Javier Milei is cutting tariffs on luxury American vehicles while millions of Argentines cannot afford to eat. The 10,000-unit exemption his government is finalizing will slash the price of Ford F-150s, Chevrolet Suburbans, and Mercedes-Maybachs â vehicles costing more than most Argentines earn in years. The Maybach GLS will find a tax-free path into Buenos Aires. The local automotive worker will find a new line at the unemployment office.
This is not a complex economic formula. It is a simple arithmetic of human cost. You are deciding whose dignity matters and whose can be discarded to balance a ledger. The prophet Amos named this inversion with precision: “They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” The accusation is not against trade but against a system in which the wealthy receive discounts while the poor are told to wait for benefits that never arrive. The trickle-down that was supposed to reach everyone has a way of stopping at the gated community.
We in the United States have a habit of cheering for these arrangements when they put cheaper goods on our shelves, so let me name my own complicity before I name yours. My country built its own wealth on the same bargain â opening markets when it suits the powerful and closing them when the powerful are threatened. I have been a beneficiary of that system my entire life. I have no standing to stand above Argentina’s choices. But I have the obligation that comes from being inside the arrangement: to name what I see. When we support a policy that benefits the executive suite while the line worker carries the risk, we are participating in the same abandonment you are signing into law.
Pope Francis, who knows this continent, warned in Evangelii Gaudium against “an economy that kills.” The phrase lands squarely here. A government that cuts tariffs on luxury vehicles while cutting the programs that keep children alive is not making a neutral economic choice. It is revealing what it values. Pope Leo XIII warned in Rerum Novarum that capital without a just regard for the worker is dead weight, and that the rights of the poor cannot be sacrificed to enrich a few. You are taking a policy tool meant to protect the domestic assembly line and handing it to the foreign luxury dealer. Pope John XXIII wrote in Pacem in Terris that any economic system failing the common good is structurally unjust. It does not operate on a first-come, first-served basis for the wealthy while the working class is told to compete with untaxed foreign capital.
To President Milei, if he would hear me: A trade policy that lowers the price of luxury goods while raising the price of survival for the poor is not liberalization. It is a transfer of advantage to those who already have it. Your own Catholic tradition, the prophets, and the poor themselves all say the same thing. The door of return is open. You can redesign this plan to protect the domestic worker while still allowing legitimate trade. You can prioritize the vehicles that carry families over the vehicles that carry status. You can remember that a president’s first obligation is not to the foreign automaker but to the citizen on the assembly line.
The people of Argentina â the ones who will never see a Mercedes-Maybach except on a street they do not live on â deserve an economy that treats their dignity as the measure of its success. That economy does not yet exist. But it could. The first step is to stop pretending that a luxury-tariff cut is a policy for everyone. A Mercedes-Maybach on the waterfront cannot outrun the hunger of a forgotten nation.