“Foreigners enjoy in the territory of the Nation all the civil rights of the citizen; they may exercise their industry, commerce and profession; own real estate, buy and alienate it; navigate the rivers and coasts; freely exercise their worship; testament and marry according to the laws.”

Article 20 of the Argentine Constitution, 1853

Unfortunately, we libertarians are grouped with the right. Nothing could be further from the truth. During the Spanish Civil War, libertarians fought alongside socialists and anarchists against violent facism, longing for the lost Liberal Triennium. Today we are grouped with the right-wing because governments are all socialist, and libertarians lie always uncomfortably against the State.

So speaks Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party:

“They (the left) want to muzzle Spaniards while they collude with the enemies of Spain: those who assault our borders.”

I am not right-wing. I love immigration, and all personal freedoms. But I am not a left-wing either. Neither during the Spanish Civil War, nor now, do I surrender into the bunch. Libertarians are anti-state, anti-violence, anti-control. We seek peace and market, material progress, industry and free labor, free movement, free thought, free speech and free religion.

Libertarians founded America. Hard-working immigrants, escaping oppressive governments, senseless wars, seeking to prosper by the work of their hands: true libertarians. Many know the American ethos of the Wild West: the frontier, the freedom of the plains, the cowboy. The old American way. Yet few know that it is also the Argentine ethos, and indeed, all of America’s ethos. The new world is the new frontier, the fertile desert waiting to be populated, the experiment of society founded by immigrants, which receives (or received) the world with open arms. Engraved in bronze under the statue of liberty in New York says Emma Lazarus:

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”

Immigration prejudices

But even we Americans and libertarians, descendants of immigrants, how many prejudices and sophisms we suffer! Juan Bautista Alberdi, classical liberal thinker, author of the Bases (“Bases and starting points for the political organization of the Argentine Republic” 1852, guide of the Argentine Constitution), holds the maxim: “To govern is to populate”. But he himself suffered, like everyone else, from various prejudices. On immigration he wrote:

“The free citizen of the United States is often the transformation of the free subject of free England, of free Switzerland, of free Belgium, of free Holland, of judicious and industrious Germany.”

The judicious and industrious Germany? The same Nordic blond who was for the Romans the uncivilized barbarian? The Viking who was the terror of the Middle Ages? What was industrious Germany doing during the tercentenary wars of the Protestant Reformations? What was free Europe doing during the decade of the French terror? During the genocide of the Congo, perpetrated by Leopold II of Free Belgium? During the Western front of World War I? Where was “Protestant Germany, industrious, a friend of rest, of domestic life and of social and religious freedom” when the death camps were being erected in 1933?

Alberdi still writes:

“To populate is to rot, to corrupt, to degenerate, to poison a country, when instead of populating it with the flower of the working population of Europe, it is populated with the trash of backward or less cultured Europe.”

2 million Italians arrived in New York at the turn of the 20th century, 17% of the city’s population. How can “backward or less cultured Europe” found the capital of the world? Texas and California, two of the most productive states in the country, were Spanish colonies until the mid-19th century.

There are richer cultures than others, but every immigrant arrives the same: poor, tired, broken, sick, uneducated, and yearning to breathe free.

“The most fruitful and useful way in which foreign wealth can be introduced and acclimatized in a new country, is that of an immigration of intelligent and hard-working population.”

What immigrant is not hard-worker? The only one who lazes is the local, comfortable, rooted, friend of subsidies, parasite of the one who works: the Greek aristocrat who depended on his slaves, the nobleman who lives on taxes, the eternal European student looking for the next scholarship. Which immigrant is not a hard-worker? They work overtime to compete against corporations (who are monopolies, instrumental to the State), they supply the market on holidays, they work (or would work) for coins, they work and that is enough.

What else is there? That prejudice of European civilization represents nothing more than table manners, personal hygiene standards and politically correct phrases. The market does not care about all these fictions of “education”: they are fashions of manners. Did the Islamic Empire need them at the end of the first millennium to advance science, industry and enrich Asia Minor and Africa?

It doesn’t matter that Alberdi was a racist. I am not an Alberdist. The important thing was written in the Constitution under article 20 (quote at the beginning of the article). Alberdi was racist because the neighborhood opinion among the well-dressed porteños was racist. Because the “cabecitas negras” made noise and dirtied the sidewalks. The port smelled bad, the machines were full of oil and grease, and the ladies got their stockings dirty. But the Argentine Constitution didn’t give a damn, and proudly wrote articles 14 to 21 on commercial, industrial and labor freedoms, which are now so lacking.

Today we are once again invited to give a damn about manners, forms, political correctness, the “presidential image”, and marketing maxims. The role of the State is not to listen to the neighbor, to the populace, to the TV presenters, to see who smells bad and who does not speak right. The Argentine Constitution, as well as the American one, knew it well: the State must protect industry, commerce, private property, the labor of the worker. It must protect the worker from every ministry, union, mafia, army and psycho-bully that seeks to destroy (or “reorganize”).

America is libertarian

The Argentine ethos was codified by Martin Fierro: he lived in peace until the army kidnapped him, dragged him to the other side of the Pampas, forced him to keep a fort and kill the Indian. They thus destroyed his life, his family and his work. Good were his days when he had peace and enjoyed his private life, his children and wife.

This is the American experience par excellence: there is peace and progress, there is family and work, until the State arrives to steal, destroy with illusions of grandeur and wearing a uniform, announcing inflation, monetary policies, expropriation and regulations.

For the rest of his life, Martin Fierro lived on the run as a deserter. The State persecuted him, instead of protecting his property and family. This is how the “barrani” merchant lives, the worker who prefers to be paid under the counter because otherwise he will not make ends meet, the one who hides merchandise so as not to declare it, the gangster wannabe who is angry because it is not legal for him to work: because he lacks a permit, because entrepreneurship is a bureaucratic nightmare, because there is no job that will employ him with the minimum wage, because he produces something ilegal.

The shantytowns are a breeding ground for opportunity, a land of promise. Filled with the raw force of young people, hungry. Full of energy, time, desire for the future: people, alas, with hands to work. Why is the cowboy a rebel? Because he has no choice. Because his house is not his, his work is illegal and his money is worthless. Not because the rest of the population condemns him to contempt, but because the State condemns him to slavery. “To be controlled in economic activity is to be controlled in everything”, (Hayek, 1944).

“To govern is to populate” says the Constitution. It should say “To govern is to let people work”. Today the frontiers are the slums and the poor worker. Yet the slum worker is not the barbarian, but the settler, the immigrant with a “little black head”. Today, as always, the immigrant, the poor is industry, is work, if we allow him to work at all costs. The young people who leave the country, those who are trapped in cycles of organized violence, those of us who have energy and time, announce to the State: We want to work! We want to undertake, we want to be owners, we want to progress, we want to open, assemble, sell, change, grow and enrich. Classical liberalism is the only idea that defends the individual in his work, against his sole enemy: the senseless majority.

I am libertarian

I am not right-wing, and neither is the Argentine Constitution of 1853. Even though Alberdi has illiberal touches:

“To govern is to populate very well; but to populate is a science, and this science is none other than political economy, which considers population as an instrument of wealth and an element of prosperity. The main part of the art of populating is the art of distributing population. Sometimes, to increase it too much is the opposite of populating; it is to diminish and ruin the population of the country.”

Rationality is socialist, the right-wing is socialist. It believes that it can, and must, control. That the role of the State is scientific. That reason can administer better than the impossible decentralized mind of the market. That the absolute indivisible individual is a tool for civilization, and not the other way around. And here we liberals separate ourselves from rationalists, empiricists and positivists. We have faith in the incomprehensible market, or at least, we have more faith in it than in the pretentious State.

Personally, I think Alberdi is (somewhat) liberal, and fortunately that is what filtered into the Constitution. His faith in the work of the individual and the market, and that optimism towards freedom comes through. Thus he writes:

“Liberty is power, strength, ability to do or not to do what our will desires. As human strength and power reside in the intelligent and moral capacity of man rather than in his material or animal capacity, there is no other means of extending and propagating liberty, than to generalize and extend the conditions of liberty, which are education, industry, wealth, capacity, in short, in which consists the force which is called liberty.”