particulars of their local situation?

sum all that together in some distributed manner and allow decisions to be made that way? Or do you want to put decision-making power in the hands of a small group of people who can't hope to know what's going on? You know, I think the Central Committee, the Soviet Central Committee, was making something like 300 pricing decisions a day. And I've run companies where we've tried to price our offerings, and just pricing one thing is...

almost impossible and you have to do that in concert with your market. You don't know what something is worth. The best you can do is find out what people are willing to pay for it, given all the other things that they're trying to accomplish simultaneously. So, okay, so the communist types, they're focusing on a planned economy. Now, let's go back to Venezuela. So before the socialist revolution took place, in your opinion, how was Venezuela doing?

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Modern people often ask themselves, why do I have to study history? Well, you're a historical being. You need to know who you are and where you came from and why you think the things you think.

That's why you have to place yourself in the proper tradition. I'm taking four of my esteemed colleagues and you across the world. Oh, wow, this is amazing. To rediscover the ways our ancient ancestors developed the ideas that shaped modern society. It was a monument to civic greatness.

greatness. To visit the places where history was made. That is ash from the actual fires when the Babylonians burned Jerusalem from 2,500 years ago. To walk the same roads. We are following the path of the crucifixion. And experience the same wonder. We are on the site of a miracle.

What kind of resources can human beings bring to a mysterious but knowable universe? Science, art, politics, all that makes life wonderful. And something new about the world is revealed.

So Venezuela is an interesting case because it had the highest per capita income in Latin America in 1970, and it was the country with the largest degree of economic freedom. You can measure that. The Fraser Institute in Canada does that work of measuring economic freedom. And in 1970, Venezuela was 14th in the world in terms of economic freedom. It was about like 90 countries, more or less, that they were measuring back then.

Chile was one of the last countries because we had had the socialist experiment of Salvador Allende, which was an attempt to impose a totalitarian communist system in Chile. And we were last in the country and we had hyperinflation and scarcity of basic goods and services and so on and so forth. So it was a complete catastrophe that ended up in the coup of 1973 led by General Pinochet.

But Venezuela over time and over the decades, especially after they nationalized in the 70s the oil industry, we have to remember Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

They nationalized it and they started falling in the ranking of economic freedom systematically. So by the time Chavez came to power in 1988, Venezuela was doing very poorly in the rankings of economic freedom. You had a very kleptocratic, corrupt system that, you know, a rent-seeking society, let's say. Everyone was trying to live out of the government handouts and

and corrupt deals between the corporate interests and the politicians,

And Chávez was elected. He had been a soldier who had attempted a coup in 1992 against Carlos Andrés Pérez. So he was a golpista, what we call a golpista in Spanish. So someone who tried to overthrow a democratically elected president and install a dictatorship. So everyone knew who Chávez was. Many people died in 1992 and he ended up in prison.

But well-meaning central leftists in Venezuela pardoned him so he could go out of jail. And then he went to see Fidel Castro, and Fidel Castro recognized immediately that he had, you know, a puppet that he could guide in order to take control over Venezuela.

So Castro and Cuba, they have been the masterminds behind what is going on in this country. And they have, you know, extracted huge sums of wealth from Venezuela because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at some point, Russia stopped funding the Cuban dictatorship. And so Venezuela played that role. And Chavez had saw in Fidel Castro a fatherly figure for him.

And this is really an important thing because he was loyal to Fidel until the very end. And the intelligence services from Cuba, who are very effective, we have to say, in consolidating power, they have been there in Cuba for over 60 years, so they know what they're doing. These are the people advising the regime as to what to do to deal with the opposition and to purge the military and things like that.

But Venezuela was already in a situation where they have lost their economic freedom and their per capita incomes, as compared to other countries in Latin America, started to fall dramatically. And while Chile embraced free market reforms, especially influenced by the Chicago School of Economics, Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, George Stigler, and people like that,

and we became the wealthiest country in per capita terms in Latin America. And so you can see that in the '70s, Chile was at the bottom of the economic freedom ranking. We went up to the top, even top 10 at some point, and we became the wealthiest country in Latin America. And Venezuela, the complete opposite. They went from being the freest country in Latin America to now the last country in the ranking in the world, 162.

among 162 countries that are measured and it's a complete disaster. And this is socialism, this is what I mean. So the Nordic countries

are really on the top countries in terms of economic freedom. These are not really socialist countries. And I remember Bernie Sanders saying this all the time, and he got a response. I think it was the prime minister from Sweden who told him, we are not socialists. You have corporate tax in Sweden that is lower than in the United States, more or less, in some of these Nordic countries. So what they do is they tax very heavily personal income, right? And this is

I don't like it because you have lots of human capital flight, people who are very qualified who go to the United States for other parts. But still, they're very productive countries, and they have very large degrees of economic freedom. And economic freedom means free trade, stable currency, protection of property rights, reasonable size of government, and so on.

So it is a social democracy like Anthony Giddens' type of social democracy, what Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were at the time at some point, or German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who made all the reforms in Germany, allowing Germany in the 2000s to then experience

a boom, an economic boom that Merkel benefited from that. Okay, so, but here what we have is the extreme far left experiments that are very anti-capitalist. And this is what you see in Venezuela now is the consolidation of this ideology.

We have to remember that Maduro was chosen by Chavez as his successor. And the reason for this was that Maduro, compared to Diosdado Cabello, who is another criminal and one of the main leaders of this Soles cartel, Maduro is a doctrinaire. He was the hardcore socialist.

And he was foreign a first minister to the Chavez administration. And he was instrumental in building up the whole network of Venezuela and the Chavismo on an international level, in Europe, in Asia, in different parts. And Chavez aligned himself very rapidly with Russia and with Iran and with China.

So this is part of the Cold War 2.0 that we are experiencing. Venezuela is playing for them. And now we have, and I want to stress this, Jordan, because it's important. You have a minimum wage of $3 in Venezuela. You have accumulated inflation of 2 million percent or more.

You have a collapse of 70% of GDP, 70%. You have a collapse of over 80% of oil production in Venezuela. And they have squandered almost a trillion dollars in wealth because when Chavez came to power, you had a barrel of oil at $8 or so. And it skyrocketed to over $120.

So only because of that, they got almost a trillion dollars. They destroyed all of that wealth. And people say, "Oh, this is Caribbean type of politics." This is the result of socialism. Everywhere you go and you see what the socialists, when they implement this system, and again, I don't mean the Nordic type of welfare state, which is not socialism,

not real socialism at least, they destroy the country where they run it. You can see it in Eastern Germany as compared to Western Germany during the Cold War. It was a very poor country compared to Western Germany and so on. I mean, everyone knows the different examples, North Korea, South Korea, and so on and so forth. But it's important to remember that Fidel Castro Cuba and Russia, Vladimir Putin,

and Iran, Hezbollah are behind Maduro. I have to stress this because this is not only a Venezuelan problem. This is going to be a crucial problem for the United States and for national security in the United States. Well, let's dig into that. So there's three, four things I'd like to cover as we move forward right now.

I want to talk more about the opposition in Venezuela and what you think people outside Venezuela can do to aid the opposition. I want to talk about the ordinary life of the typical Venezuelan now. I want to talk about where that trillion dollars went. And maybe we can do that while talking about your claim, for example, that the Maduro government has basically also become a narco dictatorship. Now, you know, you made claims

a variety of extremely serious allegations, the misuse of a trillion dollars certainly being one of them. But then you also said, well, the Maduro government is in bed with the

with the narco cartels. And see, I don't think people in North America exactly understand what that means or exactly how nefarious those cartels are and what a danger they pose, well, to the stability of the entire Western hemisphere. But then you also added to that the fact that Maduro is in cahoots with, well, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and then Hezbollah. And so,

This is a lot for people to digest because it sounds like a stew generated by a conspiracy theorist in a sense, right? Because there's almost nothing that is bad that you're not

accusing the Maduro government of participating in. And so the easiest thing for a listener to do is to just say no to all that. So we should walk through those issues one by one. I guess the thing I'm most curious about to begin with, let's do it in this order. What the hell happened to a trillion dollars?

Like that's an awful lot of money. Where do you think most of that, especially given that you have a 70% collapse in GDP and an 80% reduction in oil production? It's like, and then everybody in Venezuela is poor and yet a trillion dollars came pouring in. So what's your sense of who that money went to? And like, what sort of people did that money go to? And what are they doing with that money?

So part of the money funded some very existentialist social programs at some point during the Chavez administration. But a large part of it went to fund revolutionary groups and political parties all over Latin America. We have to remember that the Castro vision, which is the important part,

figure, I think, here. The Castro vision was to spread the revolution all over Latin America. And in his worldview, what he was doing, believe it or not, is Christ's work on Earth. Like he was bringing paradise to Earth. He said that literally many times. So Castro had been educated by the Jesuits in Cuba.

And he believed that capitalism and liberal democracy, individualism were the sources of corruption, that Christ was the first communist revolutionary. And this is, by the way, something very similar to what Pope Francis said at some point when he argued that it was the communists who thought like the Christians. He said that literally, Pope Francis, who is a Jesuit himself.

So, and Castro was promising to create this, but this had to be an expansionist project. So when Chavez came to power and he had all of these resources,

in his pockets. Plenty of them went to Cuba, of course, to sustain the island. But then he started supporting different regimes or movements and terrorist organizations all over Latin America. At some point, I had this conversation with former President Alvaro Uribe, who is also a good friend. At some point, he told me I was the only non-leftist, non-socialist president in most of South America.

And it's true. And all of these regimes, even the Kirchner dynasty in Argentina, the corrupt Kirchner dynasty, got some, you know, loans, special loans from the Venezuelan government when they needed money. So, and they stole a lot of money. I mean, they have, the Chavistas and their families have billions of dollars.

and on bank accounts in Europe, in the US, in different parts. And so it's amazing. You saw Ferraris in Caracas while people were starving. You have almost 8 million people have left Venezuela because you don't find things to eat.

8 million is a quarter of the population who have left the country because of the desperate situation. And you have over 80% poverty rate. And so a large part of the money, as I said, went to fund all of these movements, but also within Venezuela.

they started creating a parallel army, the Circulos Bolivarianos. Chávez very early on understood, probably because Castro advised him to do so, that he needed parallel troops in order to contain any threat that could come from within the army. And he was right. In 2002, the army staged a coup against Chávez, and Chávez was taken into custody. He was imprisoned.

But then some generals regretted the decision of getting rid of him, and they reinstalled Chávez. And then he, of course, used the muscle of the intelligence services of Cuba to purge the military as much as he could. But he was never entirely sure that there would not be traitors within the army. So he created the Circulos Bolivarianos, which are armed. And these are the guys, by the way, that you see nowadays in the videos, attacking Bolivianos.

Venezuelans from the opposition who are just protesting on the streets and they are shooting at them, they are taking them in and torturing them. Most of the people doing the dirty job are these Circulos Bolivarianos, which is the Bolivarian circles. And so that's a lot of money that went there also.

And, you know, you can squander wealth with no end. I mean, if you are supporting other countries and you want to install regimes all over Latin America that are favorable to you, I mean, a trillion dollars is not even a lot of money. You know, but the worst part, and I finish the point with this,

is that we saw people all over the West in the 2000s when it was already clear that Chávez was a dictator, that he was completely undermining the separation of powers, he was imprisoning the opposition and he was violating human rights and so on. We saw very famous people like Joseph Stiglitz, for instance,

coming to Venezuela and praising Chávez for what he was doing. And he did the same, by the way, with Kirchner's, with Fidel Castro. He has been a long time supporter of the Castro dictatorship. And he now writes books called The Road to Freedom.

and pretends to be the saviour of the West or the killer or the undertaker of neoliberalism or something like that. But you could read the New York Times, you could read different BBC, you could see different news media outlets or even on television. They were sympathetic to Chávez when he started doing this and it was already clear where he was going.

So I share the frustration of the Venezuelan friends in their resistance because the West has not shown, you know, one standard for everyone. When it's the leftist, they support them or they turn a blind eye to what they do.

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Okay, so let's talk about, let's move from that. So you accounted for a fair bit of the spending. A lot of it has disappeared into the pockets of corrupt politicians. You see exactly the same thing, for example, with the Palestinian leadership. All of those people end up with billions of dollars in their accounts. And so that's appalling beyond comprehension. They sacrifice their own people.

and they often live elsewhere. And so the socialist redistribution of wealth ends up meaning that everyone's much more poor than they used to be, except the small minority of people who have power instead of the evil capitalists, and they have untold wealth at their fingertips. And then you also said the money was distributed around South America and Central America to destabilize and to promote revolution, and maybe elsewhere in the world as well.

Okay, so and that you can spend an awful lot of money doing that and cause an awful lot of trouble. And you also pointed out that that's been aided and abetted by the, what would you call them, useful idiots of the Western media. And so we'll get back to that. Let's turn to...

Another element of the corruption, and that's you described Maduro as a narco, the Maduro regime as a narco dictatorship. So talk to everyone, if you would, a little bit about the role of the cartels in Central and South America, because that's not something that's well understood in North America at all.

Well, by the way, people who think I'm making these things up, they can Google it. It's all online. This is, you can see in very serious media. You can read articles about this. So the United States, they know about this, about the Iran connection, about the, you know, the drug cartels and so on and so forth. But, you know, now in Latin America, because this is including Mexico,

We have a problem that more and more the cartels are taking over politics and you don't need to do the revolution. And actually this is really interesting. Chávez used to be a proponent of what he called 21st century socialism. That is what he used to talk about. We are doing 21st century socialism. So what did that mean?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, they came all together in Brazil, you know, the Sao Paulo Forum with Lula and so on. And they said, okay, we are going to use democracy. We are going to use democracy in order to create a socialist system. We are not going to fight a revolutionary war necessarily.

But we are going to use it in order to come to power. And then once we are there, we establish our system and we never leave. If we can, if we can avoid to leave, we are going to stay. OK, so the cartels have been playing an important role in this because at some point,

Chavez needed them and he offered refuge to the Colombian cartels from the attacks that the Uribe administration was engaging in. And they would come into Venezuelan territory and Chavez would protect them. And the Colombian army couldn't go into Venezuelan territory because that would have meant probably war with the Venezuelan army. So they started with that and the cartels

also started channeling money to the regime. And at some point, the regime itself, especially with Diosdado Cabello, who is a very high up in the Maduro administration, became a cartel boss. Now you have regions in Venezuela, but also in Mexico. In Mexico, for instance, 30% of the Mexican territory is controlled by the cartels. 30%.

In Venezuela, you have complete regions, complete states that are being run by the cartels. Okay? And now we have a country like Chile that used to be a safe country, like the most advanced country. The cartels are taking over complete regions of the country with their guns and so on. Now, these cartels have, again, connections with Hezbollah. They work with them. And...

And Hezbollah is creating now in Bolivia, which is also a far-left administration and which is a big producer of coke, Bolivia, they are creating or establishing facilities to produce drones that are for military purposes. But also we have to remember that Bolivia and Venezuela

I know this for a fact in Venezuela, but I think it's also true for Bolivia. They have uranium, which is important for the Iranians, for the nuclear program that Iran wants to develop. So the cartels have become a source of funding. They have become the government in the case of Venezuela. And they don't want to lose their business model. And that's why I think

They are not going to accept a transition to democracy in Venezuela, but they are destabilizing the whole of Latin America because they are a business. They are expanding everywhere they can in order to make more profits. And a country like Chile, for instance, which used to be free from this problem, now has become the third largest exporter of cocaine to Europe.

Because we are integrated with the rest of the world, we have many free trade agreements. And so you have ships here that go everywhere. And we have basically no control on the border with Peru and Bolivia. And so they bring all this cocaine through the northern border, and then they export it via the Chilean ports to the United States, to Europe, and everywhere. And so this is corrupting everything in Latin America.

I've heard, and I think this is in the media also, that the Tren Daraua, which is one of these cartels and organized crime groups, are also operating in New York and other cities in the United States. Of course, why not? I mean, if it's easy to get into the United States, it's a huge market, why not?

So this is the problem. We are becoming a narco region, or a region controlled by the narcos, and politicians are working for the narcos. And the problem with this is that Iran, Russia, and China, they don't care about this. They just use it.

these cartels or the connections with the cartels for their own purposes. And that's why you see the first countries recognizing Maduro's fraud saying that he was democratically elected were China, Russia, and Iran. These three countries. This is not a coincidence. Okay, so let's speak to something more practical and psychological for a moment or...

So many people who are watching and listening will be wondering, at least in some corner of their imagination, why the hell they should care. You know, there's lots of things that are besetting the typical American voter at the moment. The situation in the United States is far from stable. I would say the same thing about Canada. There are many...

catastrophes and looming catastrophes to be concerned about. And what happens typically is that anything to do with South and Central America takes a pretty, it takes a backseat to say the least. So, I mean, when we met in Chile,

you were obviously interested in pursuing this conversation, as I was. What would you say to people who are listening in the United States and Canada, let's say, and elsewhere in the world, about why they should care about what's happening with regards to China and Iran and Russia in South America and the cartels? I mean, South America has always been a relatively unstable place from the perspective of the northern west. And in some ways, this is par for the course. I mean,

The Cold War has been being played out in a manner similar to this for as long as I can possibly remember. In what what is it that you want to bring to the attention of the typical person in Canada and the US with regards to what's happening down south? And why should they care?

Well, you know, the thing is that the United States used to care a lot about Latin America. A lot. During the Cold War, they intervened every country in order to prevent them from becoming communist and Soviet-line countries. Because the KGB back then had the theory that the Cold War would be won in the third world, basically.

And Henry Kissinger, for instance, when Salvador Allende in Chile was elected in 1970, he was the first Marxist president ever democratically elected in history. And Henry Kissinger said, and I'm quoting him literally, the Allende election is the greatest threat that has occurred in the Western Hemisphere in a long time.

because he understood that this could have a domino effect. Other countries would follow, not only in Latin America, but also in Europe. But now you have the following problem. The United States, after September 11th, the country completely forgot about Latin America. We don't exist anymore for them in terms of foreign policy. And I'm not really exaggerating. If September 11th would not have happened, I think the history of Latin America would be completely different right now.

So they forgot about us and now they have Russia and they have China and they have other problems that are, they look more important than Latin America. But the thing is that the main migration force in the United States are Latinos. And if the continent continues to destabilize because of narco cartels, because of people like Maduro and so on, you will have millions more people coming into the United States, millions.

And among them, you will have the Iranian Hezbollah people and so on and so forth. So from that point of view, it is really important for national security. And then when they are in the United States, Latinos tend to favor the Democratic Party. Two thirds of Latinos, they vote for the Democratic Party. I think this is changing a little bit, but not enough.

So if you have a change, a substantial change in the demographics in the United States, and we know this is happening, this will have a political impact that is really, really, will be very substantial. Why do Latinos vote for the Democratic Party?

When we emigrate to the United States, we bring our belief systems with us. It's not like because we're in the US, suddenly we love Thomas Jefferson. That's not how it works. They favor the welfare state.

and government handouts. And I'm not saying everyone, most of them are very hardworking people and so on. And I mean, we cannot complain. And most people hate Maduro, for instance, in Venezuela who have escaped. But the point is that if I was an American, I would be worried that the cultural landscape in my country

would be changing so much because of this migration force that is coming into the United States that at some point it will be politically unmanageable for someone who wants to keep your country the way it was in terms of, you know, the ideas, the institution, limited government, and so on.

So, which is when they speak about the purple states, people moving from California to Texas, for instance, and they tell them, don't vote for what you left for, no? So, but it's the same with Latinos going into the United States. It's the largest minority.

And it is really important to have a stable region so you don't have this influx of people coming into your country first. But then also, because it poses, as I said, a risk for national security. And on top of that, geopolitically, Latin America is extremely important in this second world war because supply chains are deglobalizing now.

You know, you have this trade war going on with China, and you need countries where you can produce your stuff. You need raw materials. China is buying everything in Latin America. They're buying ports in Peru. They are buying mines in Chile. They are buying everything you can in Panama, everywhere. They are buying up natural resources, and Americans are looking the other way.

So I think this is not, this is the backyard. There is a reason why you had the Monroe Doctrine at some point in 1832.

where they said, "Okay, we are not intervening in Latin America, but we will not accept any foreign power also going to Latin America and intervening there and having this region as their sphere of influence." But the Monroe Doctrine seems not to exist anymore. But this is a new development. For most of its history, the United States has really cared about Latin America because they understood how important it was for them, for their national security and for their national interest.

Well, I think we made the great mistake in the West of assuming that because the Soviet Union collapsed, the victory over the ideology that it made manifest was not only complete, but in some ways self-evident, right? Victory had been attained, the end of history, let's say. And it turns out that the spirit of the envious radicals

was in no real way diminished by the cataclysmic catastrophe of the Soviet Union. In fact, to some degree, quite the opposite, because when I was younger and the Soviet Union was still in full operation, you could point to the Soviet Union as an object lesson in the dangers of an anti-free market ideology. But now the Soviet Union has disappeared, and so...

it's much more difficult to point to something that's happening right now. Well, you could point to Venezuela, you can point to North Korea, but they're economies that didn't have the scale or the presence, obviously, of the Soviet Union. And so all of this has gone back underground, that the attractiveness of the communist revolutionary ideas hasn't seemed to diminish at all. So now your point is, okay, so let's summarize this.

Well, it's probably not a good idea to distribute a trillion dollars to radical leftist utopian criminal dictatorships all over South America and the world. That seems like a bad idea if you're trying to maintain a certain degree of stability even in your own country.

That manifests itself in all manner of economic collapse. That drives migration northward. We've seen tremendous pressure on the American border, and by all appearances, especially if Kamala Harris wins, however that might play itself out, that's only going to get worse. And so the idea that the U.S. and Canada, by implication, can separate themselves from China

the geopolitical occurrences in South America, that's a fool's delusion. And that's especially the case if it's Venezuela with all that oil money, let's say,

and oil that the rest of the world needs is in bed not only with the narco cartels who are brutal criminals beyond the comprehension of any normal person to imagine, but also simultaneously in bed with Iran, which is one seriously bad actor, Russia, which is basically at war with the West, and China, which is the biggest threat to freedom that the world has ever seen since the Soviet Union. And so that's all playing itself out in South America and driving migration northward.

Exactly. And I would add in the end, Jordan, if China, Iran and Russia, your main enemies of the Western world, really care about Latin America, you should too.

You know because they are they are here. They are they are involved in these countries They are investing tons of money at least the chinese russia is sending Effectives even the wagner group has been seen in venezuela um, they they know That they need strongholds close to the united states and they want to destabilize the region because they also know That this destabilizes the united states. And so, uh I mean

It is so obvious, but I don't know. Even in the conservative movement in the US, this is not understood. I think someone like Marco Rubio understands this very well.

or maybe Ted Cruz, but I think the traditional Republican politicians, they don't understand this. They don't see how big of a threat we can become if China and Russia and Iran, they take over these countries. And by the way, we have some of the largest reserves in natural gas in the world, copper, lithium, silver,

gold, whatever, oil, all these things you have here. And manufacturing capacity in Latin America is also very strong. So you will need that at some point. And we are relatively young population still in Latin America as compared to Europe or even the United States or Canada, where we're growing old very rapidly. So for all of these reasons, I think it's not a smart move to just ignore what's going on in your backyard. It's never a good idea.

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It's obvious that what's playing out there needs to be attended to. Okay, so let's flip back to Venezuela specifically for a moment. So could you give us an account, for example, of what ordinary life is like for a Venezuelan

for the typical Venezuelan citizen now, you said that 25% of the population has decided to vote with their feet, and that's an awful lot of people. And that you said that, you know, the GDP has collapsed by 70%, oil production is down 80%, and that 80% of the population lives in poverty. And so what is the typical situation

What is typical reality for a Venezuelan citizen now? Because we never hear about it. We have no idea. Well, it's what you would expect in a socialist paradise. It's basically you don't have enough food to eat. Calorie intake in Venezuela has collapsed over the last 15 years, 20 years. You don't have medicines available.

You don't have hospitals that are functioning. You have no grid, electricity. You have problems all the time in Caracas, everywhere in a country that is very hot. Many regions of Venezuela are very hot. You don't have air conditioning or any of that. And only people who can get access to dollars because there are remittances going to the country, they manage to survive.

But this is the reason why almost a quarter of the population have left. And if Maduro is reinstalled in January, you will have another couple of million living in Venezuela, by the way. This is going to happen and we are expecting that all over Latin America. You have no rule of law, zero rule of law. So you basically have a regime that controls the judiciary, the legislative, everything, and the police.

Any day someone can knock at your door and take you, a prisoner, and you disappear and no one knows anything about you anymore?

If you are in the opposition, you have to be hiding and very careful. Even I am on a blacklist. I was sold. And that's one of the reasons why I've never been back to Venezuela since last time I was there, 2014, even if I'm not really relevant within the country. But because I have argued against the Maduro regime in different media all over the West, probably at least in the United States and Latin America and Spain, I'm not welcome.

So imagine people who are living there. My friends are hiding from the regime. You have many families that have been torn apart, completely destroyed. Because, you know, let me tell you also an anecdote that is really interesting for the audience. I was once in Miami and I took an Uber and I started talking to the driver and I thought that he was very well educated and really intellectual.

Like more than the normal, he knew a lot about law, for instance. And I said, "What did you do back in Venezuela?" "I was a minister of the Supreme Court in Venezuela, a member of the Supreme Court of Justice in Venezuela. And now I am your Uber driver."

So, this is the reality of millions of Venezuelans. Not only poor people or middle class people, but also people who are very successful. They had their jobs, they had their companies, and they lost everything. They lost their families, they lost everything. And many of them have families, members that have been killed by the regime also.

And so the situation is so desperate that I think Venezuelans are going to fight to the last breath in order to make change possible. And Maria Corina Machado, by the way, has said this, the fight is until the end. And so I don't know how this is going to look like. But if the Biden administration does not convince Maduro and the regime to transition back to democracy,

you will maybe have a bloodbath even worse than the one you have now. By the way, a point that is important, Chávez, when he was in government, he disarmed the Venezuelan population. He banned guns for every citizen in Venezuela. The only people who could have guns were his thugs, basically, and the Círculos Bolivarianos, the parallel army groups that they have funded and

and they were financing. And so now you have a situation where Venezuelans don't have even a pistol to defend themselves from these hordes of assassins that their regime is sending to kill them or to imprison them. And they have over 2,000 people in the last weeks have been imprisoned, mostly young people who want a better future. So this is what Venezuela looks like right now. It's hell on earth.

Let's talk about the structure of the opposition.

So it's Maria Corina Machado. I'm butchering that name, obviously. And it's difficult from the outside to understand because tell me how the last election, who was put forward as opposition in the last election? What role does she play? What threat does she currently face? And what, well, what can people from the outside do to shed light on this and to help?

Well, Maria Corina Machado has been the main opposition leader for over a decade, I would say even a decade and a half. Even if at some point in 2013, for instance, after Chávez died, you had an election where Enrique Capriles lost by a small margin to Maduro, but Maduro sold that election. They stole millions of votes. This is not the first time that this happens.

And the reason is because the system in Venezuela, it requires that you have sort of an ID and you go and vote.

but the system is not integrated. So in the sense that you can with different IDs, you can vote in different parts. So one member of the government got like, let's say, 100 IDs and he could go to 100 different places and vote for the same candidate. And this is the way they stole the last election in 2013. And back then, population wanted to rebel.

But Capriles said, "No, stay home. We have nothing to do here." And so it gave oxygen to the regime. And Maria Corina has always been the voice of, I think, reason and courage because she was willing to fight. But the opposition was very fragmented and has been for a long time. This is the first time that they are all together, together against the regime, which is very good.

And she has become the undisputed leader of the opposition, even though Eduardo Gonzalez is a candidate and the president, the president elect is Eduardo Gonzalez. But why? Because Maduro banned Maria Corina from running as president. So, and they have been doing this forever in Venezuela since Chavez came to power. So, Maria Corina endorsed Gonzalez,

to the election and González won, we all know, with a distance of over 30 points. So, with a difference of over 30 points.

So now the opposition, at least, they are all together against the regime. But the main face of the opposition is Maria Corina Machado, which, by the way, deserves a Nobel Prize for peace because she has been so courageous in trying to bring democratic change to Venezuela. But she's not going to get it because she is not a leftist. So I think there is not a big hope that she would get this. But she faces now the possibility of being imprisoned.

And who knows, maybe being killed. And she's willing to give her life for the cause. I mean, she's not going to turn herself over to the regime. Just, you know, a simple... I mean, like, I think she will try to prevent them from capturing her. But she could be imprisoned and maybe killed. So this is what she's facing. Maria Corina and her family. So she had...

She had Eduardo Gonzalez run in her stead, in essence. Is she in hiding at the moment? Yes, she is. I think she's sort of in hiding because the government wants to bring her in and to take her to prison. But she's very active on social media and she has...

showed her face on some public rallies. So I think the government is in a situation where they don't really want to do this very publicly because they could upset the world and the people in Venezuela even more than they are right now. So it's a problem for them because she's too symbolic. They are not going to probably go after her where everyone is looking or watching at her. I mean, this is probably not going to happen.

But they would break into her house in the middle of the night or something like that. They would do. But I don't think they know where she is. But she's at risk, of course. And there are some orders that were given by the government to detain her. So I think it's a very dangerous situation for her.

And as long as some regimes like the Biden administration keeps pushing for a democratic transition, maybe she has a chance. But we have communist or socialist, let's say far-left presidents in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, and they are in bed with Maduro also to some extent. And they are sort of protecting Maduro. They are not really pushing Maduro to accept that he lost and then...

just rule the country until January, which is the day where he should leave the presidency and accept Eduardo Gonzalez as the next president. But this is a life or death situation for Maria Corina and most of the opposition leaders. As I said, one of her right hands, a friend of mine, was taken to prison by the armed forces or by members of the dictatorship, and we don't know anything about her.

So tell me about Maria Karina. So what is it about her that's

made her a popular figure. I'd like to know some more about her background and also, you know, why she doesn't quit. Now, you explained, at least to some degree, why she's still alive. You believe that it would be a scandal of such preposterous magnitude if there was something that happened to her, that the Maduro regime is afraid that would turn international attention on them with sufficient force

drama to actually be a threat to the continued stability of their regime. So she's protected insofar as that's the case. But tell me about who she is. You mentioned yourself earlier in this podcast that she's being tarred and feathered like anybody who isn't a communist for being far right now because that's happening everywhere. But again, the far right epithet is a very effective one.

And it doesn't take much agitation, especially from the mainstream press, in order to make that accusation stick. And so it's clear that to the degree that you're trustworthy, you trust Maria Karina. Tell us about her so that people have some sense of who it is that is standing in opposition to Maduro. So I think that she's the most courageous woman ever.

I think this is maybe many people will think this is an overstatement, but I think this is she's the most courageous women in politics right now in the world. I cannot imagine someone with more courage than her than hers. I mean, this is I mean, she's unbelievably courageous and charismatic. And so she has this force. So she's like a force of nature. And this is why the regime is so afraid of her.

And she has managed to bring the whole opposition together and to create a movement of such magnitude in Venezuela that even the dictatorship with all the guns and so on is shaking because they are afraid that this is going to, in the end, you know, bring change in Venezuela. And her charisma is so powerful that even members of the armed forces

have backed her. That's, by the way, one of the reasons why they had the access to the documents showing that they won the presidency. Because members in the military were leaking these documents to the opposition. And they have imprisoned over 100 soldiers, and they humiliate them and they torture them and so on because they are behind Maria Corina and not behind Maduro.

But she is in favor of free markets, which is not the case with most of the opposition in Venezuela. People might remember Leopoldo Lopez, who was in prison for a long time and it was a scandal all over the world. I believe he's now in Spain. But I once gave a speech with Leopoldo Lopez's father in a European parliament. And Leopoldo Lopez's father was defending socialism.

which was, to me, was incredible. He was saying, "No, socialism does not do what Chávez has done." And it's exactly the opposite is the case. And he was very naive when it came to this. And Enrique Capriles, the same thing. The last opposition leader before Guaidó, Enrique Capriles, who lost in 2013, the other day tweeted,

Along these lines, like Chavez was the good guy and Maduro is the bad guy, which is a narrative that the left is trying to create in order to save the socialist revolution in Venezuela. It's the same narrative they did with Lenin and Stalin. Oh, Lenin was a good guy, but Stalin was a criminal. Stalin was, you know, coming from the proletarian who didn't know anything and he was a criminal. They are doing the same thing.

with Chavez Maduro. And to me, it was shocking that someone like Capriles, who is in the opposition and who wants regime change, would fall for this crap and this trap. So Maria Corina has never considered anything. She has always been very coherent. She believes in liberal democracy and the rule of law and the free market. I guess that qualifies you as a far right nowadays. So

It doesn't happen only to her, I guess, but it is really appalling that we read this sort of nonsense from the established media. There is no one more democratic. She hasn't called for a rebellion against the government to a violent march towards Miraflores Palace, to depose Maduro. She hasn't done any of that. She never did that.

It's just peaceful protest. That's why I'm saying she should get the Nobel Peace Prize. Really, because she's risking her life for millions of Venezuelans. And so you will never, and I hope you meet her one day, because you will never meet a woman with more, you know, not only courage, but also integrity. Do you think she'd do a podcast? I think she would, yes.

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So, because people need to see her, I mean, all over the world. Yes. Her fight is everyone's fight. People who believe in freedom, and especially Venezuela, it's such a dramatic case because it was also the most stable democracy in Latin America for decades. Not only the most stable economy, but also the most stable democracy.

which offers also a lesson, right? I mean, it doesn't matter how well or how good your country looks like at some point in history. It can change very rapidly. Me being a German, my family came from Germany. You know, Germany was the Athens of the modern world and so on. And in a decade or two decades, you lost everything and you sunk into the most horrible barbarism.

And this was in Central Europe. This can happen to anyone. It happened to Venezuela. It can happen to... You mean like the UK? Well, there you go. There you go. I mean, the UK is... What is going on there is really shocking to me. I'm a great admirer of the Anglo-Saxons because, as Montesquieu said, they have done more for liberty than any other people in the world.

But now you see this totalitarian degeneration going on in the UK. And it's very scary because the thing, Jordan, is that for us who grew up in Latin America, I also spent some time, my childhood in Germany and so on, but you could always say, okay, here the things don't look very well in terms of democracy and liberty, but you have the UK or you have Canada or you have the United States.

But now it's like everywhere you are having the same problems. Maybe not to the same degree, but you're having the same problems. You don't see people really defending freedom of speech in the UK as you would have seen probably 50 years ago or 40 years ago. You don't see the American political class celebrating the 4th of July as they used to do it

you know, 50 years ago or 40 years ago, because you have a part of the establishment that believes that they are an oppressive society that deserves to disappear. And they have replaced the founding myth of the United States, which was moral equality, basically. That was the founding myth of the United States. You know, all men are created equal and so on.

by the noble savage myth, which is the founding myth of Latin America. The idea that you only have good people here, these indigenous peoples were pure-hearted and they didn't know envy or jealousy or anything else, and then the Europeans came and they corrupted everything. And this is part of the reason why we have all these revolutions all the time. Because this idea that we were corrupted by foreign powers, first Europe and then the United States,

It's a rhetoric that is being used over and over again by people like Chavez and others in order to say we have to restore the original purity before capitalism, before exploitation, before private property, before all of that. And I see this development happening also in the United States more and more with the woke movement, let's put it that way, and the incapacity of many Democrats to, even moderate Democrats,

to stop it and to face it, you know, and confront it as they should. That's why I'm very worried about the future of the West. I'm wondering, let me step sideways for a moment and then we'll return to our discussion about Venezuela and South America in general. You know, I don't think it's really appropriate now to conceptualize what's happening

around the world, but particularly in the West, in political terms precisely, because it's something deeper than what's merely political. And one of the ideas I've been toying with, I'd like your opinion about it, is that the default human moral stance is probably left-wing. You know, Ben Shapiro said something to me at one point, just off the cuff, that tangled its way into my thinking, and I suppose is one of the motivations for this idea, that we're

He said he's a communist in his family. And so, you know, if you have a family, if you have children, you're really hoping for something like, at least a part of you is hoping, especially when they're kids, for something like equality of outcome. You want everyone to do well. You're willing to intervene on the side of the person who's, you know, bearing what, who's not quite as successful at any given moment.

You want to distribute resources as equitably as possible. Your interaction with your children and your wife is based on essentially an ethos of care. But, you know, if you look at organizations that move beyond the scope of the family in size, that ethos of care and equitable care, let's say, doesn't scale well.

And modern civilizations are not families. And here's some proof of that from the psychological perspective. So the personality trait agreeableness is associated with maternal care, let's say. It's the dimension of empathic, self-sacrificial care. And women are substantially higher in trait agreeableness across the world than men.

What predicts success in a complex society on the personality side isn't agreeableness. In fact, managers who are more agreeable do worse because people take advantage of them. What predicts success on the personality side in a large-scale society is conscientiousness.

And conscientiousness is dutifulness and industriousness and orderliness. And it's the ethos of hard work. It's a meritocratic ethos. And it's a cold virtue. Like, to be conscientious isn't the same as to be emotionally caring. And so I wonder if part of the reason that the...

politics of the left, so to speak, constantly mutate and transform. They're immune to criticism, say, by reference to history. You can't just say, well, every communist regime in the 20th century was a brutal, bloody dictatorial disaster. It doesn't hold water. Maybe it doesn't hold water because it's actually extremely difficult to socialize people

so that they can take their place in a complex society without defaulting to the underlying ethos of familial care. You know, and so if you're a harsh and discriminating person, if you're very meritocratically oriented, if you say to someone, I don't give a damn about your feelings, it matters what sort of job you do, you know, you're a harsh voice. And you might be a necessary voice to keep civilization itself running, but

That doesn't mean that you're necessarily an attractive voice, especially to people who think instinctively in terms of an ethos of care. And it's very, very easy to appeal to that. And so I think part of the problem, and then you might add to that another problem. So imagine that if you're driven by necessity when times are hard,

it becomes obvious that those who can should be allowed to do or should be pushed forward to do, that the meritocratic have to rise to the top because otherwise disaster looms. If you've been in a situation where economic security has been granted to you in some ways effortlessly for several generations even,

it's also perhaps much easier to default to that ethos of care and to attend to the outliers in society who haven't served themselves well, but also perhaps haven't been served well by the conscientious ethos. And so I'm wondering about your thoughts of that, you know, like, because we usually think about this, well, some people have left-wing beliefs and some people have right-wing beliefs, and that's the battlefield. It's like,

I don't think that's a good level of analysis because I don't exactly think this is about ideas. I think the default human position might be equality of outcome in small groups and that you have to struggle against that mightily with your education system, maybe your moral system as a whole, to impose a meritocratic policy.

like a cold virtue meritocracy on top of that. And obviously, we haven't been doing a very good job of that. So, I'm curious, you're well versed in the Austrian School of Economics, I'm wondering what you think of that kind of theorizing. No, I fully agree, and this is really interesting because Friedrich Hayek wrote a paper called "The Mirage of Social Justice."

where he argued exactly what you are saying. He said that this idea of social justice, that we had to redistribute wealth so everyone gets an equal share or in terms that guarantee the survival of the community, it's an idea that he attributes to our past for thousands of years. We were a small,

communities, tribes, basically. We had this family ethos, the care ethos, and it was the way to survive. But we were communities only of a couple of dozen people or maybe over a hundred, but not more than that. You knew everyone. And this is the instincts, he says, we evolved

in this type of environment. And so socialism in the end wants to apply this moral instincts to what he called the complex society, the larger society, which is civilization basically. And that's why you have this regression towards tribalism.

and you have it with socialism and communism and with nationalism when nationalism is exacerbated like the Nazis did in Germany then you go back to the tribe and you feel protected by the tribe and you have this unifying rhetoric and this identity and you are you know like you are again like this organism and you are

part of a whole. You're not just an individual looking for yourself. And this is the care ethics ethos that you were talking about. It's really interesting also because Gerald Cohen, who was a very famous Marxist, a professor at Oxford University, he said, he wrote the book, Why Not Socialism? And by socialism, he didn't mean Nordic type of welfare state or something like that. He meant like really equality of outcomes, more or less.

And he was saying, and he said that the instinct, the socialist ideology, or the socialist philosophy appealed to an instinct that was so ingrained in human nature that it was going to come back over and over and over again. So I fully agree with that analysis, and this is why civilization is so fragile.

Okay, let me add two data points to that, okay, or three. So we did a study in 2016 looking at personality and cognitive predictors of politically correct authoritarianism. So that wouldn't be democratic socialism, that would be the far left authoritarian types of

And the things that predicted it were low verbal intelligence, which was a walloping predictor. So you could imagine it's a very simple narrative, right? There are victims and there are victimizers. That explains everything. And if you're moral, you're on the side of the victims. And that's something like a predatory infant instinct, right? There are predators, there are infants. You're obviously on the side of the infants and to hell with the predators.

So you can think of that as an instinctual orientation and an effective one under certain conditions. Okay, what else predicted? Feminine temperament, high agreeableness in particular. And then there's another, the other data point I would say is that if you look in the United States right now, the people who are holding the radical utopians in power are women between 18 and 34.

Okay, and now they're particularly targeted by the Iranians and the Chinese on TikTok, right? And they're bombarded with images, for example, of dying Palestinian children. And that's a targeted attack. We know that the Iranians are behind that and the Chinese, and it's extremely effective. And women between the ages of 18 and 34 are wildly discordant in their political views.

in relationship to everyone else. Now, 50% of them are also childless. Right. So there's an element of the maternal instinct run amok on the political landscape, because you could easily say, and I don't think that it's an exaggeration, and our empirical data supported that, is that that maternal instinct is going to find its

target. It's going to find its expression. If it doesn't find its expression within the confines of a family, where there's some real demand to take care of those who are unable to take care of themselves, children essentially, infants primarily, then it's going to find its expression politically. And that can be exploited, as it certainly is by the Chinese and the Iranians on TikTok. And so the battle that we're

engaged in politically, I believe is better construed in the manner that we just described. It's a battle between an instinctive orientation towards care and a higher order cognitive interpretation that's associated with conscientiousness that notes how complex systems operate and introduces a different standard, which would essentially be something like the cold-hearted meritocratic standard.

Okay, so you see a parallel between that and what the Austrian school economists proposed. Okay, that's what I thought. So, okay, okay, okay. So I'm going to bang that around in the back of my head. Maybe we could turn, we don't have a lot of time for this because we're running out of time on the YouTube side, but maybe we could turn our attention to democracy.

developments that are arguably somewhat positive. Chile is somewhat positive. What do you think about what's happening in Argentina with Malai? And we also have the example of El Salvador and with its turning to both Bitcoin, interestingly enough, and to the US dollar. So I'm

What let's start with Argentina. So, yeah, what are your views on what's what is happening in Argentina? Like what Millay is doing? Is that is that being is that producing any success on economic grounds? Because it's very difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff in terms of anything approximating legacy media coverage of Argentina. Yeah.

Well, I have to disclose here that I'm a good friend of Millet and we have been working for the cause of freedom in Latin America for 10 years together. So what is happening in Argentina is the most fascinating and interesting thing that I've seen, of course, in my lifetime, but also I think in the last half a century, because what is really taking place is a cultural revolution.

In a positive sense, not the Chinese type of Maoist type of cultural revolution, but

Argentina was the wealthiest country in the world in 1896, with highest per capita income in the world. We had a constitution in place, the 1853 Constitution that was designed by Juan Bautista Alberti, who was an admirer of the founding fathers of the United States. He was a classical liberal, conservative classical liberal. He believed that government had to be limited.

And he saw in the French revolutionary tradition of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the main reasons why Latin America was not prosperous enough. And because we expected everything from an omnipotent government. He actually has an article called "Omnipotent Government."

And he said the Americans, on the other hand, they expect from government nothing. They fix the things for themselves. So he created the 1853 Constitution. And after that, Argentina became the most successful country in the world in terms of per capita income. But if you went to 1914,

you had half of the population in Buenos Aires was born not in Buenos Aires. There were foreigners coming from Europe. So it was a legitimate question to ask yourself, are we emigrating to the United States or to Argentina in the late 19th century? This is what happened back then. And this is why also the Argentinian population looks so European in general. And you had in the last World Cup all this nonsensical article saying, well, why there are no black people in the soccer team in Argentina and so on. This is

And it's very European population, but in the '20s and '30s, and then especially '40s with Juan Domingo Perón, who was a fascist general, a collectivist fascist general, admirer of Mussolini. He had met Mussolini actually in Italy.

But he was anti-communist at the same time. He didn't want the central-blank economy for, you know, the whole thing, but he wanted the corporatist type of very corrupt economy. And then they changed dramatically the institutions. And Argentina became a declining nation and a poor nation compared to the rest of the world, at least the developed world. And what did Millet do?

Millet managed, Millet and the free market movement, the classical liberal movement, conservative movement in Argentina, I played a role also there. So we managed to transform dramatically the mindset, especially of young people. In Argentina, you are allowed to vote with 16. So between 16 and 24, Millet got 70% of the votes, 70%.

And these young people forced the change towards a very hardcore radical free market regime, but not because people were upset because inflation was so high and so on. No, that was not the reason.

there is a structural change in Argentina. All of these people, they would have been Peronists 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Now they are libertarians. And how did we achieve that? Well, a lot of going to medias, giving interviews, especially social media. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube were crucial

to change the mentality of millions of people. And of course, the style. Millet has a charisma, a style that is very, you know, eccentric, let's put it that way. And he is irreverent. He has the rhetoric of a revolutionary, which is very Argentinian. By the way, it's not...

really strange in that country. He's very theatrical, but he's also intellectually very solid. So he came to power and he's doing exactly what he said he was going to do. He didn't lie. He said, you know, all over the last years that he has been on television, over the last five, six years, he has been saying what was going to happen.

what it takes to fix it. Everything came as he predicted and now he's in government. He has brought down inflation from over 25% a month to less than 4%. You know the inflation in terms of goods to food, it's 0%. So 0% food inflation. Then you have fiscal surplus.

Since January, since he came to power, you have a fiscal surplus every month, a consecutive way. And then you are starting to see a little bit of a reactivation of the economy because you first had to deal with inflation. They were on the verge of hyperinflation. If Millet had not come to power, you would have inflation at over 15,000% in Argentina right now.

15,000%. It would be the complete catastrophe. And he has been a very skillful politician because he doesn't have majority in Congress. But even so, Congress has passed after several negotiations and failed attempts to pass the Bases Law, which is a law that dramatically changes the structure of Argentinian economy, which is really a rent-seeking society.

It's really, you know, corporate interests in bed with the politicians and exploiting everyone else for their own benefit. Okay, so let's do this. We've got another half an hour or two to talk on the Daily Wire side. I think, why don't we delve more deeply into what's happening in Argentina and also to give some consideration to that.

as a model for what could occur in South America more generally if the leftist utopian tide could be stemmed.

So does that seem reasonable to you? That's perfect. Let's do that. So for everybody, good, good. So for everybody in watching and listening, most of you know that I do an additional half an hour with my guests on the Daily Wire platform. And so that's what we're going to do. And if you found this discussion useful and interesting, you could give some consideration to joining us there. I can delve further into the sorts of things that we've been talking about. And so I think that's what we'll turn to. And I would say...

Thank you to The Daily Wire for making this discussion possible. And Dr. Kaiser, thank you very much to you for agreeing to talk to us today. Obviously, we could talk for a much longer period of time, and perhaps we'll do that again in the not-too-distant future. There's lots of things to discuss in more detail with regard to Venezuela, let's say. But for now, we'll turn our attention to Argentina, and maybe with a foray into Venezuela.

El Salvador, and we'll do that on the Daily Wire side, so you can all join us there. Thank you very much, sir, for agreeing to talk to me today. I know we only scratched the surface, but at least it's a start. Thank you very much for having me.