This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 30th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

This week's election in Ecuador has ramifications for more than just Julian Assange.

The country's prospects for both wealth and limited government hang in the balance.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady writes for the Wall Street Journal,

we spoke yesterday about Ecuador's election and the broader struggle for free trade.

You make note in a recent column that Julian Assange's fate sort of hangs in the balance with respect to the election in Ecuador and you argue

that pretty much nobody should be rooting for the people that he's rooting for.

Why is that?

Well let's remember that Julian Assange went to the

Ecuadorian embassy in London when he was worried about being deported to the U.S.

Well, we won't get into whether he should be or he could be deported to the U.S.

But the point was that he chose an embassy in Washington

that he felt pretty sure was going to be have an anti-American

viewpoint and would not deport him.

So that was the main driver there I think and this president, the

current president of Ecuador is named Raphael Correa. He has been in power for 10 years. He has many times violated

the Constitution, changed the Constitution whenever it fits his objectives and has made the

state the center of economic development in the country which has obviously been

detrimental for the well-being of Ecuadorians and and I think that it would be a good thing if his party left power.

Now he's not running in this election.

He has a proxy running by the name of Lenin Moreno and Mr. Moreno was a vice president at

...