Free Markets: An Interview with Walter Block

0:00Good morning and welcome to Free Markets with Dr. Mike Beitler. You'll be hearing leading thinkers discuss business, economic and political issues from a libertarian free market perspective. Now, here's your host, Dr. Mike Beitler. Good morning. Welcome to Free Markets. I'm Mike Beitler, your host. I believe big government is the problem and a free market is the solution. I'm gonna jump right in today and introduce my special guest. My guest today is Professor Walter Block. Walter is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at Loyola University in New Orleans.

0:47Dr. Block is an adjunct scholar at the Mises Institute. Walter is the author of many books, Including the Privatization of Roads and Highways in 2006 and Labor Economics from a Free Market Perspective, Employing the Unemployable in 2008, Walter has contributed almost 300 articles and reviews to scholarly refereed journals and has written several thousand op-ed pieces. Walter, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's an honor to have you. Walter, I was going I'm going to ask you to start off telling my listeners a little bit about Katrina since you live in New Orleans.

1:34What was the government's involvement and did they make matters better or worse down there? I'll give you three guesses. I think I can get in one guess. Government is great. Without them, we would have had a lot of trouble here. No, I'm kidding. Of course. I believe that Katrina really did not cause the problem. Actually, Katrina missed us. It went more to Biloxi, which is, oh, 40, 50 miles to the east of us. The real problem was two government agencies. One, the Army Corps of Engineers that made levies that didn't last too long or last too well. One of the bumper stickers here is, make levies not war. Well, yes, I suppose that's good. They should make levies, but they can't because they're government and therefore they're inept.

2:23The other group that contributed to the deaths, and none of them are in jail now or even being indicted or anything for criminal behavior, is FEMA. And my favorite bumper sticker there is FEMA Happen. That's a great bumper sticker. And what happened was the Army Corps of Engineers built levies that didn't do their job and FEMA prevented private enterprise like Walmart and hundreds of of Individuals and Groups and Private Organizations from coming in here and helping. There were boats with 500 rooms in them that were willing to put people in them, but no, this is not allowed by FEMA. The Walmart brought in truckloads of ice and orange juice and oranges and milk and things like that, and they were turned back.

3:13It was just a debacle. There were hundreds of those yellow school buses, Halfway up to their steering wheel in water. Now look, you know, Katrina, we had five days notice for Katrina. Six days, eight days notice. It's not like one of these earthquakes that you get two seconds notice. And Ray Nagin, the mayor, and Blanco, the governor, they were all just very inept and created havoc here. And if the intelligentsia, or what passes through the intelligentsia, the pundits and editorialists are saying, well, this shows that the government needs more money. I tell you, if a private enterprise had done half of the bad things that they've done, it would have been the end of them.

4:07They would have been bankrupt. They would have been long gone. And that's good, because in the market, if you don't provide a service to a consumer, you don't make money. If you don't make money for a long enough time, you go bankrupt, and you leave the stage for other people who can do a better job. Whereas with government, when you fail, they just throw more money at you. I think that's so interesting, Walter, because you're saying something I don't think I've heard people talk about. I mean, there was problems not just at the federal level, but at the governor's level. The mayor and city council obviously must have known there was a potential problem. Yeah. There was this one young black kid who stole a city, one of those yellow school buses, and he went around to the, they used to call it the Superdome, but I sort of refer to it as the Sewer Dome.

4:57He went there and he got people just standing on the sidewalk, said, come on in, I'll take you to Baton Rouge. He was like a local hero because he, quote, stole a bus, although my favorite novel, of course, is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrug, and Ragnar Danischkold, one of my favorite heroes in that book, stole, in quotes, government property that they never should have had in the first place. Well, this kid really was a hero, and if he could do it, why couldn't the city government

6:03I gave him a copy of Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal and I said this is by Ayn Rand and he looked at the book and he said, oh there's something here by Alan Greenspan, was he a follower of Ayn Rand? I hardly knew what to say because, yes, obviously at one point he was, but then he goes on to become a central planner. Yes. Isn't that horrible? I mean, it really is. I mean, it's sort of okay when a socialist stays a socialist. I don't really mean it's okay, but you can sort of understand it.

6:48It's maybe in the blood or in the genes or somewhere. But when a guy like Alan Greenspan, who was not only just a follower, but maybe Chief Luke Kennet, or certainly in her inner circle, and who did good work on the gold standard and free enterprise and the money system, and then he, I don't know what, turns code or becomes a trader to freedom and becomes a central planner and denigrates the gold Standard, Free Enterprise Money, Dr. Robert Stadler, Dr. Robert Stadler, Dr. Robert Stadler, Walter, and when you think about Greenspan created just trillions of dollars in a V.I.

8:19Free Enterprise Money is that which becomes money in a competitive free market setting. And gold didn't always win, it won most of the time, but silver was used and copper and sometimes bronze and heck, cigarettes are sometimes used as money. The point is that when a commodity arises in the market setting and people start using it to facilitate trades, well, that's what money is. And this fiat currency and the fractional reserve banking and all the mess that Greenstein and his buddy Bernanke have created, that's why we have the economic crisis that we now have.

9:09And guess who we're relying upon to get us out of the economic crisis? I've told my listeners before, I was a CFO in banking and I'm amazed at what I'm seeing

10:13Closer to Capitalism Okay, which I appreciate. Okay, so as we're getting close here to our first break, you're listening to Free Markets. I'm Mike Beitler, your host, and my guest today is Professor Walter Block. We're going to take a couple of minutes here for a break, but stay with us. We've got some really interesting discussion coming up, and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the second segment of Free Market. I'm Mike Feitner, your host. My special guest today is Professor Walter Block. And right before the break, I mentioned this whole debacle about TARP funds and Wall Street banking bailout and so forth. And as you listeners know, I've already told my stories before about the government coming in and telling us we have to make loans.

11:07And I was going to ask Walter to jump in here and tell us Walter, what do you think about the, I guess we're on TARP 2 at this point or TARP 3 and is this the answer to the banking crisis? No, I don't think that this is the answer to the banking crisis. It's sort of like taking water out of the deep end of the pool and putting it into the shallow end of the pool in an attempt to make the shallow end of the pool deeper. It's just silly. I mean, if you take money from Peter and give it to Paul, well, Paul looks pretty good, but Peter doesn't look that good and it's hard to see how you can lift yourself up by the bootstraps and just by taking money from victims and giving it to recipients that you No, there's a cost to the transfer, so you're making everyone worse off.

12:11The whole thing started, though, with, again, the Fed, our favorite institution here. The Boston Fed, there are 12 of them, in 1992, I think it was, started in with the banks and saying that they were racist. Why are they racist? Because black people are getting disproportionately fewer mortgages than white people. And why is this? When you go into a bank and you want to get a mortgage for your house, they want 20% down. They want to ask you if you have a job, if you have a credit rating, have you paid your debts in the past, if you have a fixed address, if you have assets, things like that. And for various reasons, black people and other minority groups had lower credit ratings than white people.

13:01And also there was a bit of redlining, that is, the banks would draw a red line or a red circle around a neighborhood because they had had trouble collecting mortgage payments from people who lived there and it just so happened that those red lines were in predominantly black areas so black people weren't getting as many loans and this the Boston Fed was due to racism, not due to proper business practices of making sure that the money entrusted to you by your depositors will be repaid by the people you ended out to in mortgages, but based on racism or something like that. What they did, and banking is a very, very heavily regulated industry, so if you don't listen to the regulators, you can't merge, you can't buy this, you can't sell that, So what they would do is they would start making loans to people, sometimes called ninja loans, N-I-N-J-A-A, ninja loans, no income, no job, no assets, no address, and this just encouraged people to buy bigger housing and more housing than they otherwise would have been justified in doing.

14:22and putting people into housing who didn't have the ability to pay off mortgages. And then what happened is that there was a secondary market in mortgages. Lots of times, you know, you'll get a mortgage on your house with Bank A, and then Bank A will send you a letter three months later saying, from now on, send your mortgage money to Bank B because we've sold the mortgage to Bank B, and then, you know, Bank B will then transfer it to Bank C. and what they'll do is they'll combine these mortgages into commercial paper and this is all well and good. There's nothing wrong with secondary markets. I mean, if you didn't have a used car market, then the new car market wouldn't be as good as it is because half the value or part of the value of buying a new car is the knowledge that you can sell it whenever you want. So part of the benefit of a bank having a mortgage property, if you will, is that they can sell it. But the point is that

15:18These were non-performing loans, or toxic loans, as it is now called, and I'm not sure who to blame, probably everybody. On the one hand, the banks were forced into it. On the other hand, they didn't resist all that much. And now we're talking about bailing them out, taking these toxic loans off their books and getting the government to, in effect, nationalize or take a property interest in these banks and Return for relieving them of these ill-gotten loans. Well, this is just socialism when the government takes ownership stakes in private industry and it stashes them when the government controls economies through regulation.

16:03And I'm not sure which is which. Well, I guess each is worse than the other. So I'm not a big fan of talk. I forget what T-A-R-P means, something to do with bailing out companies. Well, one of the benefits of a bankruptcy is that it takes out of the market people who are non-performers. But if you take a Chrysler or a General Motors or a Ford, we used to call them the big three, but I guess we should now call them the medium three or the mediocre three, and we give them vast amounts of money that the car buyers are unwilling to give them on a voluntary basis, We undermine the whole ethos of the free enterprise system and no longer can we expect what we expect from capitalism, namely good productivity, because we're now supporting people who are non-productive or companies that are non-productive.

17:02Yes, yes, Barack Obama will not give money to companies where the CEO makes more than what is it, 400,000 or 500,000 a year? Yeah, they went to 500,000. I went up to $500,000, but there are grave problems with that as well. First of all, if you expect people to fix these companies, you've got to get talented people. Well, talented people can command much higher salaries than $500,000. Heck, even professors make that much money sometimes at the top of the list. So what you're really doing is misallocating very good corporate talent and telling them don't go to companies that are in trouble. Stay in companies that are safe. Well, then how are you going to get the market to fix this? The other thing is that the capital system has within it the ability to make sure that CEOs don't get inordinately high salaries.

17:59So you might ask, well why then are they getting such inordinately high salaries? Why are these The Market has a mechanism that is able to deal with the out-of-control CEO's salaries. For want of a better word, I'll call it the Michael Milken effect. You might remember Michael Milken. What he would do is he would go to companies where he thought the CEO was hogging up the money, getting too high a salary, because if the CEO is diverting funds to himself that shouldn't be going to him, what happens to the value of the stock of the company? Well, the value of the stock of the company gets depreciated.

18:47It's lower. So Michael Milken would buy up these companies with junk bonds and when he He had enough control. He would kick out these, I don't want to use the word, greedy CEOs because I'm in favor of greed, but these CEOs who are grabbing off more money than the marketplace would support. And he would kick them out and put in a new board and he would make a vast amount of money. But guess what happened to Michael Milken? These politicians threw him in jail. So, if the government takes away the market mechanism that enables the market to solve a problem, then the market can't solve the problem because the market isn't allowed to operate. And then they say, aha, you see, the market is failing, the government has to step in to rationalize things, but this is just silly, but that's the world we have.

19:42Actually, Walter, let me jump in here and everything you said I would say amen to, and And I would just add one thing, from my own experience in banking, like you were saying, we were forced to make these bad loans to special interest groups for the politicians. And I remember a meeting I had with our senior team with the regulators, and they basically told us if you don't make these loans, and they had a stack of loan files there that We were about to reject and said, if you don't make these loans, we'll take the eagle off the door. Basically saying you won't have FDIC insurance or a charter, you'll be out of business. And the thing I would add, Walter, is I remember our executive team looking at each other about this is just bad business practice and the regulators said, well, you should originate the loans and then just sell them off to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

20:43So, you know, going back to your point about what the bankers didn't resist, well, yeah, because we could shift that risk over to ultimately the taxpayers. Well, you know, it's a very interesting subject that you're raising. Arne Rand wrote this essay. What was it? Something to the effect, maybe you'll correct me if I don't have the exact title. America's Big Businessmen, America's Most Persecuted Minority. The Persecuted Minority, right. That's it. I think that's only half the tale. I think that that is true, that America's businessmen are a persecuted minority. Only one evidence, nowadays it's very difficult on TV or shows to have the villain be a Jew or a woman or a black person or a minority group or a gay person. It seems that the only fair game to As the villain is a white business man, so yes, there is a lot of persecuting of business.

21:48On the other hand, people like Murray Rothbard and Gabriel Coco and other historians have shown definitively that business is not all that innocent. There's a lot of initiation of the regulations of business by business. For example, the FDA and the Meat Inspection Act, railroads and regulation, a lot of these companies, what happened in the 19th century is that they were being outcompeted by small arrivals, and rather than allow the market to rationalize things to their expenses, they would have been driven into bankruptcy. Oh Walter, let me jump in here. I hear the second break creeping up on us.

22:33I think what you're getting into there is cronyism, and I think we ought to talk about that a little bit after the break. Sounds good. You're listening to Free Markets. I'm Mike Feitler with Professor Walter Block. We're going to take a short break. Stay with us.

22:51Welcome back to the third segment of Free Markets. I'm Mike Feitler, your host. I'm speaking today with Professor Walter Block. And Walter's agreed to stay with us for the full hour, so if you have an email question form, go ahead and shoot that over here to me. Before the break, Walter, we were talking a little bit about what I would call cronyism. I know people call it crony capitalism, but I hate to hear capitalism and cronyism in the same sentence. Let's talk a little bit more about that, so I guess, like you Walter, I'm anti-big government, but business being in bed with government, should we be concerned about that also? Oh, absolutely. Big businesses, yes, in some sense they are a persecuted minority, but in another sense they're bringing it on themselves and they're not persecuting, they're persecuted, they're The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit There are businesses giving money to, to the demo publicans and the republicans or whatever.

24:24They don't give money to the libertarians who favor the free enterprise system. So yes, I think Ayn Rand is very good on half the story, but she's less good on this crony capitalism as far as I read her. I would never write an essay myself saying, big business, America's most persecuted minority. I would say it's a complicated thing. They're both persecuting and persecute ed, and I'm not a real big fan of business. I mean, look at what Bill Gates is doing now, he's, you know, and Soros and these other people. They're just very socialist and fascistic kinds of people, and they represent big business.

25:10I think that the situation is a lot more complicated than just saying that they're a persecuted minority. I guess my concerns be about that, Walter. I've been in the business world over 30 years, so I've been proud to be in the business world. I used to work in Washington, D.C., and when I go back now, K Street's nothing but lobbyists. Many of these are just business lobbies trying to, like you said, get legislation that favors their firm and they're trying to get subsidies and everything else that are just coming out of the taxpayers' pockets.

25:56Well, I guess we have to distinguish between offensive and defensive lobbying. If it's defensive lobbying, what their lobbying is all about is against government incursions. But if it's offense of lobbying, then they're lobbying in favor of government interventions which they think will benefit them. So it's a very complicated thing, the relationship between business and liberty. You'd think that businessmen would all favor free enterprise because free enterprise is what allows them to be business people in the first place, but sadly that's not the case. It's a great point when you think that to stay in business you almost have to have a lobbyist just to protect you. Yeah, I mean, to get back to Atlas Shrugged, that magnificent book, Hank Reardon hired Wesley Mouch before Wesley Mouch or Mooch, I'm not sure how to pronounce it.

26:51Oh yes, right. Is it Mooch or Mouch? Do you know? I thought it was Mouch, but I'm joking, Mooch might come up with a way to pronounce it. Hank Reardon didn't really know Washington, all he knew was Pittsburgh and steel and Reardon and Metal and stuff like that, and he hired this guy, Wesley Mootsch, and he was his supposed link in Washington, who later turned traitor against him and became one of the regulators. Ayn Rand put her finger on a lot of very important points. Absolutely. Let me switch topics a little bit here, Walter, and ask you about, are you starting to see Do you see a lot of similarities between what's happening now and the FDR administration and Great Depression?

27:44Oh yes, yes. The parallels are amazing. I mean, we might as well call this guy Franklin Delano Obama. He's just doing, you know, we're all Keynesians now, he's following the pattern of bailouts FDR had the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and Obama is talking about ending dependence on foreign bananas, foreign oil, foreign anything. We've got to stop free trade internationally, seems to be one of those things. The FDR had the CCC and the WPA, and the equivalent there is Obama's bailing these guys out and having a tarp and bailing those guys out.

28:35The parallels are very, very strong. Murray Rothbard wrote a book, America's Great Depression, and unfortunately he's not with us anymore. He died in 1995. If he were around now, he would be making the case, I'm sure, that there are ominous Parallels between the 1929 and the 2009 situation. FDR and Hoover, we mustn't forget that Hoover was also a New Dealer. Somehow he's seen as a free enterprise, which is totally fallacious. The Hoover-FDR New Deal extended the Great Depression from 1929 all the way to 1946, If Obama follows this Keynesian FDR-Hoover path, instead of the depression or recession or whatever it is, panic lasting for a couple of months, it can last for 10, 15, 20 years and be very much deeper than it otherwise would be.

29:37And it was even more so because we've already discussed the CRA, which was one of the impetuses

29:47of the misallocation of resources. Another one is the fact that in the 1920s, Rothbard's book, America's Great Depression Shows, what the Fed did then was artificially lower interest The idea then was artificially lower interest rates, which misallocated resources toward heavier industry, and that's what Greenspan and Bernanke have been doing low these many years. Heck, the interest rate is down near zero. So in the Austrian view, and by the way, Austrian economics has got nothing to do with the economics of the country of Austria any more than Chicago's school economics has to do with the city of What the Austrian view is, to which I subscribe, is that the recession is sort of like a hangover the next morning and the last thing you want to do is give the drunkard more booms.

30:43That's not the way to cure depression and that's exactly what Obama is doing. Another parallel is that FDR popped up wages. Well, Obama is not propping up wages, he's propping down wages with the CEOs, but he's also propping up companies instead of wages, he's propping up the big three, the Rust Belt Kings. So I would say the parallels are ominous, they're all over the place, they're very powerful and if we learn anything from history it's to not do what they did in the 20s and in the 1930s, but Obama, I guess, and his advisors haven't read the Austrian libertarian view on these things. It definitely looks like they have definitely not read it, that's for sure.

31:31I'm curious, too, Walter, you were talking there about propping up wages and so forth. Are you all so concerned like I am about, I was listening to, watching CNBC this morning and they were talking about the problem is real estate prices are, we have to do something and to hold up real estate prices. Shouldn't we just let them drop down to the market? Yes, well, Ben, that's what the magic of the market is. That's what the beauty of the free enterprise system is, is that we don't know what the right prices are and nor do the central planners. Ludwig von Mises wrote a book, Human Action and Socialism, and many of his other books that show that the market is the best planner of an economy. These people don't know what they're doing.

32:18They don't know what the proper price of housing should be. The only way to find out what the efficient and low price of housing is, is to allow markets to decide what the housing prices are. So if what they're going to do is start bailing out people who bought houses that they couldn't afford to keep the prices up so that they don't have to sell at a loss, well, that's a big problem. problem, we have more housing than the time preference rates or the impatience rates or the saving investment decisions of the populace would allow us to have and the only way to rationalize this is to allow prices to drop. How far? I don't know. I'm not a central planner. It seems to me, I just think about it on a very micro level, that I would consider buying

33:40I'm just using a paraphrase that if an individual tries to save himself, it's very difficult because there's no knowing of what to do and it's very hard for the individual to save himself and rather what the individual should try to do is to bring about freedom and bring about free enterprise and the Mises Institute, which is sort of patterned itself after Mises Walter, after the break, I'm going to talk a little bit about the Mises Institute with Okay. We're coming up on the third and final break here. You're listening to Free Markets. I'm Mike Beidler, your host, and my special guest today is Professor Walter Block.

34:27We'll be right back. Welcome back to the final segment of Free Markets. I'm Mike Feitler, your host. I'm speaking today with Professor Walter Block and what I'd like to do, Walter, is we've mentioned the Mises Institute a few times and I want to point out to my listeners that you have several videos and audios on Mises.org. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the Mises Institute? Yes, the Mises Institute was started in 1982 by Lew Rockwell and he wanted to promote Austrian economics and libertarianism and he wasn't really happy with the Beltway Libertarian Group and Cato Institute would be one example because he thought that they compromised with principle too much and Murray Rothbard was a guiding intellectual light in this and I think Mrs.

35:28This is Mises, Ludwig von Mises' widow was on the board of directors initially and they've been holding conferences and publishing books and I am one of the regular faculty members of the functions that they have in the summer for students and I give lectures there. And this is pretty much my own personal favorite institution because I think that they are are most congruent to my own views, and they are doing yeoman work in promoting liberty and free enterprise and peace and prosperity. It's a wonderful website too, I was going to tell my listeners, if they just go to mises.org and then if you click on media, there's just, there literally must be hundreds of lectures The way to spell Mises, not everyone is familiar with that, is M as in Mary, I as in Indigo, S as in Sam, E as in Elephant, S as in Samuel, M-I-S-E-S dot org and also there's a thing What I wanted to do, Walter, one great contribution I think you've made, Walter, is not just

37:04challenging people on the left and the far right, but also challenging us libertarians. And what I'm getting at there is I know you've talked about things like privatizing the roads and even privatizing the oceans. Would you talk a little bit about that? Yes. Actually, one of my books forthcoming from the Mises Institute is a book on privatizing highways. One of the two main reasons that I got into this and I've been at it, I think my first My first article on this, which will now be a chapter in this book was in God in the 70s. It was in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which is another initiative of the Mises Institute.

37:50Do you know how many people die on the roads every year? It's 40,000. 40,000? Oh, gosh. Not every year exactly 40,000. Sometimes it's 39. Sometimes it's 41. But over the last 10 or 20 years, it's trending around that. Around that, it's pretty flat at 40,000. To just put this in perspective, only 1,500 people died in the post-Katrina debacle. I think it was around 3,000 that died in 9-11 and 4,000, 4,500 servicemen in Iraq now and maybe 50,000 in Vietnam, that is U.S. soldiers, but that was over that 10 years. That's only 5,000 a year. This is a stupendous, gigantic, gargantuan number of people that are slaughtered on our highways every year and it's just horrible.

38:39People think it's inevitable, sort of like death in taxes, but that's not true. They say, well, it's not really the government's fault. I've heard that one before. It's due to drunken driving and speeding and vehicle malfunction and driver error, but that's not true either. Those are just proximate causes. The ultimate cause is the manager. The manager doesn't deal with the truck and drivers as the manager should, doesn't deal with driver error or whatever the other proximate causes of the fatalities are. And guess who the manager of the highways is? Well, it's the old government. And people think, well, you know, the government's got to run roads because if private enterprise ran roads, they'd be chaos.

39:24But the first roads in this country were all private. They were turnpike highways, and you would be charged on the number of horses and how many axles in your wagon. They would even charge based on the width of the wheel of the wagon. If it was a wide wheel, think steamroller, they would charge less. If it was a narrow wheel, think ice skate, which would put ruts in the dirt road, they would charge more. It was a perfectly viable industry that could have protected us, but their government nationalized The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration loses money? Does Obama lose money? No. There is no automatic feedback mechanism producing better rules of the road and better management of the road. That is one of my impetuses for it. The other is the traffic congestion which is just horrible.

40:22Yes. It's a great point that you're making too, Walter, because as you're saying, we just naturally assume, even those devout libertarians somehow naturally assume the government should be doing that, but we should at least be asking ourselves, couldn't private industry be doing this much better? I want to throw one thing at you kind of quickly here, too, but just to get you to comment on it. You've even talked, Walter, about privatizing the oceans and talking about things like strata and four levels and using homesteading theory. I think this is, again, challenging to libertarians to think about how do we go about privatizing the oceans? Well, I think the ocean, water is just a fast-moving land and land is slow-moving water and my My motto is, if it moves, privatize it, and if it doesn't move, privatize it, and everything either moves or doesn't move, so you privatize everything.

41:20Look, the oceans cover three-quarters of the Earth's surface and contribute maybe two percent or one percent to the world GDP, whereas the land amounts to one-quarter of the Earth's surface and contributes 98 percent of the GDP, and what's the difference? Well, people own land and people don't own oceans, and whenever you don't own things Walter, we're about out of time here, Walter, but this has been delightful and as I was Thanks for challenging all of us with your ideas.

42:16It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's been delightful. Many thanks to my guest today, Professor Walter Block. I'm Mike Biler. Talk to you next week.