Leo vs. the Lion

Actor DiCaprio to "confront" Javier Milei over the fate of the planet...

(Professional pretend person, Leonardo DiCaprio, in full flight.)

“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”

~ Frederic Bastiat, The Law

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World...

Fear not, fear not! Reports of the End of the World have been greatly exaggerated!

Hot off the presses comes news that the great crisis has been averted... pending doom delayed... the apocalypse shelved for another panicked people, from another grim and beastly age of ignorance. 

Yes gentle, parboiled reader, at long last we are saved. And the form of our savior? None other than the award-winning overactor and insufferable globalist shill, Leonardo DiCaprio! From La Derecha Diario (translated):

This Monday it was announced that the actor and film producer Leonardo DiCaprio will visit Argentina in March through an event of his NGO, where he will give a speech at the Lollapalooza music festival about climate change and confront the brand new government of Javier Milei.

Sigh... 

Of Coarser Clay

As if the long-suffering people of Argentina haven’t had enough on their collectivist plate these past 75-years, now they can look forward to a sanctimonious climate hypocrite descending on their fair shores to lecture the impoverished masses about the importance of eating bugs and owning nothing. 

Leo will of course be traveling to the End of the World in his carbon-belching private jet, from which he’ll be able to survey the widespread beggary that socialist policy has inevitably visited upon the people, all while blanketing the country in his own noxious plumes of celebrity smug. 

(“Here’s to… well, me of course!”)

Still, we can hardly wait to witness the celery-powered actor “confront” the nation’s newly and duly elected presidente, Javier Milei, who won the general election in a landslide not seen for forty years. (All in the name of “democracy,” of course.) The man with the chainsaw must be positively shaking in his boots. 

If the good people of Argentina don’t march this Hollywood clown out of town at the sharp end of a giant pitchfork, they’ll have let a good point go to waste. 

Another Brick From The Wall

Meanwhile, back here in the real world, populated by real people with real professions, who live real and unscripted lives, the democratically-elected government of Argentina continues to peel back the layers of the state’s rotten onion. 

From the Office of the Commerce Secretary yesterday...

Sixty-nine further regulations that hindered commercial relations in the internal market and promoted an interventionist role of the State were today eliminated.

In this way, administrative bureaucracy is reduced and competition is stimulated for the benefit of consumers.

The official communiqué went on to describe, in detail, the massive derogation of power from government busybodies and back to the people over whose lives they had heretofore claimed authority. 

Simultaneously, Milei’s giant Omnibus Law (which takes its libertarian cues from one of the nation’s founding documents, the “Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines”), is making its way through the congress as we type these words. Here’s Reuters...

"There should now be no obstacle for the law to be approved," presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni said in a daily press conference on Tuesday. "As we understand it is going to get approved, with the first half of that this week."

Having never met a socialist who didn’t have a stolen card up his borrowed sleeve, we await the law’s final approval before sounding any trumpets. Still, the very fact that people are even considering freedom as a viable alternative to state-managed catastrophe is itself cause for optimism.

DiCaprios be Damned

As readers will recall, the sweeping Omnibus Law is essentially the legislative equivalent of Milei’s chainsaw and aims at divesting power from the state and returning it to the hands of entrepreneurs, small businesses and to the smallest minority in the world: individuals who claim the right to run their own lives, to contract with whomever they so wish and to set terms both parties find mutually agreeable. 

(Old timers will recognize this quaint anachronism as “live and let live” or “to each their own” or “mind your own [expletive] business.”)

And so, brick by brick... regulation by regulation... fetid swamp critter by fetid swamp critter... the bloated administrative state is being dismantled. More importantly still, people are coming to realize that there is no finer clay than that which man uses to shape his own individual destiny, DiCaprios of the world be damned. 

Our question for this week, and the foreseeable future, is whether such an ambitious experiment in liberty, and the empowerment of individuals against their tyrannical state, might precipitate similar movements elsewhere around the world?

It can be difficult to imagine, when celebrity private jets are blotting out the sun, a day when salt of the earth men and women stand up against parasitic actors of state and stage alike. And yet, history is replete with examples of brave folks casting off the yoke of illegitimate, would-be rulers. 

We may just be witnessing one of them at this very moment. Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman