Iberia and Siberia are separated, alphabetically, by little more than a consonant; civilizationally, they may evoke two radically different ways of ordering the human world. Long before Adam Smith, in Salamanca – with Coimbra as its remarkable Lusitanian addendum – late Scholastics were already asking questions about property and prices, money and inflation, interest and exchange, trade and war, while refusing to separate economic reasoning from the moral nature of human action. This was an economics born not in the service of Caesar, but in the search for Truth: an austere science of freedom, responsibility and natural law, developed precisely when Iberian caravels were turning geography into geopolitics and discovery into commerce. Centuries later, Siberia would become an almost inverse metaphor: immense space subjected to political command, natural wealth detached from private ownership, human movement subordinated to the designs of power. The comparison is intentionally audacious, but perhaps revealing. From Salamanca and Coimbra runs a stubborn intellectual thread: society is not raw material to be engineered, and man is not an “accidental statistic” or a “dependent variable” in somebody else’s aggregate equation. Between Iberia and Siberia lies more than a continent. There lies a perennial question of political economy: is order something power imposes upon human beings, or something free human beings are capable of discovering among themselves?