In this interview, Walter Block reflects on the ideas that shaped his thinking and defined his career. He discusses markets, economic freedom, voluntary exchange, and the enduring pursuit of a society where individuals can thrive.
About the Guest
Walter Block is the Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans. He is the author of more than 700 peer-reviewed articles, over 30 books, and thousands of newspaper and magazine op-eds. Among his best-known works are Defending the Undefendable, The Privatization of Roads and Highways, and Space Capitalism.
Interview
Simon Sarevski: You have spent more than five decades studying economics, political philosophy, and individual liberty. Before discussing your specific ideas, what first drew you to the study of freedom, markets, and voluntary cooperation?
Walter Block: I’m Jewish. I’m from Brooklyn. Everyone in my neighborhood was a socialist; many were communists. I just sort of imbibed this philosophy. I overlapped with Bernie Sanders for four years at James Madison High School. We were on the track team together, even ran the same distances. Our views were about the same. When I was a sophomore at Brooklyn College, this would have been around 1962, Ayn Rand gave a speech there. Afterward, it was announced that there would be a lunch in her honor, and that the entire audience was invited. I was determined to convert her to socialism.
When I got to the lunchroom, there was a long table, perhaps 50 people on each side, with her at the head of it. Seated next to her were people who I later learned were her chief lieutenants: Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, Leonard Piekoff, Alan Greenspan, and a few others. I was about 21 years old then. I stuck my head between Nathaniel’s and Ayn’s and announced that there was a socialist who wanted to debate a capitalist. They asked who it was and I told them it was me. I was pushy then. Still am.
Nathaniel acted very kindly to my intrusiveness (hey, it’s a Jewish thing). He said there was no room at this part of the table, but he would come to talk to me at the other end of the room, under two conditions. First, I would not allow our debate to end until we had settled matters. Second, I would promise to read two books he recommended to me: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. We talked for an hour, and neither of us convinced the other.
I read both books. Atlas really knocked my socks off. I couldn’t put it down. I was pretty much convinced of free enterprise after reading the entire book in a few days. I’ve reread that book every ten years or so after that, and still get a lot out of it. Hazlitt was the icing on the cake. I now assign these two books to my introductory economics classes.
I went a few times to Branden’s apartment in Manhattan, and several times to Rand’s. Occasionally, I brought my college roommates with me, Ben Klein, who later became a professor of economics at UCLA, and Mel Fein, who later became a professor of sociology at Kennesaw State University. Later, I attended several sessions of the Nathaniel Branden Institute lectures held in the basement of the Empire State Building. I never considered myself an Objectivist; I didn’t agree with their metaphysics or epistemology, but I became an enthusiastic supporter of free enterprise and limited government. Jerry Tuccille wrote a book called “It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand.” That describes my initial conversion process to a T.
Here is the next step in my transformation. I was in 1965 studying for a PhD in economics at Columbia. Larry Moss, a fellow student, whose views I thought similar to mine, told me I must meet this man Murray Rothbard, who was an anarcho-capitalist. I declined. I was enough of an Objectivist to reject anarchism. But, finally, he and his then roommate Jerry Woloz bullied me into meeting Murray. He converted me to anarcho-capitalism in about ten minutes. He was underhanded! He used Hazlitt against me. He said, You can see why we need competition in groceries, automobiles, etc., why not police, courts, armies. The light-bulb went off above my head. I have been an admirer of Murray’s ever since, and a friend of his until his too-early demise. However, I must register a criticism against my mentor: stomach aches. He was so funny he had me in stitches for hours at a time while I was for several years a member of this living room crowd, as we called ourselves.
Throughout history, societies have restricted or stigmatized certain peaceful occupations and forms of exchange. How should societies distinguish between actions that may be morally criticized and those that should be legally prohibited? What do we lose — economically and socially — when voluntary interactions are replaced by prohibition or condemnation?
Walter Block: There is all the difference in the world between restriction and stigmatization; between prohibition and condemnation. For a libertarian such as myself, the only acts that should be made illegal are those that violate the non-aggression principle, for example, murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, arson, fraud, assault and battery, etc. Everything else should be legal. But that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be free to condemn or stigmatize whatever actions or professions they want.
This was the thesis of the three books in my defending series, Defending the Undefendable, Defending the Undefendable II: Freedom in All Realms, and Defending the Undefendable III. I strived mightily therein to make the point to the right that while consenting adult behavior involving sex, drugs, etc., should be legalized, that doesn’t mean we should not be free to condemn such behavior. And to the left, that while usury, slum-lording, and profiteering should likewise not be crimes, we should all be free to castigate them as immoral.
When you wrote Defending the Undefendable in 1976, you challenged conventional views about many occupations and activities. Looking back fifty years later, are there new professions, industries, or groups that you believe would deserve a place in a modern edition of the book?
Walter Block: I am now working on DtU4. Here are some of the professions and acts I am contemplating trying to defend on a legal basis, not necessarily on a moral one: voluntary slave ownership, the absentee landlord, bigotry, racism, antisemitism, price gouging, blackface, white face, ambulance chaser, murder park, poison pills dispenser (in finance!), cultural appropriation. That is, all these things should be legal, and some of them even beneficial, provided, only, that they do not violate the non-aggression principle, the holiest of holies of libertarianism.
You entered economics at a time when debates over inflation, price controls, and trade restrictions were central. Half a century later, which economic ideas have been most strongly confirmed by experience, and which areas have required economists to rethink their assumptions?
Walter Block: Not too much has changed in some regards. When economists are surveyed, then as now, there is almost but not quite a full consensus that minimum wages, rent controls, and tariffs always and ever reduce economic welfare. In other regards, the economics profession is much more heavily mathematicalized nowadays than when I first started. My first refereed journal article was in 1970. You could publish with a lot less math then in the most prestigious economics journals.
What does mainstream economics still fail to understand about markets? Or are the remaining disagreements less about economics itself and more about political economy and competing values?
Walter Block: Mainstreamers have not yet become Austrian economists. They still support antitrust laws. However, of all disciplines, mainstreamers included, economics is the least woke and politically correct. Sociologists, to say nothing of the whining “studies,” are virtually all leftists. Not so in this discipline.
Let me tell you a bit of a story. In 1997, Sherwin Rosen in Austrian and Neoclassical Economics: Any Gains from Trade? claimed that Austrianism was defunct. All of the rare and correct insights it had ever had were by then fully incorporated into the mainstream. All that remained was false. His proof of this contention? There were more practitioners of the latter than the former. Oy vey. At one time more people believed the earth was flat than round. That’s a definitive proof? So my co-authors and I tried a bit of reductio ad absurdum in Internal vs. external explanations: a new perspective on the history of economic thought. We maintained that the way to determine which school of thought was more nearly correct was to see in any debate in the literature who had the last word; whose publication ended the debate. Now, this is just as silly as Rosen’s claim. The “loser” might have died. He might have allowed his opponent the last word out of boredom. In any case, we lined up about 150 debates, and the Austrian published last in about 100 of them. QED. Austrianism is better! Hah!
Many policies are created with the goal of solving genuine social problems, yet their effects often differ from what policymakers intended. Why do societies so often struggle to anticipate the broader consequences of their decisions?
Walter Block: There are several reasons. One is the abysmal knowledge of economics on the part of the electorate. They are voting for the likes of Zohran Mamdani, who will ruin New York City with his socialistic policies.
What, in turn, accounts for this vast economic illiteracy? One possibility is that we as a society are more highly concentrated as producers than as consumers. Most of us produce one good or service: accountancy, carpentry, medicine, philosophy. How many items do we consume in a year? Tens of thousands. Go count the items in any supermarket. So, it is relatively easy for producers to amalgamate; to engage in restrictive entry into their professions, or industries. Yes, there are also consumers’ organizations, but they fight a losing battle.
Another possibility stems from sociobiology: we are influenced by our “selfish genes” to support socialism, fascism, communism, anything apart from free enterprise. All too many people recoil in horror from profiteering, slum-lording, etc. All too many embrace strong, coercive leadership. The sociobiological explanation for this is that this is baked into our genes. Zillions of years ago, when our species was located in the trees, or in the caves, this phenomenon was actually beneficial, it is argued. We are self-selected, ever since, on this basis.
Fields such as behavioral economics and experimental economics have challenged some traditional assumptions about human decision-making. How should economists incorporate these insights while still preserving the importance of incentives, knowledge, and voluntary exchange?
Walter Block: I don’t think that these new insights undermine the notion that incentives, knowledge, and voluntary exchange lead to human flourishing. They are, rather, for the most part, empirical illustrations of the pure underlying, unchanging logic of economics; that is, Austrian praxeology where we deduce from undeniable axioms such as Mises’ “man acts.”
Capitalism has generated unprecedented increases in prosperity, yet many people—especially younger generations—have become increasingly skeptical of markets. What do critics of capitalism identify correctly, and where do they misunderstand how markets actually function?
Walter Block: These critics of capitalism don’t identify pretty much anything correctly. They are suffering from a lack of knowledge of the dismal science. If they all read Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, that would be an improvement. But only slightly. For as I have said above, we are really fighting biology on behalf of economic freedom. According to that old aphorism, if a young man of 20 is not a socialist, he has no heart. If he still supports dirigisme at 50, he has no brain. Young people are traditionally more in favor of government usurpation of freedom than their elders. Maybe we should raise the minimum voting age from 21 to 51.
Concerns about monopoly power have returned, particularly regarding Big Tech and artificial intelligence. When does market dominance represent a genuine economic problem?
Walter Block: Never. As long as the high concentration ratio was achieved through the market process, it is not harmful. “Monopoly,” properly understood, indicates a government grant of privilege, such as the Post Office, or taxi-cab medallions. Neither Standard Oil, IBM, Ford, nor Microsoft ever had a “monopoly” in this sense. None had any legal power to prevent competition.
Large corporations are all one step away from bankruptcy. Take a peek at the Fortune 500, and go back every decade for 100 years or so. Gigantic companies have a tendency of disappearing. So much for their “power.” Also, as Murray Rothbard demonstrated in his Man, Economy and State, any one big firm on the verge of being the only business company in the economy would face problems similar to those which bedevil central planners.
Much of your work examines voluntary institutions as alternatives to government solutions. Which private or voluntary institutions do you believe are most important for maintaining a free society?
Walter Block: All of them. Any of them. If I had to pick only one, however, I would choose money and banking. This is the lifeblood of the economy. The medium of exchange enters every commercial interaction except for barter. End the Fed! Another pet peeve of mine is the minimum wage law, which attacks the least and lost of us: teenagers, especially from minority groups, are made unemployable. They get bored, they get into crime, they go to jail. This, too, is a despicable institution.
You are one of the most prominent advocates of anarcho-capitalism. Do you view it primarily as an ideal—a standard by which existing institutions should be evaluated—or as a realistic political system that societies could eventually adopt? More broadly, what do people most commonly misunderstand about anarchism as a political philosophy?
Walter Block: I think it will be realistic in about a million years, when our biological inheritance from the Stone Age disappears, if that amount of time counts as “eventual.” I think we will by then adopt that system, if we don’t blow ourselves up before that. Yes, anarcho-capitalism certainly can now serve as a standard by which existing institutions should be evaluated. Some countries are far closer to the libertarian standard than others. And you’ll never guess what: not only is their GDP per capita higher than the less free ones, but so are their growth rates. This book of mine, co-authored with James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, Economic Freedom of the World, 19675-1995, makes that point based upon statistical evidence.
Are there any contemporary books — whether written by people you agree with or not — that you believe people interested in economics, society, and human flourishing should read?
Walter Block: I’ve mentioned books by Ayn Rand and Henry Hazlitt. Pretty much anything ever written by the following authors should be placed on this list: Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Carl Menger, Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick.
I guess that you are familiar with Harry Browne’s answer, but in your own words: how can one find freedom in an unfree world?
Walter Block: You can’t. By definition. If it is an unfree world, and by golly it sure is, then, by the laws of logic, you can’t find freedom. You can find prosperity; you can find happiness; you can find stability, if you work at it.
I am a student of Albert Ellis and Michael Edelstein, two leaders of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, a school of thought in psychology. According to this vision, people are very limited as to how, to what degree, and whether they can at all change the world. But they can change their thoughts about it, much to their benefit.
I’ve been working on promoting freedom all of my professional life, and, I think, with all due modesty, I’ve increased our level of freedom by one nonillionth. That’s 10 to the 90th power. That is, virtually zero. Some dozen of my former students are now professors of economics and are busily promoting free enterprise. I’ve converted, maybe, a few people to libertarianism and Austrian economics, through my publications, lectures, and public debates. But in terms of preventing the likes of Bernie Sanders from being elected to office, zero is too high an estimate of my effect.
However, according to the teachings of REBT, while we can very rarely change the world, we’ve got a pretty good shot at changing our thinking about what in the world besets us. So, even in a very unfree world, we can still achieve happiness. Not as much as if the world were free, but quite a bit.