Defending the Undefendable, The Pimp, Prostitute, Scab, Slumlord, Libeler, Money Lender and Other Scapegoats in the Rogues Gallery of American Society
by Walter Block
Forward by Murray Ann Rothbard
For many years, free market economists have shown how market activities benefit the often heedless public.
Ever since the days of Adam Smith, they have shown how producers and businessmen, generally
motivated solely by personal gain, unwittingly confer enormous benefits on the general public.
By seeking to maximize their profits and minimize losses, for example, businessmen are driven
to satisfy the most urgent demands of the consumers in the most efficient way.
Economists have long shown these truths in the abstract, and in recent years they have
added to our knowledge by illustrating, in case after case, in the concrete, the superiority
and efficiency of private operation.
But the inquiries of economists have been confined, with sober pedantry, to the respectable
industries, to such activities as agriculture, natural gas, housing, airways, and so forth.
Until this book, no economist has had the courage of Professor Walter Block in tackling
head-on the moral and economic status of the dozens of reviled, scorned and grievously
misunderstood professions and occupations in our society, those whom he rightly calls
the economic scapegoats.
Fearlessly and with logic and trenchant wit, Professor Block rehabilitates and demonstrates
represents the considerable economic merits of such scapegoat occupations as the pimp,
the blackmailer and the slumlord.
In this way, in addition to redeeming the stature of these much reviled occupations,
defending the undefendable performs the service of highlighting, in the fullest and starkest
terms, the essential nature of the productive services performed by all people in the free
market.
By taking the most extreme examples and showing how the Smithian principles work even in these
cases, the book does far more to demonstrate the workability and morality of the free market
than a dozen sober tomes on more respectable industries and activities.
By testing and proving the extreme cases, he all the more illustrates and vindicates
the theory.
These case studies also have considerable shock value.
By relentlessly taking up one extreme case after another that is generally guaranteed
to shock the sensibilities of the reader, Professor Block forces the reader to think,
to rethink his initial knee-jerk emotional responses, and to gain a new and far sounder
under appreciation of economic theory, and of the virtues and operations of the free-market economy.
Even many readers who now think they believe in a free market must now be prepared to grasp fully the logical implications of a belief in a free economy.
This book will be an exciting and shocking adventure for most readers, even for those who believe that they are already converted
to the Merits of the Free Market Economy.
Alright, some readers might concede, we grant that these people are performing valuable
economic services.
But why, for heaven's sake, call them heroes?
Why is the pimp or the medical quack any more heroic, and therefore, in a sense, more moral
than other more respectable producers?
The grocers, clothiers, steel manufacturers, etc.
The explanation is precisely wrapped up in the extreme lack of respectability of Professor
Block's scapegoats.
For the grocer, the steel producer and the others are generally allowed to go about their
business unmolested and, indeed, earn respect and prestige from the fellow members of the
community.
Not so, these scapegoats.
For not only are their economic services unrecognized, but they face the universal bile, scorn and
wrath of virtually every member of society, plus the additional restrictions and prohibitions
that governments have almost universally placed upon their activities.
Scorned and condemned unmercifully by society and state alike, social outcasts and state-proclaimed
and Outlaws, Professor Block's collection of scapegoats go about their business nevertheless,
heroically proceeding to confer their economic services in the teeth of universal scorn and
outlawry.
They are heroes, indeed, made so by their unjust treatment at the hands of society and
of the state apparatus.
Heroes, yes, but not necessarily saints.
When the author confers the moral stature of hero on the scab, the usurer, the pimp
and so on, he does not mean to imply that these activities are intrinsically more moral
than any other.
In a free market, and in a society that treats the usurer, slumlord and sweatshop employer
in precisely the same just way as it treats other occupations, they would no longer be
be heroes, and they would certainly be no more moral than anyone else.
Their heroic status for Professor Block is solely a function of the unjust restrictions
that other men have been placing upon them.
It is the happy paradox of this book that if its implicit advice is followed, and the
men and women described in these pages are no longer treated to scorn and legal coercion,
One and only then will they no longer be heroes.
If you don't like the idea of a usurer or a slumlord being a hero, then the only way
to deprive him of this stature is to remove the shackles that misguided people have placed
upon him.
Murray and Rothbard