I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Fernando Zanella 397
axis powers instead of allowing American military bases in Brazil. CSN was, and still is,
considered a watershed in the Brazilian industrialization process, an industrialization
with central command. Government, in the words of Vargas, had the duty of organizing
the “market anarchy.” My father died when I was three years old and my family moved
to Porto Alegre.
I always had a passion for economics; I am not sure why. I used to buy books about
economics even before going to the university. When I was thirteen years old I used to do
my mother’s income taxes, my first concrete experience with the “mafia’s” work. Brazil was
not yet a democratic country in 1982, the year that I entered a public university to study
economics. After years of hampered economy, Brazil had a widespread system of inefficient
state-owned companies, all kinds of regulations, and uncontrolled debts at all levels of
government. CSN was finally privatized in 1993. Its net income jumped from US$ 22
million to US$ 154 million in 1994.
My undergraduate studies were pretty much focused on Keynes, Marx, and neoclassical
economics. It was then fashionable to study Marx. During my studies, Brazil went
through an external debt repudiation, several price controls, and a relentless inflation
process. Everything was quite amazing for an economics student. However, I could not
make much sense from what I learned in the academy besides ending up deeply disappointed
with the Marxist rhetoric and the Keynesian models (and their variants).
I pursued a master’s degree in economics. After the first year, and the traditional micro,
macro, math, and econometrics classes I was again a little disappointed. I was mastering
how to deal with math models and textbooks tricks without creating connections with the
outside world, actually, the real world. Then I came across, by accident, books on Austrian
economics.
Walking through the university library I saw a shelf with books which were being given
away, for free. I was struck by two new books, recently translated to Portuguese, on that
shelf. They were Unemployment and Monetary Policy by F.A. Hayek and The Essential von
Mises by Murray Rothbard. I asked the librarian why they were giving away those books.
She told me that they needed more space on the shelves and those books were duplicates
and no one, ever, took them out to. My first surprise was that Hayek was a Nobel Prize
winner in economics whom I had never heard of before. Those two books were just fascinating.
For the first time, economics made sense to me. The theoretical approach was
coherent, solid, and quite applied to the Brazilian reality. Later, I met the head of the graduate
program and asked if he knew about Hayek and Austrian economics. He said that he
did not know much but he believed that Hayek was “a kind of monetarist.” I talked with
another professor, a neoclassical economist who held a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt. He said that
he did not know about Austrian economics, but actually had brought from the U.S. a book
that he never read and he believed would be of interest to me. He lent me The Foundations
of Modern Austrian Economics, edited by Edwin Dolan which consists, mainly, of articles
by Kirzner, Lachmann, and Rothbard. After that I read The Capitalist Alternative by
Alexander Shand and all the Austrian books available in Portuguese. They were Human
Action and Liberalism by Ludwig von Mises, Competition and Entrepreneurship by Israel
Kirzner, Denationalization of Money by Hayek, and Economics in One Lesson by Henry