In my town this week, two tribes shouted each other down, each claiming that the other is destroying the country. At issue: whether to eat or not eat a chicken sandwich from Chick-Fil-A.
Yes, this is what democracy has been reduced to. People have so little effective control over their own lives and their political institutions that they jump at any chance to make a difference…anything to show some influence, ratify their personal significance, strike out at the oppressor that they inchoately suspect is wrecking the future.
Eat or don’t eat? Who should get privileges and who should be suppressed by law? Are you for or against gays, for or against evangelicals, for or against this or that lifestyle?
Both sides in this debate are attempting to find a scapegoat for what they think is wrong with this country, even as the real oppressor watches with amusement.
In a police state, to live and let live is not an option. What is not mandated must be against the law. Every act, every word, is a political statement. No business is permitted to operate in a political vacuum. Every enterprise must choose sides.
And so we too must decide: eat or don’t eat.
If you step back from the frenzied catfights, you can see that the real problem is not a sandwich, much less the religious opinions of one CEO, but the intensifying power that the nation state itself exercises over all over us.
We are beating each other up even as the leviathan state is crushing the life out of all enterprises and individuals through debilitating taxes, regulations, intrusions, and manipulations.
In a free society, all this pent-up public energy would be poured into productive pursuits like working harder, being more creative, building great institutions, improving our lives and lives of others.
But under a system of social and economic control, scapegoating becomes a national pastime. The system first produces ruined lives and dashed dreams; people then respond by lashing out at anything within reach.
Now let’s turn to Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable. It is a defense of the rights of the least popular professions and occupations in the social order. He seeks to rehabilitate many of the scapegoats. The list is endless. This book defends the advertiser, the miser, the moneylender, the slanderer, the slumlord, the profiteer, the stripminer, the scab, drug pusher, the blackmailer, the addict, the pimp, and so on.
Yes, provocative reading. You can enjoy the full blast with Spy Briefing Book’s new edition, complete with a new preface and introduction (by young Blockian scholar Daniel D’Amico). It comes to you with a subscription to the Spy Briefing Club for $10 (plus you get our entire archive!).
What these hated groups that Block discusses have in common is that they exist within the voluntary sector of society. Whatever might be wrong with these people, they are not actually inflicting physical harm on anyone. In this sense, they are all more upstanding members of society than the politician or bureaucrat.
Challenging that terms of debate is part of the appeal of this book. But there’s more going on here. The book is full of theoretical substance. This has something to do with the time in which it was written.
Block was in graduate school at Columbia University. His “day job” was to learn things that he had progressively come to believe have nothing to do with economics properly understood.
Meanwhile, the world around him was crying out for economic logic to be brought to bear on a range of human problems. This is when he began to work on this book, essay by essay. It was written on nights and weekends. It was his means of intellectual survival, a tactic for staying interested in real human problems while his mind was otherwise occupied with endless mathematical abstractions.
The book benefits from this timing. You can tell in the sheer rigor of the argument. The subject matter is obviously provocative and popular, but the method of argumentation draws from the highest level of scholarship and logical analytics. The result is that you can learn from this work how to think about microeconomic issues, even as you find yourself drawn to Block’s seemingly outrageous claims throughout. The book manages that rare combination of being both rigorous and fun at the same time.
If you are outraged, appalled, offended, and stretched to your limits, your response is exactly what Block intended. That’s the idea: to think and consider and imagine liberty as a solution to our social and economic problems. How many books can you name that really achieve that? Not that many. In this sense, this really is a book for the ages.
The brilliant young scholar Daniel D’Amico, a student of Block’s writes the introduction.
Below you can also read what Murray Rothbard himself had to say.
Why Block’s Book Matters
by Murray RothbardFor many years, free-market economists have shown how market activities benefit the often heedless public. Ever since the days of Adam Smith, they have shown how producers and businessmen, generally motivated solely by personal gain, unwittingly confer enormous benefits on the general public. By seeking to maximize their profits and minimize losses, for example, businessmen are driven to satisfy the most urgent demands of the consumers in the most efficient way.
Economists have long shown these truths in the abstract; and in recent years they have added to our knowledge by illustrating in case after case, in the concrete, the superiority and efficiency of private operation. But the inquiries of economists have been confined, with sober pedantry, to the “respectable” industries: to such activities as agriculture, natural gas, housing, airways, and so forth.
Until this book, no economist has had the courage of Professor Walter Block in tackling head-on the moral and economic status of the dozens of reviled, scorned, and grievously misunderstood professions and occupations in our society: those whom he rightly calls the “economic scapegoats.”
Fearlessly, and with logic and trenchant wit, Professor Block rehabilitates and demonstrates the considerable economic merits of such scapegoat occupations as the pimp, the blackmailer, and the slumlord. In this way, in addition to redeeming the stature of these much reviled occupations, Defending the Undefendable performs the service of highlighting, in the fullest and starkest terms, the essential nature of the productive services performed by all people in the free market.
By taking the most extreme examples and showing how the Smithian principles work even in these cases, the book does far more to demonstrate the workability and morality of the free market than a dozen sober tomes on more respectable industries and activities. By testing and proving the extreme cases, he all the more illustrates and vindicates the theory.
These case studies also have considerable shock value. By relentlessly taking up one “extreme” case after another that is generally guaranteed to shock the sensibilities of the reader, Professor Block forces the reader to think, to rethink his initial knee-jerk emotional responses, and to gain a new and far sounder appreciation of economic theory and of the virtues and operations of the free-market economy. Even many readers who now think they believe in a free market must now be prepared to grasp fully the logical implications of a belief in a free economy. This book will be an exciting and shocking adventure for most readers, even for those who believe that they are already converted to the merits of the free-market economy.
All right, some readers might concede, we grant that these people are performing valuable economic services. But why, for heaven’s sake, call them “heroes”? Why is the pimp or the medical quack any more “heroic,” and therefore in a sense more moral, than other, more respectable producers: the grocers, clothiers, steel manufacturers, etc.? The explanation is precisely wrapped up in the extreme lack of respectability of Professor Block’s scapegoats.
For the grocer, the steel producer, and the others are generally allowed to go about their business unmolested, and indeed earn respect and prestige from the fellow members of the community. Not so these scapegoats; for not only are their economic services unrecognized, but they face the universal bile, scorn, and wrath of virtually every member of society
Smithian principles work even in these cases, the book does far more to demonstrate the workability and morality of the free market than a dozen sober tomes on more respectable industries and activities. By testing and proving the extreme cases, he all the more illustrates and vindicates the theory.
Heroes yes, but not necessarily saints. When the author confers the moral stature of hero on the scab, the usurer, the pimp, and so on, he does not mean to imply that these activities are intrinsically more moral than any other. In a free market, and in a society that treats the usurer, slumlord, and sweat shop employer in precisely the same just way as it treats other occupations, they would no longer be heroes, and they would certainly be no more moral than anyone else.
Their heroic status, for Professor Block, is solely a function of the unjust restrictions that other men have been placing upon them. It is the happy paradox of this book that if its implicit advice is followed, and the men and women described in these pages are no longer treated to scorn and legal coercion, then and only then will they no longer be heroes. If you don’t like the idea of a usurer or a slumlord being a hero, then the only way to deprive him of this stature is to remove the shackles that misguided people have placed upon him.
______Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
