Anarcho-capitalism has won in Argentina.

Libertarian chainsaw guy, Javier Malay, just won a decisive electoral victory, bigger than most people expected.

What a libertarians think about that, we're going to talk about it today.

Welcome to the Reason Roundtable. I'm your host, Peter Souterman, and today I am joined by my colleagues, Matthew Welch, Nick Gillespie, and special Reason Roundup newsletter writer extraordinaire. Liz Wolf, everybody, welcome to the show. Liz, you wrote about Malay's victory for us in the Reason Roundup this morning.

Tell us just briefly, what happened? Why does it matter?

So I dispute the characterization of Malay as an anarcho-capitalist.

I mean, he has used that term, is my understanding.

Mostly because of the amount of central bank control that Argentina currently has, which I'll get to in a second.

But, I mean, this is huge news. This is a lot better than a lot of people were predicting.

You know, basically, Malay, when he came into office about two years ago, was in charge of making a ton of really aggressive cuts.

And, you know, the voters asked for that.

But some of these cuts were extraordinarily painful.

And in a place that has just historically had handout after handout given to the people,

so much public sentiment in favor of paranoism, the fact that Malay's aggressive public spending cuts have been able to make it through.

I mean, a lot of people thought that this was going to result in massive backlash. It's worth noting, especially because

our own president doesn't seem to know that this was not a referendum on Malay himself technically.

This was a legislative election. But his party won more than 40% of the vote. Basically,

more than 30% of seats in parliament is what would have registered as sort of a victory for Malay.

So the fact that he, you know, majorly exceeded those expectations is absolutely huge.

I mean, I would basically look at this as the Argentine people decided to stay the course. You know,

there will be a lot of short-term pain with getting Argentine inflation under control and actually

getting to a place of greater fiscal solvency. Malay is, I think, headed down the right path,

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