On the 24th of September 2024, Javier Milei, the President of the Argentinian Republic, told the General Assemblee of the United Nations in New York: “I want to be clear about something, so that there are no misinterpretations: Argentina, which is undergoing a profound process of change, has decided to embrace the ideas of freedom; those ideas that say that all citizens are born free and equal before the law, that we have inalienable rights granted by the Creator, among which are the right to life, liberty and property. Those principles, which guide the process of change that we are carrying out in Argentina, are also the principles that will guide our international conduct from now on.”
Not a politician
“… for those who do not know”, Milei said, “I am not a politician, I am an economist, a libertarian liberal economist, who has never had the ambition to be a politician … and who was honored with the position of President of the Argentine Republic, in the face of the resounding failure of more than a century of collectivist policies … that destroyed our country.” In spite of being an economist and not a politician, Milei stressed that the restoration of his wrecked country doesn’t just require a change in economic and financial policies, but that it cannot be achieved without a fundamental change in the world view underlying them.
Unalienable rights
I leave the answer to the question whether President Milei is indeed a libertarian liberal economist to those who consider themselves schooled in libertarian liberal economy. But when it comes to Milei’s concept of Man’s unalienable rights, the Argentinian President shows that he is, indeed, an economist who couldn’t help himself substituting the right to property for that classic God-given right that was defined as the Pursuit of Happiness in the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence. When it comes to defining Man’s unalienable rights, this Preamble stands as the seminal and fundamental hallmark. Without a doubt, Milei is familiar with the text. He knows that Thomas Jefferson and his co-authors did not declare that the Creator of Man granted Men the right to property. No. They declared that the Creator endowed Man with the Pursuit of Happiness which they defined as one of Man’s unalienable rights.
The Declaration’s Preamble says it all
On the 4th of July 1776, in Philadelphia, not far from where Javier Milei addressed the UN Assemblee, the representatives of the 13 brandnew American States, while they were assembled in Congress, unanimously declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Belief or holding self-evident truths
In his UN-speech, President Milei emphatically declared that Argentinians now “believe in the defense of life for all; … in the defense of property for all; … in freedom of speech for all; … in freedom of worship for all; … in freedom of commerce for all; and … in limited governments, all of them.” No matter how commendable these words and Milei’s intentions may be, the late 18th century Americans did not believe in all these lofty principles. No. They held as self-evident truth that just Governments are limited because they are instituted to serve no other purpose than to secure certain unalienable rights and that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That’s it.
A Bill of Rights
To underscore the limited nature of their newly established Federal Government, the Americans enumerated freedom of speech, freedom of worship, the principle of habeas corpus, etc., in various “declaratory and restrictive clauses” which, on December 15, 1791, they ratified and added to the Constitution as the 10 Amendments that became known as the Bill of Rights. [i] This was done to precisely delimit the powers of their Federal Government by expressly prohibiting it from meddling with the enumerated rights and freedoms by way of “misconstruction or abuse of its powers” and “as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government” in order to “best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution”. In fact, by amending the Constitution, Congress bound itself to unconditionally respect the rights enumerated in the Bill. It was a Ulysses pact.
Property differs from Life and Liberty
It was in that Bill of Rights that the American Founders brought up the right to property. In what became the Constitution’s 5th Amendment, the First Congress of the United States had laid down that “no person … shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” By defining property as something that may not be taken without just compensation, the Founders distinguished property from Life and Liberty in the sense that, while property can be taken without or with just compensation, there can’t be any just or unjust compensation when Life and/or Liberty are “taken”. Neither can there be any compensation when that other unallienable right, the Pursuit of Happiness, is “taken”. Why not? Because Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are rights that are unalienable, wherefore they can neither be given nor taken. And so, it follows axiomatically, that when things can’t be alienated, matters of compensation simply can’t be of concern. Besides this, since all Men were endowed with these rights by the Creator, there’s no need to give or take what everyone is already endowed with. It took the genius of Thomas Jefferson to formulate this so simply, clearly and unequivocally in the Declaration’s Preamble.
The “unalienable” Right to Property
Does this mean that Governments are incapable of constraining and suppressing Life, Liberty and/or the Pursuit of Happiness? No. It is precisely because Governments, and the UN for that matter, tend to suppress Man’s unalienable rights that the Preamble was inserted into the Declaration of Independence. Likewise, this is precisely the reason why President Milei is trying to repair what he described as Argentina’s “poverty, brutalization, anarchy and a fatal absence of freedom” by rekindling Man’s unalienable rights. When placed in the perspective of the American Declaration of Independence, President Milei’s speech is meaningful only because he acknowledgded and expressly confirmed that the source of our unalienable rights is Man’s Creator. And, who knows, perhaps he figured that even though the Americans “of old” didn’t think that the Creator granted us the right to property, it would be a great idea to embrace and hold as truth that He did. In this embrace Milei lifted the source of this right from the secular world of Man to the Divine Ground of Beingness. Instead of wresting the right to property from the hands of the collectivists as if it were an alienable entitlement, Milei just placed it out of their reach by defining it as unalienable and granted by the Creator.
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[i] On September 25, 1789, the First Congress of the United States proposed 12 amendments to the Constitution. The 1789 Joint Resolution of Congress proposing the amendments is on display in the Rotunda in the National Archives Museum. Ten of the proposed 12 amendments were ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures on December 15, 1791. The ratified Articles (Articles 3–12) constitute the first 10 amendments of the Constitution, or the U.S. Bill of Rights. In 1992, 203 years after it was proposed, Article 2 was ratified as the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. Article 1 was never ratified.
