Ensure the benefits of freedom over time!

The nineteenth century was, for Argentina, the century of hope and growth. After decades of internal conflicts and tyranny, a generation emerged that decided to organize the country on solid foundations: institutions, respect for the law, private property, openness to the world, and economic freedom. The thought of Juan Bautista Alberdi, whose influence on the Constitution of 1853 was decisive in transforming a fragmented land into a thriving Nation.

That liberal Argentina was not a theoretical utopia. It was a concrete reality. In just a few decades, we became one of the most prosperous countries on the planet. Investments, immigrants, and opportunities arrived. Argentine wages competed with those in Europe. The world saw in our country a promise of progress and modernity. Freedom was the engine of that growth.

But the twentieth century represented exactly the opposite, the decline of that model. Institutional breaks, the advance of statism, endless bureaucracy, corporatism, and the idea that the State should intervene in every aspect of economic life slowly extinguished Argentina's potential.

The leadership abandoned the culture of effort and embraced the logic of redistribution. The State ceased to be an arbiter to become a boss, businessman, and political loot. Those who produced were punished, and those who lived off privilege were rewarded. Tax pressure became suffocating. Inflation destroyed savings. Merit was replaced by dependency. And so, while the world advanced, Argentina regressed.

However, even in the darkest moments of statist predominance, there were Argentines who did not resign themselves. Intellectuals, academics, journalists, entrepreneurs, foundations, study centers, and spaces for liberal dissemination kept the light of freedom alive when it seemed that the single thought was advancing without resistance.

For decades, they fought the cultural battle often in solitude, enduring mockery, isolation, and political marginalization. But they understood something fundamental: ideas have consequences, and when a society abandons the ideas of freedom, it inevitably ends up losing prosperity and dignity.

Thanks to that silent perseverance, liberalism survived the advance of collectivism and was able to be replanted in new generations. They kept the intellectual torch alive that today again illuminates hope for Argentina; they were our generation of '37 during the last century.

That is why the twenty-first century began to show signs of a profound change. Millions of Argentines began to question the old recipes for failure and to turn their gaze towards the ideas that once made the country great. A new generation rediscovered the value of individual responsibility, merit, private property, limits on power, and economic freedom.

In this context, the figure of President Javier Milei emerges, not only as a political leader but as the expression of a cultural break with decades of statist resignation. His arrival in government represents the courage to discuss what had seemed forbidden for years: the size of the State, political spending, tax pressure, monetary issuance, and the suffocating weight of bureaucracy on those who produce, work, and the fact that there can be no development when society spends more than it produces.

But the real challenge exceeds a government and a man. Deep transformations are not sustained solely from political power; they are sustained when a society adopts certain ideas and values as its own. That is why the cultural battle is decisive.

President Milei recently expressed it: “The success of this process will depend on whether Argentines permanently choose the path of freedom and punish the populist recipes that have caused so much harm.” Because nations do not change due to the fate of a leader, but by the conviction of a people.

Ideas are more important than men. And that is perhaps the most transcendent lesson of this historical time: true justice does not arise from clientelism or eternal subsidies. It arises from an economy that grows, from companies that invest, from workers who progress, and from a State that does not destroy the efforts of those who produce with taxes and regulations.

The State must generate clear rules; everything else must be left in the hands of a free, creative, and entrepreneurial society. There is no progress or future when merit is punished and privilege protected.

That is why this time can mark a turning point. If we learn the lessons of history, the nineteenth century was the century of organization and liberal growth, the twentieth century was the century of statist decline, and the twenty-first century can become the century of the renaissance of freedom.

One date should serve as our horizon: 2053, when 200 years of our National Constitution are fulfilled. That anniversary should not find us discussing how to survive, but how to lead again in the West the values of freedom, progress, the culture of work, and the unrestricted respect for the individual.

Economic and political reforms can initiate a change, but that is why the importance of the cultural battle: only a society convinced of the ideas of freedom can make it permanent towards that date.

The key to Argentine progress, as the president said: “Is in the Argentines, … in that we definitively decide to embrace the ideas of freedom again.”