I'm done with the race tracks,
I'm quiting all gambling
a dead heat I don't want
to ever watch again
but if a young filly
looks sure bet on Sunday
I'll gamble all I have,
what can I do then!
~ Carlos Gardel Por una Cabeza (English translation)
Joel Bowman, with today’s Notes from the End of the World…
The gauchos have placed their bets… now we wait to see, along with the rest of the weary world, whether their long-shot outsider proves to be a sprinter…or a stayer.
You’ll recall that the long-suffering Argentines recently elected to office the world’s first (self-described) libertarian president, in Sr. Javier Milei. Now we shall see, for better or worse, whether the people are ready for the freedom to which they lay claim. Here we recall Henry David Thoreau’s wonderful opener in his essay, Civil Disobedience:
I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe – “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government they have.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
A New Paradigm
Adroit readers will notice Thoreau’s dangling qualifier… “when men are prepared for it.”
For their part, the Argentines have been “preparing” for liberty for the past 75 years. That is, they’ve been running (and re-running… ad bloody nauseam) some version of state-sponsored utopia since before most people alive can remember. From paternalistic Peronism on the “left” to military dictatorship on the “right,” the porteños have lurched from one extreme of the political pendulum to the other.
What, then, can we expect from this newest foray…led, as his critics never tire of reminding us, by a “chainsaw-wielding tantric sex coach who names his canines after dead economists”?
Hopelessly sanguine, your man on the scene here reports a contagious optimism in the city’s buenos aires. Could it be that the people here sense an emerging distinction between political paradigms old and new? That the simple-minded delineation between so-called “Right” and “Left” no longer applies as it once did? That the choice between two candidates working for the same, elite establishment is really an illusion of choice?
Libertarian philosophy – cousin to what the great Leo Tolstoy called “spiritual anarchism” – proposes a distinct paradigm from these tired old textbook definitions.
In place of Right vs. Left, it proposes Freedom vs Authoritarianism. In lieu of Progressive vs. Conservative, Democrat vs. Republican, Liberal vs. Labour – loose words and hack parties that change and morph from nation to nation, era to era, election to election – the libertarian sees only Freedom vs. Tyranny.
He favors voluntarism over violence, in other words. Cooperation over coercion. Freedom over force. Rules over rulers.
And when his fellow men are prepared for such a world, they shall finally stand up and deserve it.
Stay tuned for more Notes from the End of the World…
Saludos!
Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Anarchy on the Pampas