It’s not every evening that you are able to pack a room full of a hundred libertarians on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, let alone at the bastion of leftism that is Columbia University. But tonight was different, as Loyola Professor and Columbia alum Walter Block was on campus, leading a spirited lecture on all things Austrian.
During the first part of his discussion, he spoke to his encounters with a variety of notable economists including Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises and Gary Becker amongst others. With his characteristic Brooklyn sense of humor, Block had the audience laughing as he recounted stories like that of his defense of his dissertation on rent control against one of his judges, a rent control commissioner, and his meeting with Nathaniel Branden and Ayn Rand back when he was a rabid young socialist and subsequent conversion to libertarianism.
He then dealt with more substantive issues across the spectrum of political economy with aplomb. Block tackled the mainstream economists’ failures in their dealing with welfare economics, in which as Block argues there is a lack of recognition of each individual’s unique subjective utility with regard to various products proving amongst other reasons why marginal utility as justification for wealth redistribution fails, and in dealing with the absurdity of antitrust laws that are either used to prosecute companies for evil price gouging, ruthless undercutting or dastardly collusion.
Block also tackled fractional-reserve banking. Now we can all agree that fractional-reserve banking is an evil and fraudulent system that is the principle mechanism for inflating the money supply. However, my view had been that if two parties agreed to a contract that allowed demand deposits to be lent out, this was fine as both parties did so at their own risk. Block argues that two parties agreeing to a contract based upon fractional reserve proves illegitimate because a contract has to be consonant with property rights. In Block’s view, fractional reserve creates a system where multiple titles are given to a single piece of property (money); the obligations to the parties are greater than the assets involved, so the system is thus not Kosher.
Block also tackled social issues such as immigration, where he made a couple of interesting arguments. First, he rightly pointed out that those who wish to restrict immigration because of the belief that immigrants would take advantage of the welfare state were dealing with the symptoms rather than the root cause of the problem which is the welfare state. Second, he argued that being against immigration meant being against babies, since they both represent new additions to the population. I would differ with Block in that I don’t believe babies born into a certain society are equivalent in their socialization to those coming from societies with differing values. This is not to say I am against legal immigration, but that I do not believe newborns and immigrants are necessarily equivalent in terms of their effect on society. I also have not sufficiently examined my immigration views with respect to defense. If a certain group clearly poses an existential threat to your society, then should you invite them over the border and deal with them only when mass murder has been committed? This may be dealing with a symptom of immigration rather than a root cause of the militancy of a foreigner or group of foreigners, but nevertheless these issues amongst many others must be reconciled.
He also argued against intellectual property, as in Block’s eyes ideas are not scarce and can’t be owned. The argument goes that if ideas were property, then one would not be able to speak because someone else would have laid claim to each word. Again, IP is an issue which I have yet to study enough to firmly pick a side on, but at face value to me the issue seems to deal on the one hand with incentivizing people to produce things (by granting them a monopoly right to that product for a limited time), and on the other trying to ensure a free market in which competition amongst producers is robust, driving down costs while increasing quality for the consumer. I know the Boldrin book addresses a variety of discoveries that occurred without the incentive of a patent or copyright, but again I have not settled on this issue.
Block also put forth the view that man is not naturally predisposed towards liberty because while he initially developed explicit cooperation in helping out his fellow hunter-gatherers, he was never hardwired for implicit cooperation through the price system of the market. The argument goes that this spontaneous system coordinating the wants of individuals is foreign to us inherently because back in the days of hunting and gathering, we were not dealing with voluntary transactions with people from all over the world. We simply worked together in small traveling groups. To this argument, he also added that the ruling class has brainwashed the people and quashed perceived “radical” voices like that of Ron Paul. I don’t believe these reasons are sufficient to explain why collective tyranny continues to trump individual liberty, especially when many people support legalized plunder because they benefit from it, and because there are certain Judeo-Christian values some construe as supporting socialism, amongst many other reasons.
Finally, Block addressed one of my questions on the private provision of defense. Since I find the defense as private insurance companies argument interesting, I asked Block what happens if one’s enemies buy out their defense company. Block admitted there would be a problem here, but made the case that a government military could be bought out by enemies as well. This was a fair though in my view somewhat tenuous response, and there are numerous other arguments as a practical matter that can be made against private defense. Briefly, in my view, defense is not about economic efficiency, but defending a group of people with common values. And too, in our society we have allowed for the proliferation of private defense forces to assist our public defense — in other words we allow our military to yield the benefits of free market institutions. I believe that defense and the courts are the proper realms of government, problem-riddled as they may be. I believe in our Constitution when read in its plain language. To expound upon this debate will be left for another occasion.
Overall, Block’s arguments were welcome banter for this writer so infrequently exposed to anarcho-capitalist ideas promulgated by a real person in the flesh. The evening made for great entertainment and deep reflection on a plethora of issues. It was a pleasure to hear Professor Block’s unique perspective on the world. To be exposed to radical arguments on either side of the issues certainly helps one to check one’s principles and grow intellectually. Without challenges to our beliefs and constant intellectual criticism, we become complacent. Luckily, as I have found on my intellectual journey of the past few years, the libertarian community keeps its members constantly on their toes.
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