Let's celebrate with Argentina today
Congratulations to the new president and vice president of Argentina, Javier Milei and Victoria Villaruel.
And a heartfelt congratulations also to the Argentine people.
To those of you who don't know Victoria and Javier:
They do not come from the same political class as the majority of politicians who dominate politics in the Western world.
They are different.
Radically different.
For instance, they have a totally different view of what it means to be "free", how society maximizes freedom and prosperity and what the government's role should be.
They believe the government should step back and give the country back to the people.
I don't know much about Victoria, but let me tell you a littlebit more about Javier.
He is the first anarcho capitalist who has become a leader of a state in modern times.
Anarcho - as supporter of anarchy.
And capitalist - as supporter of property and trade.
In sum - someone who believe people can organize themselves best when they are free to own and protect their property.
And someone who see this system as the only ethical way of letting people organize themselves.
However, Javier is also a realist.
So his ambition is to slash 80% of the government.
But this isn't the most important with the election.
The following is what's most important:
Javier believes in "monetary freedom," the right to use the money you like best.
He believes money creation should be left to the private sector, the way it used to be in most of our history as a civilized species.
The new president understands the evil of government monopolies in the production of money.
Therefore he wants to abolish the central bank and get rid of the Argentines' current monetary system.
Why do he support monetary freedom?
Because he understands its foundational importance for society.
And because he was fed up.
He had watched the Argentine government abuse their monopoly in money creation for decades.
They borrowed US dollars from the IMF, and let it flow into their own pockets and to the super wealthy.
This put the taxpayers on the hook.
The people were supposed to pay back this growing mountain of public debt.
Not the political class.
The voters.
And the children of the voters.
And the voter's grandchildren.
This scheme was supposed to move forward in perpetuity.
At the same time the evil government forced their people to use the Argentine peso.
"Wanna pay taxes?"
"We just accept peso."
And they made sure that their central bank and the private banks printed the peso in such a high tempo as if the devil himself commanded them to do it.
Who do you think got to use the pesos first, while it still had some value?
The political class and their crony capitalist comrades, of course.
And the people - what about them?
I'll tell you what this policy did to them.
The Argentine government crushed their people with price inflation.
Caused directly by their monopoly in money creation.
They debased the value of the peso.
Deliberately.
Fast.
Yes.
And they crushed the Argentine people with this.
They made them work harder and harder, faster and faster, to keep up with the rapidly rising prices.
They set fire to their savings.
Made the money they deposited in their savings accounts worth nothing.
The political elite destroyed the country economically.
They made sufficiently many of the people of Argentina hate the pesos and the government.
Yes.
They made the people hate.
So the people rose against them.
They flocked to Javier.
They did it with enthusiasm.
Because Javier hated the political establishment too.
He understood how this institutionalized fraud crushed the people of Argentine.
And he was able to communicate it to them.
And the people understood what Javier said.
In fact, they felt what he said.
They knew he was right.
Spot on.
So, they chose to follow him.
The people of Argentina rose against the political class and they did it peacefully.
I'm full of admiration for the way they behaved.
They felt what their candidate said, agreed, supported him, and finally they elected him.
That simple.
A peaceful revolution.
You might think it was very different in Argentina than it is in your country.
That their policy was extreme.
You are almost right.
But you are more wrong than you are right.
You see, it's almost the same everywhere.
In my country, Norway, we also have a government - and bank-controlled monopoly in money creation.
It's the same in the US.
And in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, UK, Ethiopia, Japan, Russia, Sweden, Brazil, Canada....
The list goes on and on and on.
And they all abuse their monopoly.
They all crush their peoples.
They crush us, because they stuff their own pockets and the super wealthy with the riches that comes from having the privilege of being the first users of newly created money.
The exact same thing.
They just crush us slower.
They grind us to poverty.
They grind us to death.
Slowly.
Steadily.
Using the same old, terrible weapon.
You would BTW be mistaken to belive that we haven't had leaders in the past who shared the same ideas as Milei.
A thousand years ago, the people in my region Trøndelag had much of the same view of what freedom meant that the new president of Argentina has.
This included the elite - the landowners and the farmers.
All of the Trønders were willing to and even obliged to kill any king who didn't rule by consent.
It's true.
It was established in the law.
It meant that much to them.
They knew they had to fight for their freedom.
They understood that they couldn't leave the duty to protect their freedom to anyone else.
It was an individual duty.
Individual obligation.
And a matter of honor.
In respect of past genertions.
And as a promise to the future generations.
Like today's people of Argentina, the Trønders understood that they had an obligation.
That they didn't have a choice.
Self defence and freedom were two sides of the same principle.
They understood and respected it, as if it was a natural law, akin to gravity.
They realized that ignoring it would come at an extremely high cost.
By having this understanding of how much they would have to sacrifice, this protected the Trønders against kings who tried to establish their own, private monopolies in money creation.
It preserved their right to use the money they liked best.
So my ancestors therefore used foreign money, silver and gold coins that was most valuable, that held the highest amount of silver and gold.
They used sound money.
They didn't have to ask themselves if they trusted the money.
They didn't think of the need to trust the money.
They just used them.
Simple.
The sound money filled the gap created by a lack of trust in people they didn't know.
They just traded with them, using sound money, playing the generous tit-for-tat with the strangers.
Building.
Strengthening the bonds within their own culture.
Establishing friendship with strangers.
Preserving their freedom.
Protecting their culture and their institutions.
Until it all ended in 1050 AD, when the Trønders buckled and they broke the promise had made.
King Harald Hardråde assassinated the Trønder's natural leader, Einar Tambarskjelve.
Einar's soldiers hesitated.
And we lost our freedom.
For a period of almost 1000 years, monetary freedom was replaced with inflation as a policy.
For almost 1000 years my ancestors have had to pay the price.
With an ever growing state.
A state that continuously erodes our freedom.
500 years later, in 1566 AD, rebels in the Netherlands created a society that to a large extent was based on the principle of monetary freedom.
It gave them the Dutch Golden Age, which lasted for about 150 years.
The little country which had so few natural resources established a monetary system and other policies that attracted enormous amounts of capital.
And the best entrepreneurs.
As well as the most talented artists.
It was built on a foundation of monetary freedom.
Born out of rebellion.
A prosperous society that rose out of the ashes after they escaped the Habsburg empire and their blood-thirsty inflation policy.
In 1783 the same happened in America.
The rebels in the coloinies rose against the British and the institution they hated the most:
Bank of England.
The institution that financed the Crown, its wars and its suppression of the colonies.
They hated Bank of England.
Hated it.
And they freed themselves from the British crown and they pound.
The United States of America established a principle of de facto monetary freedom.
It lasted for a long period.
The Americans were free to use the money they liked best.
People preferred to use the Spanish silver dollar.
In 1857 the government stopped this, when they introduced the Coinage Act.
The good old greed had taken over.
A political elite wanted to have power.
It needed to control the money creation.
They lusted to get back what they had lost.
Greed and ambition.
It once more floated to the surface.
For a long time the American private banks could issue credit without federal control.
If a bank created too much credit, it went bust, but it didn't break the nation.
This ended in 1914, one year after the Congress established the Federal Reserve by law.
And that was the end of it.
But what did they actually lose?
Just like had happened in the Netherlands, the monetary system in the 19th century in the US attracted enormous amounts of capital.
And it literally emptied Europe for human capital.
Yes, I used the word emptied.
Because that's what happened.
Ordinary Europeans fled from nations that still abused their monopolies in money creation.
They escaped to a country with monetary freedom.
In the beginning of the 18th century, Norway had a population of 900,000.
750,000 Norwegians emigrated to North-America, most of them to the US, between 1836 and 1915.
750,000!!!
Just imagine what kind of loss this was for our extremely rich country, in terms of the natural resources that we had!
Too few of my fellow Norwegians understand how the Trønders protected their monetary freedom and what it meant.
And too few people of this world understand how little time that has passed since monetary freedom existed as a foundational principle, in the Netherlands, and in the US.
And almost nobody understand how important it is.
But Javier, the anarcho capitalist, the former professor in economics, now President of Argentine, he understance the importance of all of this.
He want's to abolish the peso.
He want's the people to use US dollars, which is better money.
Javier supports #Bitcoin .
And he dreams of letting his people have monetary freedom.
I wish Javier and Victoria the best of luck.
By giving a privilege to the US dollar, you strike a political bargain with the US government.
It might be what it takes to calm the hawks in Washington down.
In a time when the US desperately needs to find someone who wants to use the dollar, they might let Milei try to do what he set out to do.
If he didn't first "dollarize", but went straight to monetary freedom, the US would probably punish Argentina, Victoria and Javier heavily with sanctions, military intervention or worse things.
No they might be able to pull it off.
Just brilliant.
And now it's time to find the strength to do it, Victoria and Javier.
You must walk the mile from promise to action.
Smash down the walls of your central bank.
Crush the rubble into dust.
Bury the dust deep into the ground.
Never let them build it up again.
Always remind the children of Argentine why you did it.
Always.
And finally - thanks for what you have done.
Spreading the understanding of the importance of the monetary system and sound money the way that you have done, has been immensely valuable.
Priceless.
Thank you.
