College Fix contributor Andrew Desiderio, a student at The George Washington University, has a report on a college professor I would really love to meet!

Born in 1983, Simon Bilo experienced a struggle in the 1990s as the economies of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic were transitioning from a socialist totalitarian system toward a market economy and democracy.

And now, as a professor of economics at Allegheny College, he teaches others about free economies.

Bilo, from Slovakia, left to get his education in Prague, Czech Republic in the early 2000s, and left Prague in 2008 to get his PhD at George Mason University, which he calls a “life-changing opportunity” for which he will always be grateful.

Each time he moved, Bilo said he was to improve his education and “to ultimately become a better economist.”

“The economic and social transformation was for me and my generation a very important experience,” Bilo said.

Eastern Europeans, according to Bilo, were experiencing drastic changes to their environment and didn’t realize that not only were socialist economies very inefficient compared to capitalist ones, these socialist countries experienced much less political freedom as well.

Economics, Bilo says, answers “at least some” of the gaping questions facing Eastern Europeans at that time. And that’s what drew him to the field.

Bilo says economics is an important field for citizens to understand because “it tells us whether certain types of policies are consistent with certain types of policy goals.”

“In other words, if politicians say that we need to impose measure A and that we want to reach goal X at the same time, economics can tell us whether the two are compatible with each other,” he said.

A good example of this, Bilo says, is the debate over increasing the minimum wage. Those who want to increase the minimum wage also desire low unemployment rates. “Unfortunately, economics tells us that effective minimum wage laws lead to higher unemployment rates.”

In this case, the measure and the goal are not consistent with each other, Bilo says.

…He points out these facts to his students, in hopes of raising awareness and making his students responsible citizens.“Whether you call this ‘free-market economics’ or not, I have never experienced any ridicule [from professors or students] for teaching it.”