In 1999, the publisher Leonardo Facco published, in its “Laissez-faire” series, a book of interviews edited by Alberto Mingardi from the title Freedom Extremists: Dialogues on Libertarianism in the Internet Age. In the preface to that volume Sergio Ricossa recalls how the libertarian ferment that could be felt in the prestigious Mont Pèlerin Society contrasted with the provincial climate of an Italy refractory to libertarian and libertarian thoughtand always ready to strangle liberalism and the exponents of liberal culture, with the tentacles of the worst statist and authoritarian ideologies.
Ricossa wrote: “Fortunately for me, Bruno Leoni lived in Turin. In Turin culture, Bruno Leoni was a foreign body. But the character’s character allowed him to laugh at the attacks, never frontal, always hypocritical, brought against him by the intelligentsia of his and my city. As secretary of the Mont Pèlerin Society, he was in contact with university centers around the world, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, and was a friend of many scientific personalities who had already been awarded the Nobel or were about to receive it. Leoni loved Turin but had no illusions that it was more than a small provincial city, with limited cultural horizons in the field of the so-called moral sciences. When, out of his goodness, he introduced me to the Mont Pèlerin Society, I too understood that, if the spectacle of Turin, and even of corrupt Italy and senile Europe, was depressing, the view on a planetary scale was very different. The opportunity of some trips to the United States, an immense, youthful and all-encompassing country, confirmed to me that I could allow myself a certain dose of optimism in the future” (Freedom Extremists: Dialogues on Libertarianism in the Internet Age Leonardo Facco Editore – Treviglio, 1999).
Written a quarter of a century ago, these words are prescient and still relevant today, in which a “senile” Europe trudges submerged by bureaucratic regulations while elsewhere an innovative America builds IT giants, satellite networks and space rockets, literally positioning itself on another planet! Indeed, we should say “the Americas”, because, as if to confirm that certain dose of optimism for the future that Ricossa advocated, in Argentina we are seeing a president moving on libertarian tracks. The professor Milei he is a professor of economics and knows, citing by heart, the work and thoughts of the great economists and liberal and libertarian thinkers, starting with the Nobel Friedrich Von Hayek; furthermore, it is waging a battle against statist and authoritarian ideologies, calling together the varied ed heterogeneous libertarian galaxy spread across the planetfighting against the mystifications that are continually made regarding liberal, libertarian and libertarian theories.
And once again Ricossa’s words sound almost prophetic: “In the Mont Pèlerin Society we were and are without exception libertarians, at least in the sense that everyone classifies themselves as they like: de gustibus…And I think many would accept the qualification of anarchists without fear, as long as they are anarcho-individualists. I am among those. The important thing is to put an enormous distance between us and the liberal socialists or liberal socialists, not to mention the liberal communists, the liberal national socialists, the liberal fascists. These monsters should be kept away. They belong to teratology, not to moral philosophy. They indicate that the human head is susceptible to accepting the most explosive and repellent contradictions, while still believing itself to be rational. Indeed, it is precisely the extreme rationalists, who mostly end up in madness or tyranny (in madness and tyranny), who love to embellish themselves with substances which they call collective optima, maximums of social happiness, universal harmonization, total enlightenment, triumph of Man, and away we go. They offer us the return to an earthly paradise of utopian perfection, too beautiful for us to have the right to refuse it, so beautiful that we give them the right to impose it on us.” (Ibid)
Today, as then, it is necessary to oppose the spread of political and economic phenomena belonging to teratology. Let’s start from the foundations of progress: Long live freedom, dear!
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