Walter Block

Walter Block: The Undefendable and the Unrepentant

In 1976 he published a book arguing that the pimp, the blackmailer, the slumlord and the moneylender are heroes of the marketplace, wrongly reviled. *Defending the Undefendable* has since been translated into ten languages. It also set the operating template for a career now approaching fifty years: locate the position everyone finds intolerable, demonstrate that libertarian axioms require it, and refuse to retreat when the censure motions arrive. They have arrived more than once.

Brooklyn, and a Track Team With Bernie Sanders

Block was born on 21 August 1941 in Brooklyn, New York, to Abraham Block, a certified public accountant, and Ruth Block, a paralegal — both self-identified liberals. He attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn, where Bernie Sanders ran on his track team. He describes himself as a "devout atheist." He holds both American and Canadian citizenship.

In his own account he was, through the 1950s and into the 1960s, a communist. That biographical fact matters, because Block's intellectual life is organised around a single conversion and the subsequent refusal to make any second one.

Rand, Rothbard, and the Turn

Three things moved him. He attended an Ayn Rand lecture as an undergraduate. He read *Atlas Shrugged* and Hazlitt's *Economics in One Lesson*, the latter recommended by Nathaniel Branden. And he met Murray Rothbard, whom he treats as the decisive influence.

His relationship with Rand is characteristically unsentimental: he remains "a big fan," calls *Atlas Shrugged* "the best novel ever written," and simultaneously dismisses Objectivism as "cultish." He took his BA in philosophy from Brooklyn College in 1964 and his PhD in economics from Columbia in 1972, writing a dissertation on rent control under Gary Becker — a Chicago-school Nobel laureate supervising a student who would spend his life in the Austrian camp.

The Career

He was senior economist at the Fraser Institute from 1979 to 1991, and taught at the University of Central Arkansas, Holy Cross College in Indiana, Baruch College and Rutgers. He was a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute from 2000 to 2024. He holds the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at Loyola University New Orleans.

The output is enormous: over 500 peer-reviewed articles by 2017, across the *Journal of Libertarian Studies*, the *Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics*, the *Review of Austrian Economics*, the *American Journal of Economics and Sociology* and *Psychology Today*, plus roughly two dozen books. John Stossel credited Block's work with showing him that economics "illuminates what common sense overlooks."

The Method, and Where It Leads

Block's technique is deductive. He takes the libertarian non-aggression principle as axiomatic and follows it wherever it goes, treating a repugnant conclusion as evidence of the argument's rigour rather than of its failure.

So: he defends the theoretical validity of voluntary slave contracts, arguing this strengthens the framework's internal consistency, and insists slavery's moral horror derives from coercion rather than from unpleasant labour. He holds that private property owners may exclude customers — "no one is compelled to associate with people against their will" — and that Woolworth's had a legal right to segregate its lunch counters. He treats workplace sexual harassment between adults in a private establishment as a "package-deal" implicitly accepted with the job, and therefore voluntary. He attributes the 35,000-plus annual American highway deaths to government mismanagement of roads rather than driver behaviour, citing the safety records of private parking lots and shopping malls. He separates evicting a foetus from killing one, permitting pre-viability abortion and abandonment of custody. He denies the non-aggression principle extends to animals, leaving owners free to kill or torture them absent contract. He proposes a "presumption that all government employees are guilty of a crime against humanity," with restitution and retribution through libertarian "Nuremberg Trials" — exempting figures such as Ron Paul. And in the Blockean Proviso, named by Stephan Kinsella, he argues an owner cannot claim an unowned interior "donut hole" of land if surrounding property denies others access.

The Censures

In 2008, lecturing at Loyola on "Injustices in the Politics and Economics of Social Justice," Block said "blacks and women" earned less because they were "less productive." Pressed on the racial wage gap, he cited *The Bell Curve* rather than historical injustice and discrimination.

Seventeen faculty members demanded censure for what they called his "recurring public attacks…on the civil rights of all." The university president, Reverend Kevin Wildes, publicly called his arguments "fallacious." The economics department and the Adam Smith Society jointly condemned the remarks as "racially insensitive" and "erroneous," noting that a "considerable wage gap remains" even after adjusting for productivity factors. Block's response was to state that he regards sensitivity as the enemy of intellectual inquiry and truth.

In 2014 the *New York Times* reported that Block had suggested daily life under slavery was "not so bad – you pick cotton and sing songs," and that he defended Woolworth's right to segregate. He accused the paper of libel for stripping context, clarifying that he considers slavery "depraved and monstrous" because it is forced, not because the labour is unpleasant. The *Times* subsequently appended an Editor's Note recording that Block opposes slavery because it is involuntary and believes reparations should be paid.

The darkest of his published positions appears in *Libertarianism vs Objectivism*, where he argues that a four-year-old could legally consent to sex with an adult if the parent accepted payment necessary for the child's survival — and frames a parent's refusal of such payment as itself abusive.

Why Walter Is Called a Genius

The quality on offer is deductive consistency, pursued past the point where nearly everyone else stops. Most thinkers operating from an axiom treat monstrous implications as a reductio — evidence the axiom needs qualification. Block treats them as tests of nerve, and his defenders regard this as intellectual courage: the refusal to let social cost edit a logical chain. Combined with real productivity — 500-plus peer-reviewed articles, two dozen books, an endowed chair, a book in ten languages — it produces a plausible case for an unusually rigorous mind.

The counter-case is stronger. Nobody in the record calls Block a genius; the word has no source here. Consistency is not insight — a system that generates conclusions like the four-year-old argument or the *Bell Curve* citation is more naturally read as evidence the premises are wrong than as evidence the thinker is fearless. His own university's economics department, professionally competent to judge, called his central empirical claim erroneous and pointed out he had ignored the actual data on the residual wage gap. His president called his reasoning fallacious. Volume is not depth: 500 articles in largely movement-aligned journals measures productivity, not influence outside the tent. And his single most quoted line — that sensitivity is the enemy of truth — is a rhetorical position rather than an argument. The honest description is a prolific and fearless polemicist whose defining trait is that he will not stop, which is not the same trait as being right.

Legacy

*Defending the Undefendable* remains the thing he is read for, and it remains genuinely useful as a stress test — a book that forces a reader to locate exactly where their own principles stop. Whether that is a contribution to economics or to provocation is the question the last five decades have not settled, and Block, who regards the discomfort as the point, has never shown the slightest interest in settling it.