I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

398 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
Hazlitt. Economics was no longer a disappointing science. Actually, it was now fascinating.
Perhaps it was even more than that. I was searching and reading Austrian books in an
almost frenetic way. Austrian economics became the subject of my master’s thesis.
In 1991, I spent a few months in Buenos Aires studying Austrian economics at ESEADE,
a graduate school. ESEADE has the best Austrian program in South America. There I had
access to a wide range of Austrian books and others in classical economics, political science,
methodology, law, and history with several outstanding professors. There I met the best
Austrian economist in Latin America and one of the best professors I ever had, Juan
Cachanosky, who got his Ph.D. under Hans Sennholz. There I also was introduced to
public choice and neoinstitutional economics.
Back in Porto Alegre, I had the opportunity of attending seminars and exchanging
ideas with Israel Kirzner, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Walter Block. It was time to pursue
a Ph.D. I was accepted at both Auburn University and George Mason University. Several
factors made me choose Auburn. One of them was the proximity of the Mises Institute.
The most important, perhaps, was a nice exchange of emails with Professor Robert Ekelund
about my research proposal, to investigate how Brazil fell behind the U.S. in terms of
economic performance. Ekelund was my adviser and his teaching made an extraordinary
contribution to my economic way of thinking.
Curiously, during my first two years in Auburn I never visited the Mises Institute. I
had decided to focus on my formal studies. By the middle of the program I was taking an
excellent externalities class. Andy Barnett, my professor, realized that I knew about Austrian
economics. He encouraged me be in touch with the Mises Institute. I started to attend
some seminars and soon got a scholarship from the Institute. It was very helpful at that
moment because my studies were funded in reals—the Brazilian currency—and Brazil had
50 percent currency devaluation. There again I came in contact with Rothbard’s ideas,
which I had put aside for several years. I read Man, Economy, and State. If I had to choose
one of his books I would pick Power and Market as the most striking.
I am teaching at one of the biggest private universities in Brazil. My university, as are
all others, supposed to follow Education Ministry guidelines. That narrows a little what is
possible to teach and what to research. For instance, by the end of the economics course,
all students must go through a national system of evaluation. The national exam is basically
mainstream economics. The economics department got an A in this exam. Despite that,
recently I was elected, by direct vote of students, as the best professor of the department. I
cannot deny that the clear way of thinking of Austrian economics explains a good deal of
this recognition. It seems that the students realize the advantages and the pleasure of studying
the real world with coherent deductions instead of fooling around with math models.
It is something that the status quo of the academic profession seems to have lost. I cannot
stop thinking what I would be doing today if I were not at the right place and at the right
time to see, accidentally, those free Austrian books.
Fernando Zanella is economics professor at Vale do Rio dos Sinos University (UNISINOS), Brazil,
and editor of Perspectiva Econômica.