In Reply to Walter Block: Sticking with Democratic Socialism

“Of course, the question of whether healthcare should be socialized is only a small piece of my general disagreement with [Walter] Block on political economy. Still, it is a vivid enough example to stand in for all the bigger questions.”

Walter Block has many ideas that seem strange and extreme.

I do not just mean that many of his ideas seem this way to a democratic socialist like me, though they certainly do. I mean that, if one explained some of them to the first 100 people one meets on the street, I would be amazed if at least 95 did not react that way. I am not saying this as an ad hominem sneer or an excuse to dismiss his ideas without argument. Just the opposite, in fact. Bear with me while I give a sense of what I mean.

Many Americans have pro-Israel views on the war in Gaza, for example, but very few of them support the outright mass deportation of the entire Palestinian population—men, women, and children, with no attempt at differentiating between fighters and civilians. Block does. Explicitly. Similarly, many people dislike excessive government regulation and/or think #MeToo went too far, but very few would forthrightly defend a “right” to private-sector sexual harassment. Block does. He has written that harassment “that takes place between a secretary and her boss is not a coercive action like the pinching that takes place in the public sphere.” And most Americans are at least vaguely pro-capitalist (at least in the minimal sense of not advocating the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production), but very few would support “anarcho-capitalism.” That is Block’s position. In Block’s utopia, no one would be educated at a public school because he regards the taxation that funds those schools as a form of theft. There would be no public fire departments, though one would presumably be free to pay to contract the services of a private fire brigade like the one operated by Marcus Licinius Crassus in ancient Rome. There would not even be public sidewalks.

The late philosopher David Lewis, who (in his own, very different way) adopted some deeply strange positions, once said that he knew how to refute every objection to his views except “an incredulous stare.” It would be easy for me to respond to Block’s views with nothing but an incredulous stare. Instead, though, in all of my interactions with him, I have done him the courtesy of taking his arguments seriously and doing my best to refute them point-by-point. I did that four years ago when he came on my podcast for a debate on anarcho-capitalism. And I even did that when he wrote an article here advocating for outright ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.