Panel: Walter Block and Me

0:00Now that I've become a professor of economics and started lecturing to undergraduates both at Loyola University and in the summer months through a variety of educational outreach programs, students often assume that I came to Loyola explicitly to study Austrian economics with Walter, but admittedly I didn't know what libertarianism was, I didn't know what Austrian economics was, and I didn't know who Walter Block was. The only reason why I selected New Orleans and Loyola University to study economics was because, well first I chose the school because upon visiting with my parents, a minivan filled with naked women drove by us on Bourbon Street and I turned to my mother and said, I found where I want to study.

0:48And I chose economics as a major after I received a 62% on my midterm grade in principles of microeconomics taught by Bill Barnett, which depressed me greatly until I found out that the average grade was 12.

1:07I didn't change majors and fully embrace economics until my junior year when I took both law and economics and economics in the environment with Walter Block. Recently, we had a lecturer come to Loyola to speak to some of our students, a libertarian philosopher by the name of James Stacey Taylor, and he said that if you're not fully offended by something that one of your professors says in the course of your undergraduate education, that you should demand your money back. Well, that was Walter's class in a nutshell. Here I was a sort of 19 year old with a sort of left of center social consciousness. I was concerned about inequality, I was concerned about things like racism in society, I was concerned about the environment, and I was concerned about civil liberties.

2:02I was woefully unsatisfied with the conventional solutions to these sorts of problems that that I was being taught by other professors in other disciplines. And rather than sort of tweaking the standard corpus of recommendations, Walter's class denied their applicability altogether and recommended radical alternatives, things that I had never heard before. Rather than things like voting and redistribution and regulation, Walter recommended exactly the opposite. He recommended private property rights, free markets, and technological innovation as solutions to the social problems that seriously plague our world. His explanations were radical, but they were consistent, and they were fun, and his general personality was welcoming, supportive, and inviting.

2:58Every day I'd go to class and argue, as Walter mentioned, and then every evening my inbox would be filled with an email and various attachments of publications that were relevant to the topics that we argued in class and typically all of them were authored by none other than Walter Block. And so repeatedly I found myself saying, who is this guy? I didn't really realize who is this guy until I attended my first Mises Institute event. After the invitation of Walter, he took a number of us students to Auburn, Alabama to attend the Austrian Scholars Conference. And there was another group of students from Washington University in St. Louis, where Walter had given an invited lecture the week before.

3:50And once this group of students found out that I studied at Loyola and worked with Walter, couldn't help but sort of swarm and ask a number of questions. And they said, wait, wait, wait, so how much time do you actually get to spend with Walter Block in like the course of a week? And I was like, well, I have a class with him that meets for like an hour, twice a week. And then we have econ club that meets like an hour every other week. And then he keeps office hours where normally I go by to ask him like what would happen if someone surgically implanted a monkey on you in libertarian theory. And all of these students, their faces dropped when I mentioned that Walter Block keeps office hours. And they literally said that in inquisitive exclamation, Walter Block keeps office hours?

4:38You're so lucky. And it wasn't until then that I realized that it was a truly lucky and opportunistic experience is to have studied undergrad economics under Walter Block. It wasn't necessarily because of the radicalism or the consistency or even the fun or the welcoming and supportive nature of Walter's teaching style that I really think was most impressive, but rather the fact that he genuinely believes the ideas that he professes in the classroom. It's an incredibly refreshing experience as an undergraduate to be taught by people who actually endogenize the theories that they espouse into their personal world views.

5:26More often than not, faculty distance themselves from the material that they cover in class and attempt to appear objective while failing to actually be so. I think that in closing, I would like to merely suggest that Walter's model of teaching be considered not only worthy of a lifetime achievement award like the Schlauerbaum Prize, but rather it set the standard with which all Austrian scholars and all libertarian academics judge themselves against. The fact of the matter is is that if we don't instill the appreciation and the ideas of liberty in free markets in future generations of scholars, if every Schlauerbaum winner in the future doesn't also have a panel of former students now dedicated to promoting these ideas like Walter has, then we won't necessarily be able to influence the world for social change in the way that we deem fit.

6:30Something far more at stake than a successful academic career or even a prestigious publication is held in the balance. The fate of human civilization itself is what is dependent upon effective teaching and communicating these ideas. Walter, I really can't think of anyone more deserving than this Lifetime Achievement Award than you. Congratulations. The next speaker is Jenny Dermeyer, who got her bachelor's at Loyola in 2002 and her PhD in economics at George Mason in 2009. She is now an assistant professor of economics at Hampton, Sydney. I forgot to mention that Dan D'Amico is an assistant professor at at Loyola now. Jenny is a rotten kid. She ruined, absolutely ruined, my initial interview for a job at Loyola. What I do when I give an, most places when you interview for a job, they ask you to teach a class and to give a lecture to this fellow professor of a more substantive nature. So I was giving a class and Jenny was in the class and I was going

7:50to try to work with them asking, well, why are certain countries rich and other countries poor? And the right answer is some countries have free enterprise, others don't. But the wrong answer, there are many wrong answers, population, human capital, resources, this, that and the other. And I can usually get four or five kids to say the wrong things and then I sort of subtly steer them in the right direction. So I asked this question and this rotten kid, she ups and says, economic freedom. So she sort of took half of my life The other story I have to tell you about Jenny is every once in a while I'll invite some guest speaker to my classes and I invited a Jesuit priest, there was a class on economics and religion, and this guy was going off about how the minimum wage law is important, how we need the minimum wage law, how the minimum wage law is social justice, how it's the only thing that stands between us and poverty. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that.

8:50I don't like to ambush people that I invite to speak, unless it's a formal debate, and I hadn't had a formal debate with him, but fortunately Jenny redeemed herself. She was like a tiger. She was after him. It was just horrible to see what she did to this poor guy. She said, well, how about this? How about a $75 minimum wage? She was just after him. The poor guy after a while said, yes, you're right. I don't know anything about what I'm Thank you, Walter. After that kind and generous introduction, I really feel like my remarks are going to be entirely too nice.

9:48So it is a little bit daunting to be asked to represent someone's legacy, especially someone as accomplished as Walter Block. There is a big upside, though. I was asked, in fact, I was urged to talk about myself a little bit, which is nice. So I'll tell you a little bit about what I've been up to since I left Walter. I am an assistant professor of economics and I am the director of the Center for the Study of Political Economy at Hampton Sydney College. Our mission is to find students who love ideas, who are interested in ideas, and give them the guidance and the tools necessary to turn this love of ideas into a meaningful life. And in particular, my role is student development.

10:33So I've sort of crafted a career for myself as little miniature Walter Block, in which I go out and I try to find and create this future panel of students for my Lifetime Achievement Award, right? And I'll tell you that my method has been a very systematic and basically organized version of what Walter had us do as students. We have a lecture series where we have six speakers a year come in and give students an idea of what these concepts look like in different aspects. We have three reading groups a semester. We have a blog where both students and faculty contribute using economics to understand the world and society.

11:21We have a writing workshop. We have student research grants. And the results have been pretty much, if I do say so myself, phenomenal. We have students who are publishing regularly, not only in the student newspaper at Hampton City College, but are getting letters to the editor published in the Richmond Times Dispatch, which is our local big newspaper. We have students that are competing in undergraduate research competitions every year and winning some undergraduate research competitions every year using the ideas of free market economics and liberty in their research. We have five students now at Hampton City College on the track to become PhDs in economics. This is a huge increase. In the last 15 years at Hampton City College we had five students and now we have five students in the last two years who are on this track.

12:10So we have in effect basically generated a program that will get students from the point where they just are interested in this and to the point where they can actually make this their life. And my method has been to take three very important lessons that Walter taught me, none of them about economics, because obviously you heard I already knew all that by the time All right, I'll tell you the full story in a minute. So, but three very important lessons, not about economics, that Walter taught me about being a mentor. Number one, what we do matters. And so this is something that we have to tell ourselves often because we do operate in a very difficult position where, as Bob was saying, most people disagree with us.

13:04We're Johnny, walking, and we're the only ones to think that we're in step, right? But what we do matters, as Dan so eloquently put, the fate of civilization is upon our shoulders, right? It is important that we recognize that ourselves and that we tell our students this, right? I always, every time someone writes a paper for me and I say, why do I care, they look at me like, because I wrote it, you know? They say, you know, listen, what we do matters, use that. I don't want something, this is interesting because if you have to tell me it's interesting, it's not interesting, right? So, you know, we have to, as Walter says, always, in everything that we do, we have to make sure that it's relevant to the world and to society, and no sort of ivory tower ruminations are necessary, right?

13:49What we do matters. Let's actually use it. Number two, we need to invest in our students. So I think that before I came to Hampton City College, we had a fantastic faculty, actually, and they have been extremely supportive and wonderful and there are seven, no less than seven faculty that are actively engaged in what we're doing at the CSP which is kind of outstanding. But at the same time I think that they were not focused in the same way that I was when I came in on building the student involvement, my army, right? And I think the reason that I was is because I had this example of Walter to say, listen, You can invest in students. You can get students involved in the same kind of things that you are for two reasons.

14:37Number one, this is a great life. We have great lives. We do what we love. We're always passionate. There's always something new. And number two, the world needs it. We need to find the solutions that will actually create a better society. And if we believe and if we look at our students and we say, you can be part of this and we and we want you to be part of this, you'll be amazed at the kind of reaction that you get, right? So, investing in your students is absolutely foundational to what I do, alright? For myself, I was sort of like Dan, I was and actually sort of like Walter when he was a young pup, if you can imagine that. I was very liberal, I was such a fantastic liberal actually that I thought about but did not campaign for Al Gore when he was running for President, and I was very interested in social justice.

15:30I was, you know, all for the minimum wage, as a matter of fact, and solving all the problems of inequality. And then I took an intermediate microeconomic course with Deb Walker, who's not here, but who is a fantastic economics professor, and I discovered, lo and behold, that minimum wage actually hurts people instead of helping them. And the next day, I was a libertarian, and then the next month, Walter came for his interview. So he unfortunately got me right in the middle of some real converter zeal, right? And so, you know, that was my first little step toward this process, but then he came in my, Walter came in my junior year, and I was gung-ho economics in the middle of dropping I was getting my marketing major despite the fact that I only had two courses left because sunk costs were sunk, right, and marketing sucks.

16:25And then I was going to be a CEO somewhere, I don't know. I don't come from an academic family. My mother graduated college the same year I did, and my father graduated the year after I did. So this is academics, whatever, I'm going out and making some money, do the world some good. And Walter looked at me one day in the hallway, and I can still remember what it was like, and I was standing there in my college student uniform of ratty jeans, flip flops and an old t-shirt and he said, you should go to graduate school. And I like turned around, who was he talking to, you know? Yeah, you should go to Harvard, he said. Well, I did him one better, I went to George Mason, which is obviously better than Harvard. But, you know, this was something that I had never even considered.

17:12And I look at my students and I say, you know, this might be something you have never even considered, But if you love ideas, this is a life that could be very fulfilling. And lastly, I'll tell you the last lesson and the most important lesson that Walter taught me is to be relentless. He makes these jokes about what I was like when he first met me, but really this is the kind of person that I became over the course of two years knowing him. And be relentless has a corollary, a very important corollary, and it's called don't take it personally, right? So my favorite story about this is when I was at Auburn for Mises U. We were at a pizza shop. There had been a little wine consumed, I believe. And we were arguing about the wage differential between men and women. And being a 21-year-old woman at the time and extremely intelligent and very fond of wine, I had really gotten into this sophisticated argument about

18:15about how there was no such thing as perfect competition in the market and wage differentials could in fact be explained by prejudice brought upon by the lack of competition or something, I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it was good, I'll tell you that, and Walter being typically obstinate was claiming that in fact if there was a wage differential that was not brought upon by labor productivity, then some entrepreneur would have found a way to profit from this, I have in my head, you know, an entrepreneur with this harem of women doing, I'm not sure what exactly kind of work here, but, you know, we were arguing back and forth and it got to be very frustrating at some point. I put my wine down on the table, leaned in and said, Walter, I cannot wait till all you sexist jerks, I didn't say jerks, die.

19:13And I got up and I stormed off and I went to have a cigarette. I got my wine, stormed off and went to have a cigarette. And then, you know, ran away basically and the next day I'm like, oh my God. I'm looking around the corners, you know, we're at the Mises Institute and I'm like trying to make sure I don't run into Walter as I just told my mentor that I can't wait till he dies. And I'd come out of some seminar and I ran right into him, and I'm standing there, hi Walter, and he says, Jenny, how come you didn't finish the conversation last night? And at that moment I said, I didn't have anything to say, but I remembered, I remembered that forever actually, because one of the most important lessons that we can teach ourselves on a daily basis, and teach our students as well, is that you can never stop the argument.

20:12You need to be relentless, right? But don't take it personally, because this is not about my ego or your ego. It's about actually trying to find the truth, right? And Walter taught me that, and I try on a daily basis to insult my students in order to teach them that you can't take it personally. It's actually a really nice perk of the job. So I would like I would like to say thank you, Walter, for teaching me that what we do matters to invest in my students and, above all, to be relentless. I will tell you that the literature and history departments at Hampton City College are very, very happy that you have done that. Thank you very much.

21:00Thank you, Jenny. I forgot to mention that she and I are co-authors of an article called Poverty, Dignity, Economic Development and the Catholic Church, which came out of a term paper in this course, Economics and Religion, that has appeared in the Journal of Markets and Morality. The next speaker on this panel is an old friend of mine also, Andy Young, of an earlier cohort. He was not a student of mine at Loyola, where I've been at since 2001, rather he was a student of mine at Holy Cross. He graduated from Holy Cross with a bachelor's degree in 1997 and he got his PhD at Emory University. I remember when he was a student he was very straight-laced, sort of the opposite of Dan D'Amico and now look at him, I mean, ponytail, of course he's got gray hair which is a little different than those days. He is perhaps the most accomplished of all of my students because he's the only Andy, former student of mine who has taught at a research university, and teaching at

21:57a research university is sort of the apex of an academic. He used to teach at Ole Miss and now he's an associate professor with tenure at West Virginia, University of West Virginia. He and I are also co-authors of a piece called Enterprising Education, Doing Away with the Public School System, which appeared in the International Journal of Value-Based Management. Well, thank you very much, Walter, and it's truly a pleasure to be here, to have you win this award, which is so deserved, and to be able to talk about your influence on myself and my career, and through me, hopefully on my students as well. I am a professor at West at Virginia University. We have an up and coming class, a few classes of great free market oriented students there in a Ph.D. program. And so hopefully, thanks to Walter, who have two economists at Holy Cross, I can say that those two made me an economist and of those two, Walter made me the type of economist that I am today. When I first experienced Walter, and that's the only way to say it is that you experience

23:16Walter. I think the only way I can sum it up is to basically use at least paraphrasing Milton Friedman's words in a correspondence with Walter. These are not the arguments of a sane man. These are the rantings of a fanatic. F. A. Hayek in his classic article, The Usetalk of the Use of Knowledge of Society, says to the reader, I'm using the word Marvel here Walter is the ultimate master of shocking students out of their complacency. Most free-market-oriented economists will talk about something like pollution, and they'll say it's all really about when it's a problem, it's when property rights aren't well-defined and enforced, and maybe they'll use the example of the ocean, for example. Walter, on the other hand, would to look right into the eyes of environmentalist-leaning students and retell a tale about an in-law, I believe, on a fishing trip when Walter basically threw an empty can of Pepsi into the water and basically challenged him to see, is anyone going to pick this up? No, because property

24:25rights are not well-defined or enforced. When we talk to our students about taking into account the relevant opportunity costs, not the opportunity costs that you or I might Walter would use that example, but he would also try to talk to his students about situations where a parent might reasonably prostitute their child, because of the relevant opportunity costs. Class, not the arguments of a sane man, the rantings of a fanatic.

25:13I will say that while I'm not sure if I crossed certain lines, he has certainly molded the way I try to teach, especially with undergraduates, especially with undergraduates. I teach a 111 class which is basically an intro for non-majors and hopefully to get some of them excited and become majors at WVU. And I assign to them what I term defending the undefendable essays, which of course is an homage to Walter's book. And the idea is to get them to use positive economic analysis to at least to force themselves to justify by some characters in our economy who might not be entirely savory. Just last week, because it was Halloween, I assigned them to watch the movie, and tell me if you've seen this one, Repo the Genetic Opera. Now, Repo the Genetic Opera is made by the same people who make Saw, yeah, that type of movie. And being a big horror movie buff, the entire premise of this film is that in some distant dystopian future, there is

26:17There's a company which basically sells poor people in an age where health has declined significantly organs. But poor people being, well, poor, they have to finance them, okay? That's when you have a repo man, okay? And if you don't, of course, pay for the organ in time, the repo man will show up. And by the way, it's a musical. It is an opera. So So just imagine, people sing opera in it, so just imagine a repo man on film basically repossessing an organ while singing opera. And as my students came up to me after viewing this in class and questioning my sanity, I said to myself, Walter would be proud. Walter I would be proud that I said, no, this is a character that's good for society.

27:18Now I used to also admire Walter just simply for the amount of time he put in with his students and I always felt like he gave each and every one of us who wanted it, okay, all the attention, all the resources, all the time that he could, until one day I realized Walter says that really what he was just running was a very self-interested paper mill, with entirely unregulated labor, some of which was legally child labor. And I said, wait a minute, this is a good gravy train. I have also tried to emulate you in that. I have also tried to emulate you in that.

28:05Walter is the only man with a straight face that has ever called me a commie.

28:16And I have a witness, Bob Subrick, JMU, from GMU, will attest to this. Because Bob looked at me and said, did he just call you a commie? And I said, I believe so. I didn't know I was that type of anarchist. But Walter, all the time I have known him, has also managed to call Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman both commies. So I do feel like I'm in good company. I'd just like to end quickly and say that, you know, my only wish going forward as an is that I can inspire as many students as Walter has. When I just sort of try to tabulate in my head how many students that he's basically urged on to graduate school and who have become defenders of free markets at a different level, it's hard for me to count that high and granted But I have a fairly weak mind. That comes from Walter who once told me, see, Austrians do use numbers. This paper has page numbers on every single sheet.

29:27But I just hope that I can inspire students half or even a quarter as well as you inspired me. And I'm just so very glad that you're getting this award, Walter. Thank you very much. Thank you Andy Young. The last speaker on this panel is another friend of mine and former student of mine, Vedran Vuk. Vedran got his undergraduate degree at Loyola in 2007 and will soon receive his Masters in Finance from Johns Hopkins. Every time Bedrin came to my office, he invariably said, I have three ideas for articles.

30:17And we would talk about three ideas. And he wasn't one that would have ideas for articles and didn't write them, he would write them too. One time we drove up together, just the two of us, from New Orleans to Auburn for an Austrian Scholars Conference or one of the events, I forget what it was, and we came out with 55 articles, 55 ideas for articles, many of which we subsequently wrote. I'm co-authored with him of Victory in Iraq and another article, A Car Trip to Auburn, where we mention all 55 of these articles and hopefully other people could pick up from that. Vedrin is a senior author for Doug Casey in his finance newsletters.

31:07And it's my great pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend, Vedran Vuk. As Walter just said, I took a slightly different route than Andy and Jenny and Dan by becoming a financial writer. And like Walter said, currently I'm I'm the editor of Casey's Daily Dispatch for Casey Research, and I write about four or five articles a week, so this year I've done close to 200 articles. Every day I essentially have to come up with a new idea, and Walter helped me kind of build that foundation of ideas currently to keep them coming.

31:52Even I recount things that we talked about over the years, even today for the publication. But like Dan, I came to Loyola and had no idea that I wanted to do Austrian economics until I literally ran into Walter by accident. I was studying for a final exam for one of the only Keynesian professors at Loyola and I studied the night before and I had one last question to ask her. So I was looking for her office like 15 minutes before the test and I finally get there and she's not there. So I have to find another economics professor quickly. And I see that Walter's door is open and I was like, oh, he's an economics professor.

32:40So perhaps you'll know the answer to my question. So I go on this long rambling question, which just happens to be about the velocity of money and whether a new banking law would increase it or decrease it. And after this long rambling question, there's a bit of a pause and Walter says, I don't believe in Cajun economics. So I didn't know what to say at first, you know, this is not the answer I was expecting. So, I caught my wits for a second and said, well, suppose you did believe in economics. I have a test in five minutes and I have to figure this out.

33:28So, Walter told me the correct answer and went on with the test and this kind of really set the tone for knowing Walter over the years because he's so passionate about what he does at all times. all times. If this was any other professor, they would have just told me the correct answer regardless of what they believed and not made any comment or not try to teach me anything in the spot. And this passion has led him to publish 400 academic journals, thousands of FOPED articles, and he just works absolutely non-stop. I remember another final exam time. I went outside just to get some fresh air after a few hours of studying, and I believe it was actually a Friday night, about 10 o'clock, and I look over at the business school, and there's only one light on, and it's Walter's office light. I thought, no, he's not seriously there at 10 o'clock on a Friday night. But I knew that the business school was open, and so I went in, and surely enough, Walter was there.

34:36Walter was there, and I asked him a few article ideas that I was thinking of at the time, and so he held office hours at 10 o'clock at night. I've met dedicated professors before, but 10 hour o'clock office hours is really going beyond the call of duty. And Walter's caring is what really made me become a writer. As I got to know more, I started attending economics clubs at Loyola and read Defending the Undefendable and one day I had an idea for just about actually the economics of restaurant tipping and I wrote this two or three page letter to Walter about this idea and now that I'm a writer, it's the exact sort of email that I don't like to get because maybe you Walter, you wrote a page long article and somebody gave you a three page response and you want to respond but you can't write an article for every response but Walter responded at length and told me my ideas were good and the fact that my writing was pretty good and that I should consider publishing the article and at Loyola some of the students here know it's a very writing intensive school pretty much any class you take you're writing essays and nobody had really told me before

36:00Walter's passion is one of the big reasons that I'm here and all of us are here, but another reason is that he's what I would say like an intellectual weapon of mass destruction. But I'd like you to think about how that term is used also. What if he was in the wrong hands?

36:41In the sense of opportunity cost, think about if there was somebody like Walter who was keeping office hours till 10 o'clock at night, writing every day, had 400 mainstream journal articles, He would be on a short list for the Nobel Prize for that sort of effort. He'd probably be offered posts at the Fed, at the White House, if he had really put that much effort into. And he probably wouldn't be teaching at Loyola, but Harvard and those sorts of places. And that's one of the last things that helped me later on in my career was this example from Walter that, you know, it's always an uphill battle when you're an Austrian economist or doing these things, and he got me started on writing, but then later on in my career I worked in D.C. and you start seeing these opportunity costs become very real when you You see people who bend under principles a little bit or maybe they read Hayek but they support the warfare state and you see that that's a very easy way to improve your career

37:56and even you can look at articles on like Huffington Post, some of these things are amazingly badly written or have logical inconsistencies. Things are a lot easier if you bend in your principles and that's one thing that Walter Walter always reminded me, it might be an uphill battle, but you can stick with it and they can't keep a good man down, essentially. So I'd like to thank Walter for starting me in this career and keeping me in the right path as an example where I've seen others stray and I wouldn't even say that he's partially I couldn't be responsible for my career as a writer, but 100% and I couldn't think of a better person to receive the award tonight.

38:42I just want to say a word about my present students. There may be a half dozen or a dozen of them in the room now. And every class I have, I ask them to give a speech. And when they first start giving a speech, they're very nervous I'm very nervous and I give them hints on how to give a better speech and I could see in my present students my former students or when my present students give a speech I can see my former students giving speeches poorly when they started but look at them now, aren't they beautiful?