06/18/09 – Walter Block – The Scott Horton Show

It's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 95.9 FM, in Austin, Texas.
And you know, I'm always talking about my idea for a new political realignment in America where the libertarians are the real moderate center.
And my next guest is the proof of that, that the libertarians are the real political center in America.
It's the eminently moderate Walter Block.
He is a professor of economics at Loyola University, is a scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and is the author of Defending the Undefendable, the Pimp, Prostitute, Scab, Slumlord, Libeler, Moneylender, and Other Scapegoats in the Rogues Gallery of American Society.
Welcome to the show, Walter.
How are you, sir?
Pretty good.
They don't call me Walter Moderate Block for nothing.
Yes.
Well, so you are a moderate, right?
They do call you that, right?
That's your middle name?
Yes.
I'm a moderate libertarian.
Right.
And so you think we should abolish the state yesterday or what?
Today will be fine.
You see, that's my moderation.
Oh, I see.
Heck, I'll even take tomorrow.
You'll even take tomorrow.
So that is a pretty moderate position.
Yes.
I don't insist on today.
Oh, okay.
Unlike some of my rabid colleagues.
Right.
Right.
Well, now, but you do favor abolishing the state.
Of course.
They're a criminal gang.
A criminal gang.
But all right, basic basics, right?
Never mind welfare statism.
Never mind the regulatory state.
Never mind even criminal justice for the moment.
What about national defense, Walter Block?
Because don't we have to have at least enough government to prevent some other government from somewhere else coming and replacing it and making us all its subjects in an even less libertarian situation than we have now?
Well, I admit that if all we take over is a country the size of Lichtenstein and every other statist country hates us and wants to conquer us, there's not much chance for us.
On the other hand, you have to uphold with ceteris paribus in economics where other things equal.
In other words, the question should be, is anti-statism or non-statism a good idea?
And to see if it is, if you posit that 99.9% of the world hate us and ask, are we going to survive?
Well, the answer is no.
But if you ask if another Lichtenstein or a statist Lichtenstein size country could take us over, the answer is pretty much no, because freer is richer.
The freer you are, the richer you are.
There's a lot of empirical work that shows that, and certainly it's just common sense.
The more you rely on free enterprise, the more wealthy you get.
Well, if we, the free enterprise anarchist Lichtenstein, were facing someone our own size who wasn't as free as we, we'd be richer than them, and thus presumably better able to take care of ourselves than them.
And not only richer, but we'd have more creativity, more entrepreneurship, more innovation.
So I think that it's sort of a bogeyman to say, well, you know, some other country will take us over.
I don't think so, if we uphold ceteris paribus.
But I think there's even more to be said on this, and that is, if you're really worried about other countries taking us over, then what you really are implying is that we need a world government to protect ourselves.
Right now, the U.S. is in a state of anarchy with regards to France in the sense that there's no world government above both of them.
We assume that the U.S. is not a world government yet, although they're working on that.
Brazil and China are in a state of anarchy with each other.
Canada and Australia are in a state of anarchy with each other.
So if we really have to fear that, then we should have a world government.
But there are problems with a world government.
If we had one, you know, there's no place to run.
I mean, Mars and the Moon are not inhabitable, at least right now.
Well, as moderate as you are, sir, I think most people probably by default would say, yeah, but throughout history, you've always got a monopoly on the military power for a certain landmass.
You can't just have a free market competition in national defense, can you?
Well, I don't see why you can't.
And we don't have a monopoly, at least in the world sense, in the sense that we have many different countries, all of whom are in a state of anarchy with regard to each other.
And as I said, if you really don't like that, then you're favoring world government.
Logically speaking, that's the implication.
And most people will balk at world government.
And in any case, you know, there's a whole series of books, court, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it right, that show that most murders in the last century were done by governments.
And I'm not talking about wars where they fight with each other.
I'm just talking about internal killings.
Most killings are done by governments of their own people.
So if you're really worried about other people killing us, the main enemy is government.
You know, I wonder what the statistics are for America now.
I mean, I think the last time I heard there were 12,000-something murders.
But I don't know if that counts, you know, cops killing people, or, you know, how those numbers break down in the U.S. right now.
Well, there's lots more than 12,000.
My most recent book is Highway and Road Privatization.
And some 40,000 people die on our highways, our socialist road system.
And if you count that as murders, and I'm sort of inclined to do so, because, you know, we have road socialism.
We don't have private competing road owners who would vastly reduce the death rates.
So if you add that in, you get a lot more.
And, you know, when private person A kills private person B, the government is supposedly to protect private person B against private person A. And if the government is not protecting them, if the government is too busy putting victimless criminals in jail, such as those who sell drugs or sex to adults, and they're too busy doing those things when they're supposed to be stopping murders and rapes, well, I think we can blame that on them.
Now, of course, we've had Waco, where the government explicitly killed people, but not too many.
And this is a point that Murray Rothbard has made, that you can't infer domestic killing from foreign killing.
Namely, some countries are very good on domestic killing, and the U.S. is pretty good.
It doesn't kill too many people.
Waco is an apparition with only 100 or so people, whereas other countries kill their own citizens much more.
But you can infer that since a country is pretty good domestically, it's going to be good in foreign policy, and the U.S. is probably the worst one right now in foreign policy, I think.
The U.S. government has, what is it, some 800 foreign military bases in about 130 different countries?
Almost.
Ron Paul has been talking about this.
No other country's got anything like that.
I mean, at one time, Russia had something in Cuba, and we got very upset about that.
Imagine how the other people feel.
Imagine if China or Brazil had soldiers in 800 foreign military bases in 130 different countries, including the U.S.
I'm talking with Walter Block from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Do you have any friends from Switzerland, like personal friends that you talk with?
Not on a regular basis, no.
All right.
Well, see, this is a personal problem that I have.
This one of my friends is from Switzerland, which, as far as I can tell, is probably the most successful, peaceful, limited state in the history of mankind.
No matter what argument for anarchism I can ever posit, she can always say, yeah, but the school system works great in Switzerland, and the welfare thing is fine, and they don't have all these imperial wars, and they don't have capital punishment.
The government of Switzerland is not a bunch of murderers.
It's actually all right.
And I think that you probably hear that argument about other countries in Europe, too, that I guess people don't usually cite Germany or whatever, but they'll cite Denmark or Belgium or something and say, here are countries that aren't liars and murderers.
All they do is provide services to their people all the time and not fight wars, and they're great.
Well, I would ask great compared to what?
I mean, yes, the Swiss and the Belgians are peace-loving people, and they're very efficient, and they save money, and they work hard, and they're entrepreneurial, and they're doing pretty well compared to other countries that have bigger states or worse states, but you have to ask, well, how would it compare if they didn't have any welfare or they didn't have public roads, which kill people even in Switzerland?
We know that the welfare system undermines the family.
It's true in Scandinavian countries like Sweden, which is also a peace-loving, pretty prosperous country, but the point is they would be much better off without government.
In other words, they're pretty good in spite of the government, not because of the government.
They have pretty good government.
One of my books is rating economic freedom across different countries, and Switzerland and Australia and New Zealand and other such countries are pretty high up on the list.
They are among the freest countries, at least economically speaking, but that doesn't show that a freer Switzerland wouldn't be a better Switzerland, just because our present unfree Switzerland is pretty good compared to other countries, as your friend says.
It doesn't prove what she really wants to prove, namely that it's because of the government.
It could be in spite of the government, and my claim is indeed that it is in spite of the government, not because of it.
Well, and so, but if she says actually, though, because the government has control of the education system, they make sure that everybody in Switzerland, rich or poor, all of them, get just as good an education as each other, and it's really good, and it's not based on how much money your parents make.
It's based on how much every child deserves to have a good education.
Well, I don't know.
It doesn't seem to me that every child deserves to have a good education, and this is my moderate position here.
I think every child deserves what their parents give it, and if their parents don't think education is that important or don't want their kids to be educated, I mean, there are Mennonites, and who are those people that drive around in horses in this country, the Pennsylvania, gosh, the Amish?
Oh, the Amish, yeah.
They keep their kids out of school in the eighth grade.
Now, I don't know if there are any Amish in Switzerland, but if there are, those people should have the right not to have their kids have an equal education or a lot of education or whatever.
What is this education business?
Why should we force people to have more education than they want, and why doesn't everyone in Switzerland have a PhD if we want to maximize education, or two PhDs?
There are diminishing returns on education, too, and everyone should have as much as they want, not a lot or an equal amount or what the government dictates.
All right.
Now, let me change gears a little bit here to some environmental concerns.
Now, I'm not much into believing whatever it is everybody seems to believe in the majority.
It seems like they're always usually wrong, so when everybody is all full of hype about the global warming, I tend to dismiss it because I categorize myself as not really qualified to figure out the science, so I just, eh.
However, there's an environmental concern.
There are a lot of legitimate environmental concerns.
One of them that I think is the most important is something that's really shocking to me, at least from the article that I read the other day about this new documentary that's coming out about the overfishing, and basically, here's what they describe.
This is how they got me shocked, Walter.
They said, imagine the landmass of Africa, and imagine taking a giant, you know, set of nets and going from the southern tip all the way up to the Sahara Desert and catching every bit of wildlife in there just to pick out the few zebras and whatever that you want and throwing the rest all away dead.
That that is basically what is happening now in the oceans, that the industrial technology of fishing is such that they are just completely depleting the ocean.
They're breaking down the very chain of life on this planet.
They're destroying ecosystems.
They've got places where they finally freaked out and banned fishing, and the fish haven't come back.
In 10 and 15 and 20 years, the fish have not come back.
They were depleted past the point of coming back again, and, you know, this article is really scaring me.
This is basically describing, you know, the food chain as increasingly threatened in the short term by overfishing in the oceans.
So, now, you just want anarchy and complete freedom, so I guess you think that people ought to be free to just rape the ocean until we're all dead, right?
Now, now, let's calm down.
All right, I have to put on my liberal hat so I can try to play devil's advocate here.
You're a pretty good liberal.
We're going to have to sign you up.
No, I agree with this assessment.
It is pretty horrible what they're doing, but it's due not to free enterprise.
It's due to the absence of free enterprise.
You see, what you need for free enterprise is private property rights, and, you know, we don't have to go to the oceans.
We had a similar situation with the buffalo.
The buffalo almost went extinct because you weren't allowed to own buffalo, whereas the cow never came within a million miles of extinction, even though the cow and the buffalo are roughly similar.
You know, they're about the same size, and they give milk, and they have horns and all that other stuff.
You can see how into biology I am.
That is because you are into global warming.
See, the problem is that the oceans aren't privately owned.
If the oceans were privately owned, I wouldn't overfish my territory any more than I would go out to the lower 40 and shoot all my cows.
All right, so now, basically, what you're arguing is the simple theory of the tragedy of the commons.
Is that right?
Absolutely.
You've got it in one.
All right, well, now, please elaborate further for our audience, because I know, I mean, seriously, imagine a liberal in the audience saying, yeah, right, turn the oceans over to the corporations.
That'll fix everything.
That's the pressure you're under here, Walter.
Yes, well, I think it doesn't have to be corporations.
It could be private entrepreneurs, single entrepreneurs, partnerships, or corporations, any individual private company that can make money or lose money based on how well they manage their land or their plot of ocean.
Yes, what the tragedy of commons says is that if we own things in common that is coercively not under partnerships, we tend to overuse them.
The example I sometimes offer my classes is if I give each of them a soda, a can of soda, and then a straw, and then I monitor the rate at which they sip the soda, it won't be too fast.
They won't slurp it all down quickly, because they know that if they don't slurp it now, they can slurp it in five minutes or so.
But if I give them one big bowl of soda or orange juice or whatever it is I'm giving them in long straws, then they're going to slurp to bust their gut, because if they relax, someone else will get their share.
So when you have that sort of a thing, you tend to overuse or use it quickly.
It's very similar to the buffalo which weren't owned.
Why let this buffalo get away?
Because if you let it get away, someone else will get it.
Whereas if it's your cow and you let it go away, you can have it tomorrow, whereas the buffalo you can't.
So whenever you have this tragedy of the commons, as in the oceans, people tend to overfish.
Why should I leave this cod or this whale or whatever for other people?
Because then they'll get it and I won't and I'll lose.
It's true that if everyone acts that way, we won't have any more cod or whales or whatever it is, zebras, but that's not my concern.
My concern is to maximize profits.
So if you're maximizing profits under a tragedy of the commons, as we have in the oceans, then the answer is disaster.
And the scenario that you were portraying a few minutes ago about how just horrible it is, I think is pretty accurate.
But the reason for it is that we don't have private property rights.
If we had private property rights, it would be like cows.
Yes, corporations run cows, chickens or whatever, horses.
We're not running out of them.
There's no extinction for things that private people can lose if they run out of.
In fact, it's funny.
You think about, you bring up chickens.
The problem with the private property owners in their chicken industry is they cram too many chickens into too small of a space rather than the other way around.
That's a whole other issue that you're changing the subject.
Yeah, but I just mean, the problem surely isn't, you know, that, well, what happened to all the chickens?
There are plenty of chickens.
There are too many for per square foot.
Right.
It's sort of like in free enterprise.
The big problem for the poor is not starvation, but obesity.
Whereas the problem in North Korea, they'd like to have a little obesity up there, but they're starving.
And that's what happened under the Soviet Union.
So, yes, obesity is a problem.
And maybe cramming too many chickens into too small space is a problem.
But we're not talking about that now.
That deserves its own discussion.
What we're now talking about is running out of stuff, like running out of fish.
And when private enterprise runs it, we don't run out of things.
We don't run out of pigs, horses, cows, you know, barnyard animals.
And take the elephant and the rhinoceros in Africa.
We were running out of those, too, because you had tragedy, the commons on the land.
I mean, an elephant is just a, I don't know, a big whale with bigger feet.
Yeah, a big land whale.
It's not really, there's not really much of a way to make money off them, except for they're, you know, killing them and taking their tusks away.
Well, if you do that, that's because you don't own them.
And what, I mean, a farmer will never kill a pregnant cow.
They kill old cows.
They'll kill bulls because you don't need as many bulls as cows.
It's the same thing with elephants.
If they're farmed in big farmyards with big fences and big, I mean, you can't keep an elephant in a little barn.
You have to let them roam around.
But if the farmer protects them, he might allow somebody to shoot an old bull elephant for their tusk, but then they'll also take advantage of the meat and the hide, and it'll be rationalized.
Whereas when it's not, when you have this tragedy of the commons on the land, as with the rhinoceros or the elephant, well, then you have these poachers who will shoot the beast and just get their tusk, and if it's a pregnant cow, it doesn't matter.
You kill it anyway.
Well, of course we're going to run out of elephants.
So it's the same thing, whether it's on the land or the ocean.
The answer to both is to primatize.
Well, you know, they say, I guess this was Ludwig von Mises said, that the middle of the road leads to socialism.
I don't want that crack to be aimed at me as a moderate here, and I'm only kidding about moderate.
Obviously, my views are pretty extreme in terms of what most people believe in.
Yeah, but you say it all so calmly, though.
Oh, OK, I'm moderating demeanor.
But Mises is right.
I mean, you know, it's hard to adhere to a middle ground, because each time Obama has another regulation, it screws up the economy, and then you need another regulation to fix the first one, although he'll never get rid of the first one.
Well, on the subject of the oceans, you know, we have a situation where what we need at this point is to either go immediately with your way, or we need some better government regulators to be better stewards and to lower the numbers on the quotas and whatever, and try to preserve this resource somehow.
Because, I mean, look, we got six billion people plus on this planet.
We got, you know, more than half of them probably rely on eating fish to stay alive every day.
You know, we can't have the oceans die on us here.
Somebody's got to do something.
Oh, yes, I agree with you that the present system is perhaps the worst of all possible ones.
A slightly better situation would be what they do sometimes.
They'll have, like, what is it, fishing quotas, and they'll have fishing seasons, and they'll put limits on how much capacity a fishing boat can do in order to preserve the stock.
But a much more sophisticated, much better way is to have private property rights and to have, you know, the Mississippi River Corporation or the Mississippi River Partnership, if you know, like corporations own the Mississippi River and have, you know, the Atlantic Company own part of the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Company own part of the Pacific Ocean.
Look, where would you rather meet me, in Central Park, in New York City, or in Disneyland?
The obvious answer is in Disneyland.
It's much safer.
Well, I'd probably rather meet you in Central Park, but that's a matter of taste.
I understand your point, though.
There's actually security at Disneyland, you're saying, unlike in Central Park.
Right.
That's the point.
Well, private enterprise, if you can lose money, if something bad happens, you tend to focus your concentration.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, because we only have, well, four minutes left or something here for what's a pretty big topic, but I want to see if I can get your take on this real quick, which is, you know, on the subject of the oceans, international trade.
I met a very interesting professor who, you know, pretty much liked the peace, love, and libertarian program, but he said to me, you know, without the U.S.
Navy, as the world empire, guaranteeing security on the high seas, all your global division of labor and international trade and global economy that you say that you guys are not protectionists, that you're for open trade and friendly relations with all nations and whatever, but without the giant socialist navy to protect the seas, all of that breaks down, and the libertarian society becomes an isolationist one by default anyway.
Well, I would trust a private cop more than a public cop, because whether it's Disneyland versus Central Park in New York City or whether it's the private navy, look, you know, these, I was going to say, use a bad word, but these bad people, what they do with these piracy of these boats now, they forbid those people from having arms on those boats.
So, of course, they're sitting ducks for the pirates.
Look, who would you trust, an insurance company dash private navy, that if they insured a boat and the boat was lost, they had to pay off, or some government navy that if they miss up, and to err is human, we all make mistakes, they don't lose a penny.
Again, private cops in Disneyland are better than private cops in Central Park and private cops on the ocean, that is private navies, are more efficient than public navies.
Do you want the people who run the post office to secure your safety?
No, I kind of wish they'd abolish the post office, actually.
Well, then we should abolish public navies and just have private navies who would be much more efficient, private navies dash insurance companies.
This is a point Hans Hoppe makes about the importance of insurance companies.
And if I could leave your audience with one thing on environmentalism, Murray Rothbard wrote this magnificent thing which is available on the Mises web, M-I-S-E-S, it's called Air Pollution, that's the definitive piece on environmentalism, and I recommend that highly.
I'm sorry I didn't really have a chance to spend much time with it, but I did find this morning your article, Water Privatization, which is also at Mises.org.
Yes, I certainly favor privatization of oceans, rivers, lakes, whatever.
My motto is if it moves, privatize it.
If it doesn't move, privatize it.
And since everything either moves or doesn't move, you privatize everything.
And that's the recipe for a sound, wealthy, prosperous, and free society.
All right, everybody, that's Walter Block.
He is a professor at Loyola University.
He's a scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Again, that's Mises.org.
He's the author of Defending the Undefendable, and is the ultimate moderate center in American politics.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Walter.
Thanks for having me.
I really do think that, by the way.
You listen to him, he doesn't sound like a very extreme guy, does he?
I mean, the way he wants things to be is very different from the way things are now, but he didn't want to beat anybody over the head.
He is a moderate.
He's the guy who wants to stop all beatings over the head of all people all the time.
Libertarianism is the real center.
The people we call the moderates now are the extremists.
John McCain and Joe Lieberman.
That ought to be all I got to say.
That's the moderate center in America now.
I say, you know, Lew Rockwell and Walter Block.