I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

2 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
benefits of free markets and limited government as I would later be. Reading F.A. Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom twenty years later (1986) helped to place all of the connections in
clearer perspective for me.
At the conclusion of my undergraduate studies at the University of Ghana, Legon in
1971, I proudly called myself a Fabian socialist. The Marxian economics course, which was
part of the core of the B.Sc. (Economics) degree, meant very little to me, given the failed
Ghanaian socialist experiment. I had been impressed by some of my teachers that J.M. Keynes
had fashioned under Fabian socialism an enlightened way of managing an economy. In
those days the competing approaches to economic development was between controls over
the “excesses of the free market” and “completely free markets.” The notion of government
failure hadn’t gained currency. I took the side of controls in my first graduate conference
paper, bad-mouthing arguments for free markets by Harry Johnson, quoted in Gerald
Meier’s Leading Issues in Economic Development. Graduate school gave me little guidance
on the choice between free markets and controls, as it involved the usual diet of economic
theory, mathematics for economists, statistics, and econometrics.
However, my interest in economic policy at the time led to my writing commentaries
in a quasi-academic magazine, The Legon Observer, published at the university. I criticized
government policies as they caused more grief to the population than relief. My criticisms
included the support of import substitution industries and a massive devaluation that pegged
the official rate above the black market rate in December 1971. My last article during the
1970s was “The Sugar Problem,” published in 1972. In it I argued that the new military
government’s threat to close down any shops in front of which people had formed lines to
buy packets of sugar at the government’s dictated price, would hurt more than help the
problem of a sugar shortage. The fact was that buying two packets of sugar, which the
government’s quota allowed, and selling these on the black market would more than pay
the official daily minimum wage. I argued that the government would help ordinary people
by either abolishing the controlled price or at least raising it to reflect the price of sugar on
the world market or in neighboring countries. Of course, the government paid no heed,
and sugar soon disappeared from the shops. Other subsequent interventionist policies of
the military government, including restrictions on imports, controls over fares charged by
private transport operators, pegging gasoline prices, and higher taxes on cocoa and other
export products drove the economy into further ruin. The lesson of the harm from such
interferences in the market process was there to be learned by anyone who could make the
right connection between cause and effect. Thus, by the time I left Ghana in 1976 for
further studies in Canada as part of a faculty development program at the University of
Ghana, Legon (I had been employed as a Research Fellow/Lecturer there since 1974), all I
needed was the theoretical foundation fully to become a consistent advocate of free markets
and limited government.
I spent my first year in Canada at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
where, once again, the courses in economic theory, mathematics, applied statistics, and
econometrics gave me little insight into free market economic philosophy. After taking an
MA at UBC, I continued at the University of Toronto where an excellent graduate course
in the history of economic thought given by Sam Hollander in the 1978/79 academic year