The designation of Adrian Ravier As the new presidential spokesperson for Javier Milei, he brought with him a piece of information that the archive does not reveal: in 2013, the liberal economist wrote a column titled “Axel Kicillof, my professor”, in which he reviewed with evident admiration his time in the chair of Marxist Economics at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the UBA, where Kicillof was an assistant.
In that text, Ravier highlighted the expository clarity of the current Buenos Aires governor and Peronist presidential candidate, his ability to go to the original sources of economic thought and his mastery of microeconomics, macroeconomics and the history of economic thought. The note was published in October 2013, a year after the nationalization of YPF.
The praise was striking even by then: Ravier was already an economist identified with the Austrian School, at the ideological antipodes of the Marxism that Kicillof taught. Even so, in the column he acknowledged having purchased and recommended to his own students Kicillof’s doctoral thesis book on the foundations of Keynes’s General Theory, and a second volume titled Seven lessons from the history of economic thought. He also described his former teacher as someone with clear ideas, who found it difficult to lie and was difficult to appear confused in public. The column was published in the Infobae opinion blog, where Ravier was a columnist.
Two years later, in 2015, with Kicillof at the head of the Kirchnerist Ministry of Economy, Ravier published a text with a radically different tone: “The biggest mistakes of Kicillof’s management”where he questioned the economic policy of Kirchnerism in eight points: the growth model, the level of public spending, the fiscal deficit, inflation, exchange rate policy and the role of the State, among others. The contrast between both pieces—the academic praise of 2013 and the technical challenge of 2015—was what reactivated the circulation of the texts on networks after the announcement of his appointment as Milei’s spokesperson. The file, in these cases, does not distinguish between the classroom and the Rosada.
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