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BUILDING BLOCKS for Liberty BUILDING BLOCKS FOR Liberty BUILDING BLOCKS FOR Liberty Critical Essays by Walter Block Edited by Iulian Tãnase and Bogdan Glãvan Foreword by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. LvMI MISES INSTITUTE © Walter Block 2006 © Libertas Publishing 2006 First hardcover edition published in 2006 by Libertas Publishing, Bucharest, Romania (www.libertaspublishing.com). First English edition © 2010 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0/ Ludwig von Mises Institute 518 West Magnolia Avenue Auburn, Alabama 36832 mises.org ISBN: 978-1-933550-91-6 Table of Contents Acknowledgements . .vii Foreword by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. ix Introduction . xi Part One: Economics. .1 1. On Property and Exploitation . .3 2. Toward a Universal Libertarian Theory of Gun (Weapon) Control: A Spatial and Geographical Analysis. .17 3. Environmentalism and Economic Freedom: The Case for Private Property Rights . .31 4. Enterprising Education: Doing Away with the Public School System. .53 5. Labor Relations, Unions and Collective Bargaining: A Political Economic Analysis . .69 6. Is There a Right to Unionize? . .97 7. Free Market Transportation: Denationalizing the Roads . .101 8. Public Goods and Externalities: The Case of Roads . .141 9. The Gold Standard: A Critique of Friedman, Mundell, Hayek and Greenspan . 191 v vi Building Blocks for Liberty Part Two: Human Rights . .215 10. The Nonaggression Axiom of Libertarianism . .217 11. Libertarianism, Positive Obligations and Property Abandonment: Children’s Rights . .221 12. Social Justice . .235 13. Discrimination: An Interdisciplinary Analysis. .239 14. A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration. .263 15. Secession . .285 16. Legalize Drugs Now! An Analysis of the Benefits of Legalized Drugs . .291 17. Libertarianism and Libertinism. .303 Part Three: Language . 317 18. Watch Your Language. 319 19. Taking Back the Language . .329 20. Word Watch . .335 21. Continuing to Watch Our Language. .341 22. Voluntary Taxes: Abusive Language and Politicians. .347 23. Language, Once Again: Civil War, Inclusive Language, Economic Warfare, National Wealth. .349 Bibliography . .359 Index of Names. .375 Index of Subjects . .381 Acknowledgements This book could not have been published without the advice and con- tribution of many libertarian colleagues and friends. We are most grateful to Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, for helping us pursue this project and writing a wonderful Foreword. We should like to thank the editors of the International Journal of Value-Based Management, Ethics, Place and Environment, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Managerial Finance, International Journal of Social Economics, Journal of Libertarian Studies, American Journal of Economics and Sociology for permission to reprint Professor Block’s articles previously published by these prestigious journals. It is a special pleasure to thank the outstanding scholars and Professors David Gordon, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Thomas DiLorenzo and Peter Klein for reviewing the book. Thanks to Tudor Smirna for designing the cover. In the course of the preparation of this book we have received invaluable advice and assistance from Professor Walter Block. His very useful suggestions and comments helped us to improve the book further. Iulian Tãnase and Bogdan Glãvan vii Foreword Murray Rothbard, in his life, was known as Mr. Libertarian. We can make a solid case that the title now belongs to Walter Block, a student of Rothbard’s whose own vita is as thick as a phone book, as diverse as Wikipedia. Whether he is writing on economic theory, ethics, political secession, drugs, roads, education, monetary policy, social theory, unions, political language, or anything else, his prose burns with a passion for this single idea: if human problems are to be solved, the solution is to be found by permitting greater liberty. Yes, Walter Block is provocative. He is an admitted anarcho-capitalist, and his signature treatise is called Defending the Undefendable. But read- ers who spend time with his prose discover that there is far more to the Blockian method than simply breaking taboos. He is provocative not just because of his conclusions but also because he is relentlessly logical, unfailingly truthful, and unusually sincere. He wants answers to the most vexing human problems—whether they are small or large—and he is going to pursue that truth as far as human reasoning can take him. I can recall looking through correspondence that Professor Block has had with colleagues in topics such as monetary policy, letters in which Block is sharply in disagreement with his correspondent. His argument on behalf of his position is so pointed and attractive that his opponent cannot resist attempting an answer, but of course that only elicits yet another response, and yet another rejoinder, and another response, and so on. The rounds of correspondence can go on for dozens ix x Building Blocks for Liberty of interchanges. Block persists not because he wants to beat anyone down, but because he is so sincere about finding truth and ferreting out error. If he is wrong about a point, he wants to know it. That’s why his opponents always end up on the hot seat. There is another aspect to his work that should be noted. His public persona is as a plumb-line libertarian but his method and mode of argu- ment come from his core training in the science of economics. He deploys economic tools in the service of finding answers to social problems. This shows up not only in his exposition; he is also an inspired teacher, and never misses a chance to present his argument step by step so that the reader can come to understand economic logic along the way. You might be surprised at how reasonable sounding Block can make what might otherwise be considered an outrageous idea. Not every reader will accept every one of Block’s conclusions. But everyone will learn how a top-notch economic thinker in the Austrian tradition approaches a huge range of issues. If you disagree with him, you would do well to do so with the same method: that of thinking through problems with close attention to logical and analytical detail. There is one final trait of Block that might be overlooked: his humility. In a world of academics with inflated egos and selfish ambi- tions, Block displays constant sincerity, even a kind of naïveté in believing that the truth demonstrated with patience and logic should be enough to carry the day. In our politicized world of charlatans and agenda-driven ideologues, this is rarely the case, of course. But Block charms us with his truth-seeking way, his desire to engage counterarguments of any sort, and his willingness to be shown where he is wrong. A volume of all the “critical essays” by Walter Block would surely run into thousands of pages. But this is an excellent sampling, and a great tribute to one of the most inspired and hardworking intellectuals of our time. Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Ludwig von Mises Institute Auburn, Alabama Introduction This book Building Blocks for Liberty: Critical Essays by Walter Block is dedicated to the notion that libertarianism is not only a political eco- nomic philosophy that is powerful and insightful, but it is also unique; it is neither of the right nor of the left (Walter Block, “Libertarianism is Unique; It Belongs Neither to the Right Nor the Left; A Critique of the Views of Long, Holcombe, and Baden on the left, Hoppe, Feser and Paul on the right,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 2010). According to the view of most people, conservatism, or the right- wing philosophy champions economic liberty, but not personal freedom. And, similarly, socialism, or the left-wing perspective, favors personal liberty, but not that pertaining to buying and selling, trading, and other commercial endeavors. Neither of these claims is exactly true. The adherence to the prin- ciples of free enterprise of Republicans on the right is easy to exaggerate. Many of them favor free trade, except when an industry they favor is facing foreign competition. At the time of this writing, President Bush is snarling at the oil industry for of all things price gouging; it is difficult to reconcile this with any adherence to a free economy. Similarly, Democrats on the left supposedly favor keeping the state out of the bedroom and the bathroom, but when they are in power, drugs, pros- titution and pornography are virtually always illegal. However, there is enough of a grain of truth in the standard view to make its inversion even more ludicrous. That is, it is just plain silly xi xii Building Blocks for Liberty to assert that leftists favor economic freedom and rightists defend per- sonal liberties. If anything is clear, it is that neither at all defends the freedom popularly ascribed to the opposite perspective. A socialist favor- ing free markets is as much of a contradiction in terms as a conservative who looks with favor upon liberties of the individual to ingest into his body what he pleases, or to do with his body anything other adults will permit him to do. Nozick (1974, p. 163) put his finger squarely on the matter when he characterized libertarianism as favoring “capitalist acts between consenting adults.” Here, in one fell swoop, this author exposes the weaknesses of both sides. The leftists, at least according to the received doctrine, are in favor of legalizing anything between consenting adults; similarly, the rightists are supposed to support capitalism. Neither really does. Certainly, no mainstream view is compatible with both kinds of freedom. In order to find a political economic philosophy that espouses this vision, one must necessarily embrace libertarianism, the subject of the present book. It is only this perspective that travels to the furthest reaches of human endeavor, and consistently upholds the rights of people to do exactly as they please with their persons and property, so long as doing so respects the equal rights of everyone else to do the same.
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