By Michael Soltys, Buenos Aires Herald Senior Editor

Freedom should never be confused with a free-for-all and unless this is clearly understood, the currently inconceivable prospect of a successful Kirchner presidential candidacy in 2011 could remain very much alive. There can be no doubt that last month's shock midterm defeat abruptly freed the country from the creeping authoritarianism of the presidential couple but this liberation cannot be allowed to degenerate into an anarchy which could create nostalgia for a firm hand. And the ingredients for mild anarchy are already surfacing.

Price and wage restraints are being subjected to a crossfire from businessmen who feel they can blithely ignore de-authorized Domestic Trade Secretary Guillermo Moreno to jack up prices (including and especially food and supermarket prices) and from trade unionists pushing for overdue pay increases in a crisis year thus far bereft of any serious collective wage bargaining (including and especially erstwhile Kirchner ultra-loyalist CGT Secretary-General Hugo Moyano). Meanwhile a rapidly dwindling fiscal surplus is vulnerable to various new pressures ranging from an onslaught against farm export duties, protests against delayed reimbursements and insistent demands from provincial governors for fairer federal revenue-sharing.

There is nothing especially wrong or unnatural about any of these pressures. Putting up prices might seem illogical during a global recession as well as the result of an immature Argentine business practice of trying to squeeze more out of surviving customers when the market shrinks but it also becomes entirely natural when measured against price controls which lasted far too long and ultimately failed to serve even their political purpose. And why should workers play along with INDEC statistics bureau's fictions of virtually zero inflation (not that Moyano's teamsters necessarily qualify as the most downtrodden, having been almost more worried about their income tax floors than their wage levels in recent years)? Who can possibly argue against the urgency of cutting export duties in order to tap the resurgence of world commodity prices? Or against a drought-stricken inland's need for its fair share of revenues?

The only problem is that the combined effect of all these reasonable demands could end up giving the economy the equivalent of swine flu - i.e. a mild fever for most which nevertheless has devastating consequences. A country where everybody raises prices and wages while cutting back taxes will not work - it is no longer a question of opposing the government's inept juggling of these balls (already soundly defeated) but finding a new way.