For years, Argentina lived in a fiction. It was not a technical error or an economic miscalibration, but something more profound: a system that promised consumption without production, unlimited spending and invisible consequences, built and sustained from power. The result was apparent welfare based on subsidies, artificially low prices, and expanding spending. Everything seemed to work, not because the economy generated more wealth, but because the State redistributed resources that did not belong to it and issued money without backup.
That “well-being” wasn't real: it was appropriation in disguise. During that process, the State operated as a major cost concealer. It financed the deficit with emissions, liquefied revenues via inflation and transferred the burden of public spending to the whole of society without making it explicit. Inflation was not an accident, but rather a mechanism: a way to finance politics while avoiding the political cost of collecting visible taxes. For this reason, what some today describe as “adjustment” is ill-considered from the start.
We are not faced with a decision to impoverish society, but rather we are faced with the moment when a system based on hiding who pays ceases to work. For years, politics avoided conflict with reality. It chose to sustain the short term even at the cost of destroying the foundations of the long term: it expanded spending, distorted prices and multiplied regulations to sustain an illusion of stability that was never sustainable. But reality doesn't disappear, it accumulates. And when he finally shows up, he does it all at once. The deterioration doesn't start now, it starts when you decide to live above what is produced. What is experienced today as a fall in purchasing power, a decline in consumption or economic discomfort is not the result of order, but the inevitable consequence of years of disorder financed by inflation and covert
indebtedness.
The bottom line is not economic, but moral. For years, a system was consolidated in which some decided to spend and others paid without knowing it, in which politics promised benefits without explaining their cost. A system based on the forced transfer of resources from society to the State and its priorities.
It's not inflation versus wages or adjustment versus welfare, but coercion versus freedom, illusion versus truth. The opposition tries to put some issues on the agenda, but deliberately omits to analyze the causes. Because recognizing them would imply admitting that this deterioration is not a product of the current order, but of the previous system that made it inevitable. There is no way to correct a distorted economy without going through an uncomfortable process, but that process is not the problem: it is the consequence of delaying the correction for too long. For years, the adjustment existed, it just wasn't called that. It was called inflation, loss of purchasing power, silent deterioration.
It was a permanent, covert and profoundly regressive adjustment. Today, that mechanism is cut and, in doing so, the cost is no longer hidden. This generates rejection, tension and political conflict, but it also introduces something that was absent for decades: clarity. Because when the cost is visible, so is the responsibility. The current process that Argentina is undergoing is not an experiment, it is a breaking point: the attempt to abandon a scheme based on illusion and replace it with one based on reality, to stop financing politics with inflation, to stop simulating non-existent wealth and to stop transferring the cost
forward.
It is not a comfortable path, but it is the only one compatible with a society that wants to stop living at the expense of itself. Because an economy can tolerate errors; what it cannot tolerate indefinitely is a system based on hiding them. The problem isn't the fit. The problem is having built a model that only worked as long as no one asked who was paying. And when that question comes up, there is no longer a story to support it.
