The remarkable Dr. Ayau

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The true scholar is inherently incapable of running anything. By temperament, he loathes the very concept of authority and, even more, the idea of exercising authority himself. Consequently our faculty is limited to its proper functions: teaching and research in that order. Students participate in governance the same way that customers participate in the governance of Macy's: If they don't like the goods offered they can go to Gimbel's.

-- Manuel Ayau, founding president, Universidad Francisco Marroquin.

GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala.

Nations do not just become rich by accident. Economic prosperity is largely determined by the ideas and decisions of individuals regarding the political organization and economic policies in their countries. If the American Founding Fathers had not been well schooled in the ideas of John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and others, their design of the great American experiment would have been less perfect and thus unlikely to have succeeded. If there had been no F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would have lacked much of the intellectual base they needed to revitalize the economies of the United States and United Kingdom.

No country is immune from bad economic policies because economic ignorance exists in all countries. Polls indicate a few candidates won in the just completed elections in the U.S. because they favored protectionist policies and/or higher minimum wages, both economically harmful. Fortunately, countries like the U.S. and Switzerland have enough economic literacy among the citizens, the press, and the political class to keep them from adopting massively destructive (as contrasted with somewhat damaging) policies that have afflicted all too many nations.

More than a half-century ago, after returning from the U.S. with his engineering degree in hand, a young Guatemalan named Manuel Ayau wondered why there was little demand for his engineering services in his home country. Rather than just fret about the sorry Guatemalan economy, he decided to try to understand the root cause of the problem, which led him to read widely and learn economics. The great Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and Hayek, provided the explanations and the remedies Mr. Ayau sought.

Manuel Ayau then formed in 1958 the first economic think tank in Guatemala. He and his colleagues soon realized their little think tank was unlikely to raise the level of economic and civil society literacy to bring the necessary change to Guatemala. The universities, which were run by the state, had been taken over by the communists or socialists and thus were a major part of the problem rather than the solution.

Thomas Jefferson correctly observed that democracies were unlikely to succeed without an educated electorate. Guatemala had a history of political turmoil and a poor educational system. Mr. Ayau and his colleagues realized without a high-quality university that taught real economics (rather than leftist ideology) and the legal and political classics, Guatemala would never have the trained cadre to run a successful democracy and civil society.