"Roberto Campos had not always been an advocate for the ideas of liberty. During his youth, he marched as a socialist supporter and believed that the government should have the power to shape society under the guidance of an elite leader. It was while serving as a diplomat in the United States that he realized the government is usually only able to change things for the worse. “I saw, however, that it is an illusion to think that socialism reforms the world. Socialism only makes the world totalitarian,” he once said.He also became very critical of artists and intellectuals who enjoy all the advantages that only free markets can offer but whose advocacy is predominantly socialist-leaning. Campos stressed once that “Few things are more paradoxical than the leftism found among Brazilian artists. They are socialists through their fingers and their voices, but invariably capitalists in their pockets.”
Campos used to say that he saw no nobility in poverty. Unlike his fellow compatriots from the world of arts and literature, he argued that we should support the generation of wealth through a free-market society over the redistribution of beggary that ultimately comes along with socialist policies. For years before his death in 2001 at the age of 84, he was considered the most outspoken and articulate opponent of socialism in the country."
https://fee.org/articles/this-brazilian-economist-once-marched-for-socialism-but-became-a-free-market-hero/
Campos used to say that he saw no nobility in poverty. Unlike his fellow compatriots from the world of arts and literature, he argued that we should support the generation of wealth through a free-market society over the redistribution of beggary that ultimately comes along with socialist policies. For years before his death in 2001 at the age of 84, he was considered the most outspoken and articulate opponent of socialism in the country."
https://fee.org/articles/this-brazilian-economist-once-marched-for-socialism-but-became-a-free-market-hero/