Building Blocks for Liberty

Walter Block ranks among the most prolific and provocative libertarian thinkers in human history. This volume fills an important gap in his corpus of writing: a series of accessible articles on cutting edge topics. His research and writing on roads, education, labor, secession, drugs, and money fill the scholarly journals, but these reductions bring this research to you in a format that is designed to persuade everyone.

The book therefore extends the logic of liberty in new directions, helping the reader to come to a radical understanding of the implications of economic liberty for the social and political order. His mind is sharp as a tack in dealing with conventional objections.

Block even tries his hand at taking on changes in language that subtly impact the position of liberty in our social and political lives, thereby picking up a project that Hayek had begun in the 1970s. Block alone seems to have seen the merit of this type of analysis and extended it into the age of political correctness.

What first appears to be an eccentric collection of unpredictable opinions on a large range of provocative topics turns out to be a compelling presentation of the logic of liberty applied to a series of practical issues that surround us every day.

One might see Building Blocks for Liberty as a bracing introduction to the power of libertarian logic to solve everyday problems.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr

Introduction

Part One: Economics

1. On Property and Exploitation

2. Toward a Universal Libertarian Theory of Gun (Weapon) Control: A Spatial and Geographical Analysis

3. Environmentalism and Economic Freedom: The Case for Private Property Rights

4. Enterprising Education: Doing Away with the Public School System

5. Labor Relations, Unions and Collective Bargaining:

A Political Economic Analysis

6. Is There a Right to Unionize?

7. Free Market Transportation: Denationalizing the Roads

8. Public Goods and Externalities: The Case of Roads

9. The Gold Standard: A Critique of Friedman, Mundell, Hayek and Greenspan

Part Two: Human Rights

10. The Nonaggression Axiom of Libertarianism

11. Libertarianism, Positive Obligations and Property Abandonment: Children’s Rights

12. Social Justice

13. Discrimination: An Interdisciplinary Analysis

14. A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration

15. Secession

16. Legalize Drugs Now! An Analysis of the Benefits of Legalized Drugs

17. Libertarianism and Libertinism

Part Three: Language

18. Watch Your Language

19. Taking Back the Language

20. Word Watch

21. Continuing to Watch Our Language

22. Voluntary Taxes: Abusive Language and Politicians

23. Language, Once Again: Civil War, Inclusive Language, Economic Warfare, National Wealth

Bibliography

Index of Names

Index of Subjects