Exactly two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men signed one of the most significant documents in history. Not because it declared the independence of thirteen colonies from the British Crown, but because it asserted something much more revolutionary: that there are rights that no government creates and, therefore, no government can take away.
Life, liberty, and property were not concessions from the king nor benefits granted by a circumstantial majority. They were inherent rights of every person simply by the fact of existing. That assertion, which today may seem obvious, was actually a radical break from centuries of absolutism. For the first time, a nation was born on the premise that political power should be subordinate to the individual and not the individual to political power.
That was the true secret of the United States.
Many believe that its success can be explained by the abundance of natural resources, its geographical location, or the quality of its leaders. History shows that none of those answers suffice. There are immensely rich countries that remain in poverty, and the United States has had brilliant, average, and frankly bad presidents. Its exceptionalism did not lie in the men who occupied the White House, but in having built institutions designed to distrust power, limit it, and subject it to the rule of law.
Murray Rothbard pointed out that American revolutionaries never separated freedom from property because they understood that both were expressions of the same moral principle. He who cannot keep the fruits of his labor cannot be considered truly free. The defense of property was not an economic privilege, but the indispensable condition to preserve the autonomy of the individual against the State.
Argentina was born inspired by that same tradition. Alberdi understood that the mission of a Constitution was not to organize the lives of citizens, but to prevent rulers from organizing it for them. For decades, that model worked. Our country became one of the most chosen destinations by immigrants from all over the world because it offered something scarce even then: freedom to work, trade, and prosper.
But the twentieth century reversed that logic. Little by little, we stopped discussing how to limit the State to ask ourselves what new function it should assume. Each crisis justified an additional regulation, a higher tax, or a new ministry. Political power ceased to be an arbiter and became the protagonist of all aspects of social life.
Kirchnerism took that conception to its maximum expression. It built a model based on the idea that wealth could be distributed before it was created, that inflation could be hidden with controls, and that the will of a group of officials was superior to the decisions of millions of people acting freely. It was not simply a set of bad economic policies. It was a political philosophy that placed the State above society.
Jesús Huerta de Soto has explained that the essential problem of socialism is not only moral but also intellectual. No government has the necessary knowledge to coordinate a complex society because that knowledge is dispersed among millions of individuals. Where power replaces voluntary cooperation with coercion, it inevitably destroys creativity, innovation, and the capacity for progress.
That is why the process initiated by Javier Milei is much deeper than an economic stabilization program. Fiscal balance, deregulation, or reduction of public spending are important, but they all respond to a prior idea: to return to society the space that the State occupied for decades. This is not simply about better managing power, but about recognizing that there are areas where power should never have entered.
This also explains the desperation of those who made the State their tool of political domination. When power stops distributing privileges, the system of dependencies on which they lived for years weakens. That is why the real discussion was never between austerity or spending, but between a society of free citizens and one of individuals subordinated to the favor of the government.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States discovered that the greatness of a nation does not depend on having extraordinary rulers, but on preventing any ruler from concentrating too much power. That was also the intuition of the founding fathers of Argentina.
After too many decades of having forgotten it, today our country has the opportunity to rediscover it. And perhaps that is the most important change of all, because nations do not begin to prosper when the State does more things, but when it finally learns which are the things it should never have done.
