Antonio Escohotado died. In his own way, a giant. Of those on whose shoulders we rise to orient us in the story. Known in Argentina for his struggles against drug prohibition, he is not so well known for his historical works. A shame, it should be.

In the three volumes of his masterpiece, The enemies of commerce. A moral history of the property, a fascinating two thousand page journey from Plato to the present, Escohotado barely mentions Argentina. But its reading allows us to understand that the atavistic Argentine “economic problem” is actually a “cultural problem.” Cultural as the origin of the “great enrichment” of the last two centuries, teaches Deirdre McCloskey; cultural as the “revolution of the mind” that from the seventeenth century produced the “culture of growth”, shows Joel Mokyr; cultural as the prodigious drive to “escape poverty,” confirms Angus Deaton.

It is good to remember it while the umpteenth negotiation with the Monetary Fund takes place, when the Minister of Economy tries the trick of the three cards with the budget numbers. A spent ritual, repeated a thousand times: the good policeman feigns good sense, the bad one excites the moods of the “people”, the choir implores for the “social debt”. Where were they when public spending got out of hand and inflation soared? What do they do when subsidies distort prices and tariffs protect inefficiency? They celebrate social “sensitivity”: applause. If sensitivity served against poverty, Argentina would be immune to it. Instead, one and the other grow together. Is it a problem of culture? Of “moral history”?

What brings us back to Escohotado, many floors up. By life and ideas, he was an annoying figure. Liberal, libertarian, right, left? Libero, nothing more! And the annoying pleases posterity more than contemporaries, or they don’t like them at all. This explains the disproportion between the enormous legacy and its reduced echo. What can we do: history is full of misunderstood geniuses and illustrious cretins.

For starters, what is the “trade” you write about? Exchange of goods, of course. For profit, what doubt? I already see noses twist:pecunia you! But it is much more. Nothing like exchange promotes civil liberty and material progress, personal autonomy and international cooperation: from the Hanseatic League to the pioneers of the industrial revolution, from the Dutch merchants to the “non-conformists” landed in America, from Athens to the globalization. The mercantile society is the antechamber of the open, dynamic, complex society; the kind of society in which new ideas and responses to needs flourish, entrepreneurship and technological innovation, financial instruments, and scientific curiosity. It is not a providential epic, but the daily work of millions of people, the story of the risks they took and the crops they sowed. To feel more fulfilled and improve your life, make it more pleasant, comfortable, interesting. By doing so, they also unthinkingly improved that of many others.

But commerce always had many enemies, the protagonists of Escohotado’s work. Countless numbers, from the dawn of civilization to the present day: from Sparta to Rosa Luxemburg, from the New Testament to the non-global, from Thomas Müntzer to the Frankfurt School. After all, a thousand faces of a single enemy: the religious communism of the ancients, the atheistic communism of the modern ones, so different, so linked. He seems to see them, Marx and Castro on the Jesuit benches, Stalin singing in the choir of the diocese.

Be careful, however, with trivializing. Escohotado distinguishes well between reformist socialists and messianic communists, liberals by privilege and free men by vocation. He does not have a conservative hair, neither economically, nor morally. On the contrary: “live and let live”, he used to say, against those who try to teach others “how to live”. And commerce is the powerful engine of change that emancipates itself from the prison of dogma, from the tyranny of the group, from the suffocating “love” of the community. And that contributes to unhinge the bars of poverty, of course. Escohotado is not carried away either by the anti-communism of operetta that is so fashionable today: he uses the brush, not the brush, chisels, not cracks. He does not like the enemies of commerce, but is intrigued by the undying power of the communist moral universe. Therefore, search for the sources by climbing back up the walls of history.

And he finds them, and how he finds them! The historical alternative to commercial society It is, under different forms according to the times, the military and clerical. A class order that fights against worldliness and invokes sacrifice, detests pleasure and cultivates guilt. Once founded in the cradle and in obedience to the priestly class, it is today based on secular religions and parties of the “chosen”. It is they, against the “greedy” merchants and the “cynical” laws of the market, who seek to establish what is moral and immoral, useful or useless, beautiful or ugly, right or wrong, “national and popular” or “neoliberal”.

Sitting in dogma and slavery, economic rent and moral conformityFrom the era of the powerful conventual networks to that of the immense state bureaucracies, this order celebrates the “people” and despises the individual, hates the civility of the bourgeoisie and idolizes the warrior courage of heroes and saints, persecutes heresy and demands orthodoxy. The “anti-economic attitude”, in the words of Carl Menger, father of the Austrian school of economics, is inherent to him: from the Sermon on the Mount to “the empire” of Toni Negri, from San Juan Crisóstomo to Hugo Chávez, from the ebionitas sects to the present alterworldismo, the property is a robbery and the poverty, innocence; commerce, sin, and distribution, justice; money, dung, and gift, purity. What tremendous penalties the Book of Revelation announces to merchants! The myth of “restitution”, the most powerful communist myth, is born like this: on the day of Judgment, the poor will ascend to heaven and they will fall to hell. Hence the millennial movements and the class struggle, hence the twin concepts of redemption and revolution.

Which brings us back to Argentina, where atheistic communism and religious communism coexist in symbiosis, and the enemies of commerce have found paradise. Its history pours contempt for bourgeois “vices”, hosannas for religious and warrior “virtues”: long live death, long live holy poverty, how many times have they resounded in one way or another! Does it have to do with its spectacular decline? Trusting in providence, Argentina neglected the forecast; while waiting for the revolutionary catharsis or the “national project”, he excommunicated the ideas and attitudes that favor the “wealth of nations.” No pauperist culture ever eliminated poverty. Escohotado teaches.