CERC mundo afora

Nesta última quarta-feira, dia 11 de março de 2009, fui convidado a falar da minha experiencia como estudante e como criador de um grupo estudantil voltado à promoção da liberdade na Academia. Neste evento falaram também estudantes de países tais como Bélgica, Canadá, Guatemala e Rússia.

O vídeo e o áudio do evento devem estar disponíveis em breve. Confira a transcrição abaixo:

Speech given at the seminar “E-Leadership - Threats to Liberty from Around the World”, promoted by Students For Liberty and Atlas Economic Research Foundation. March 11th, 2009.

Fábio M. Ostermann


As Monica mentioned, being a libertarian in Brazil is probably not the easiest thing in the world. It means being constantly taken as someone who hates poor people, children, workers, consumers, women, elderlies, devoting all our love to big corporations from which we receive our monthly payment for defending their interests.

Of course this is not true, and I'm very happy to be speaking to people who understand why this is not true.

Unfortunately the vast majority of people in my country – and even in the US, that is supposed to be THE libertarian country in the world – don't understand why defending individual freedom (in its economic and political dimension) is not same thing as defending the interests of rich people and big business.

So what to do in order to turn the tide? Well, in school I was lucky to have some close friends who shared the same opinions about the role of government in a free society. All we had to do was get together and find the best way to help advancing the cause of freedom in Brazil. As students, we felt that the academic environment of our school was completely dominated by leftists with the most bizarre affiliations.

Our teachers and the majority of our colleagues seemed to simply ignore that there was another way of seeing subjects as labor laws, drug policy, international trade, social justice, individual rights, and what does the state have to do with all this.

Following the acknowledgement of this situation, we decided to take action. We created a student group called Circle of Studies Roberto Campos, (or simply CERC) named after a very famous brazilian libertarian. The group has the very challenging mission of promoting free-market ideas in the academy.

Since our ideas are not very well regarded in Brazil, we decided that one of the main goals of the group would be for the members to educate themselves into the fundamentals of free-market. This proved to be important in several occasions, because you gotta really know what you're talking about before you try to convince and persuade others of your point of view.

So we began to have weekly meetings in which we would discuss current topics on our economical, political and legal reality with a libertarian approach. Little by little we started inviting colleagues that we felt might be interested in debating with us. Some people used to show up, sometimes a bit cautious and disagreeing with a lot of our ideas. The important thing was not to get these folks to leave our meetings thinking the same way we do (of course, that would be great), but to expose an expressive number of people to ideas that are falsely considered to be old-fashioned and impossible to be put in practice.

We also promoted some other very interesting activities. For instance, among the candidates for Mayor of my city on last year's election there was a candidate running with a radical socialist platform. We invited her to be interviewed by members of the group and confronted her proposals such as overtaxing rich people, price controls, increasing labor rights, state control over the means of production, and some other marxist bullshits that find fertile soil in Latin America, especially among young people. It was very interesting This interview is available at our blog and at google videos.

Besides exposing socialist fallacies to facts of history and economics, we also promoted seminars on law and economics, which is considered a pretty radical approach in brazilian law schools. What got me interested about it is the fact that it provides law students with valuable insights about how market works and what is the economic outcome to be expected if this law passes or this judge decides that way.

We also giveaway libertarian classic books and constantly write articles for our school newspapers, besides our blog (www.blogdocerc.blogspot.com), of course.

From the experience with my student group, what I can tell you is gather your friends and get it started. There are hundreds of tools on the internet to help you to start your own student organization for liberty. There's a battle of ideas to be waged and, guess what?!, we're losing ground.