For much of the 20th century, politics stopped discussing how to protect people's freedom and began to focus on another, much more ambitious idea: guaranteeing material outcomes. From there, the concept of "right" began to expand almost infinitely.
First came the so-called social rights. Then came new generations of rights linked to well-being, happiness, the environment, guaranteed access to goods and services, and even increasingly broad demands on the State. The problem is that behind that morally appealing language, there exists a much deeper discussion that is rarely raised openly.
Can there be a right that compels another person to work to satisfy it?
Here appears a central difference that modern public debate tends to ignore: the distinction between negative rights and positive rights.
Negative rights are those that require others not to interfere. The right not to be robbed, censored, beaten, or arbitrarily imprisoned. They are rights compatible with individual freedom because they do not require appropriating someone else's work. They simply imply that no one interferes with another.
Positive rights work differently. When someone claims to have a "right" to receive housing, health care, education, or certain material goods, an obligation on third parties necessarily arises. Because those resources do not appear on their own. They must be financed, produced, and sustained by someone.
And that is where one of the great contradictions of modern States begins.
In the name of expanding rights, the coercive power of the State over those who produce, work, invest, or generate wealth often ends up being expanded. What is presented as institutionalized solidarity ends up depending on increasingly high taxes, more invasive regulations, and a permanent transfer of resources managed by politics.
For decades, Argentina took that logic to the extreme.
The country built a political culture where practically everything came to be considered a right guaranteed by the State. Subsidies, artificial prices, expansive public employment, permanent assistance, economic controls, and a growing bureaucratic machinery financed by tax pressure, inflation, and debt.
The result was not a freer or more prosperous society. It was exactly the opposite.
As the State promised more things, it also needed to appropriate more resources. And the more that dynamic advanced, the less autonomy individuals retained. The citizen ceased to be someone responsible for building their own life project and became a subject dependent on political decisions.
That is why the underlying discussion is not only economic. It is moral and institutional.
Every concrete freedom needs a material base. The freedom to undertake, for example, does not exist merely as a principle written in a Constitution. It requires capital, inputs, energy, credit, access to markets, and the ability to produce without arbitrary obstacles. When political power controls those resources or conditions access to them through regulations, permits, controls, or bureaucratic discretion, it can limit economic freedom even without formally prohibiting private activity.
Argentina offers numerous examples of that logic. Companies that could legally exist but could not import inputs, access dollars, remit profits, or sustain their operations due to regulatory and fiscal pressure. The result was an economy where production depended less on entrepreneurial capacity and more on the relationship with political power.
Modern interventionism often does not need to nationalize or prohibit. It is enough to control the material conditions that make private activity possible.
That is why private property is not simply an economic issue. It also serves as a limit to political power. Where individuals retain economic autonomy, there is greater room to dissent, criticize, and act independently of the State.
The management of Javier Milei is perhaps reopening, for the first time in decades, this discussion head-on in Argentina. Not only around the deficit or public spending but about the very size of the State and the relationship between freedom, individual responsibility, and political power.
The deepest cultural change does not only involve ordering fiscal accounts. It involves asking again what a right really means and how far the State can expand without ultimately eroding the freedoms it claims to protect.
Because when everything becomes a politically guaranteed right, someone always ends up paying the cost. And the more things power promises, the more resources it needs to extract from society to sustain them.
Freedom then ceases to be individual autonomy and comes to depend on permits, subsidies, and structures managed from above.
That may be one of the great ideological debates of the coming years: whether societies will continue to indefinitely expand the obligations of the State or whether they will return to placing limits on political power to regain spaces of responsibility, property, and individual freedom.
