Walter Block is with us for the Mises University this week, and I thought we'd take the chance to get an interview with him.
His lecture's going to be broadcast on by podcast all week, but this is a chance for us to discuss some more personal elements of the scholarly work that he's been doing.
So welcome, Walter.
My pleasure to be here, Jeff. Thanks.
I can call you Walter, right? Not this time?
Absolutely.
Everybody calls you Professor Block, and well, anyway.
I really want Emperor of the Universe, but I'll settle for Walter.
Well, there's so many things we could discuss, but maybe we should just revisit this issue that came up yesterday about this new book on Rhodes that you have out.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Can you mention to me about that?
Sure, yes, we could talk about that.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, you know, it's sort of strange because for a while I was hot after tenure for many
years.
In my career, I never had it until I got to Loyola, which was in 2001.
So for many, many years, I didn't do any books because books don't count for tenure.
Instead, what I would do is I would do articles in referee journals.
And I had dozens of them because I'm productive and I've got a lot of stuff in me to say,
So what I did about a year or two ago is I said, well, you know, maybe I'll make some
books out of all these articles.
And the Rhodes one was the first one.
What I did is I took about 15 or 18 articles, I forget how many, something like that, and
I put them in some sort of order that would be more reasonable or pleasing or what have
you, and I offered it around as a book, and Mellon Press was kind enough to publish it,
and now there's a book on privatizing roads, it came out in May of this year.
And the prices?
Well my understanding of the price is that there's a high price for libraries of about
$135 or something like that, and then there's a lower price for individuals of about $35.
Right.
Well, you know, I hope that somehow we can manage to get it and make it available because
And we were talking about the outrageous prices of these books and how it's driven in part
by the state libraries that buy anything at any price.
Yeah, it's very elastic.
If a library wants it, they'll take it at whatever the price.
So a lot of publishers jack up the price for them, but happily they have a lower price
for individuals of $35.
I think you have a lot of provocative arguments in it, which it does, but what you don't expect is that it actually teaches microeconomics.
Well, you're very kind to say that.
I just loved that book for that reason.
It's sort of my thank you to Henry Hazlitt.
I don't know if people see this, but Economics in One Lesson is one of my favorite books,
and what Hazlitt did in that book was he had a thesis or a theory or one lesson about alternative costs and stuff,
And then he applied it to 30 different chapters. Well, I too had a thesis of libertarianism,
non-aggression against non-aggressors, and then I applied it to 30 cases or so, all of
whom were not guilty of violating the libertarian code and yet were reviled or hated or prohibited
and I said, well, you know, they shouldn't really be that way and actually they're heroic
for persisting and, you know, paying low wages or whatever it was that they were doing.
But you know what's striking about the book is, I guess that's what I was trying to say,
You pick it up, you expect it to be just a pure libertarian argument based on the non-aggression
axiom.
What you don't expect is that you employ economic methods of analytics throughout the book.
That's probably because you were just in graduate school and that was the tool that was most
on the forefront of your mind.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, if you're going to defend someone like the person who charges high rents, you
You naturally get into the function of high rents and markets and scarcity and equating
supply and demand and stuff like that.
Otherwise, what are you going to say?
Well, you can sort of say in one sentence, well, he's not violating one's rights, period.
End of chapter, next chapter.
Three sentences for that one too.
So you have to bring in some sort of analytics.
Sometimes they say it's not the words, it's the music.
You have to tell a story, give the music as well, and the music is the economic efficiency
and the University of it. Because people sometimes are convinced, sometimes rarely are convinced,
well since it doesn't violate the libertarian code, it's kosher. But most people, they
want to hear a story about how does it help, how does following Adam Smith's idea of maximizing
profits lead to the public good, well how does it work in this case? So that was a lot
of the gist of the book.
So you get an integration there between economics and moral theory.
Yeah, I think that's true. The two are never too far apart. The two wings of the libertarian plane, if you want to put it that way.
I think really that a person could, if not knowing anything else about economic theory, could pick up that book and read it from the beginning and come away with all sorts of new knowledge that you can employ in other ways.
Well, you're very, very kind to say that. There are reviewers who didn't say that.
There were reviewers who said the only good thing about the book were the cartoons.
Needless to say, I didn't do the cartoons, but I was smart enough to get a good cartoonist to illustrate it,
because the way I see it, you know, economics should be fun.
And we should look at the lighter side of these things as well as the more serious.
So that was graduate school, and then your second book now suddenly comes out now.
As you're a mature scholar, you've got a full professorship request.
I think I've done about eight or nine other books between that book and Rhodes.
Can I ask you, why is it so oddly central to your thought over time?
You've stuck with this topic for a very long time.
That's right.
Why over 20 years have I written 30 articles on roads?
What's with roads?
Nobody else is talking about roads.
Well, there are two things.
The big, big, big thing is the fact that 40,000 people a year die on the roads.
And you know, 40,000 people is a lot of people.
Every time some little girl gets lost in a well and you get 300 people trying to rescue
her, and that's all good, you know, I'm in favor of rescuing little girls from wells.
But that's one little girl.
I don't know how many little girls die out of the 40,000, you know, two, three thousand
little girls in that group, and somehow it's sort of like death in taxes.
In this case, you sort of have to bring attention to the fact that a lot of people are dying, and that it's not necessary, and that the reason for it is because the bloody government is running it, and if private enterprise ran it, my estimate is many, many fewer people would die. I think I have some estimate concocted in there, about 6,000 or 8,000 people would die from cancer.
The government is responsible for, I don't know, 30, 35,000 needless deaths.
You mentioned the word responsible and this is what always strikes me.
Well, let me just tell a story.
The other day I was at an airport going through the security thing
and the employer of the federal government dropped my laptop on the ground.
Oh, lovely.
And I picked it up and a piece had flown off of it or something and I said, what happens
if this doesn't work?
And he just looked at me and shrugged.
And you suddenly have this sudden realization that really there is no, the government doesn't
accept liability for the damages of the causes, right?
And so is that, there are many issues with having to do with private roads, having to
do with management and rationality and all that.
But how does just burying the liabilities for the desk, just the absence of responsibility,
how does that figure into the argument?
Well let me just say one thing, let me correct myself, I said they were only responsible
for 35,000, let's say 5,000 would still die, I think they were still really responsible
for all 40,000, because suppose I'm a mass murderer and I kill 25 people, and it's later
proven that had I not killed those 25 people, five of them would have died anyway on cancer
The Theory of Money and Credit
And fewer people died. I would have ads saying, you know, don't go to the Jeff Road, come
to the Walter Road. And then you would go broke or you would have to learn to emulate
my policies which reduce deaths. And we would lower deaths in that way. I mean, this system
of competition, it works well with toothpaste and wristwatches and computers and bow ties
and why shouldn't it work well with roads? The other minor thing about roads that gets
my crank going is traffic congestion. It's probably not too bad here in Auburn, but I
tell you in any big city, you can go faster on a roller skates than in a car. The traffic
congestion is so horrible. When I used to live in New York City, they would call the
Long Island Expressway the longest parking lot in the world. It was 100 miles of bumper
to bumper cars. LA is horrendous. In most big cities, you just can't go anywhere. They
I remember when I was in California, what would happen is the people in the other lanes would get so ticked off that they would bunch up so close that you couldn't get off the HOV, so you had to stop when you wanted to get off the HOV, so it's just, that's, you know, getting back to your point about airline safety, only government would prevent paperclips, not paperclips, nail clippers. Nail clippers, give me a break. Well, the same thing.
The thing with HOV, that's silly. You don't do HOV. What you do is you charge a higher
price for more accessibility to road use.
Have you noticed too that the HOV lands are increasingly used for political purposes?
I read somewhere the other day that if you have a hybrid car in some large urban areas
that you're permitted on HOV.
And probably if you're a congress critter, you know, it's just a perversion.
But if I can return to this point about liability though, if you're in the Mises Institute
this week, if you trip down the stairs and you break a leg, we're presumably going to
bear some responsibility for that, unless you've previously signed some agreement that
says the Mises Institute is not liable for anything that happens to me.
We take out insurance to deal with this.
These people who die in the highways, their families can't sue the government.
Can they?
Oh, no, no, no. You can't sue the government.
No, you can't sue the government. Look, I'm not a lawyer. I mean, you need a lawyer to be definitive on this.
But my understanding is that if they break your computer by dropping it at the search point,
or if a cop breaks into your house looking for drugs and it was the neighbor's house that he was supposed to be looking at
and he shoots you in the leg, they're not as liable as they should be.
This is just a fact of nature that they don't take liability. They're supposed to be protecting us, but if they turn around and shoot us, you know, there are problems.
So if you can manage to assign blame to some other driver, then they can be responsible for that. But the blame somehow never rests with the owner, supposed owner, of the system.
Well, you see, I would say that the way the private roads would function is that probably
no road owner would let you on there unless you sign some sort of release saying that you're
not holding the road owner responsible. But on the other hand, getting back to this competition
between the Jeff Road and the Walter Road, let's say, take the problem of speeding. Let's
suppose for the moment that speeding causes accidents. And we each try to reduce speeding.
Now, one of us will do it more successfully than the other because of different techniques
or what have you, and that might be the way to reduce the death rate.
But it need not be speeding, and maybe it's not speeding, maybe it's the variance in speed.
For instance, right now, the minimum speed is 40 miles an hour on the highways.
You have to go at least 40.
The maximum speed is usually 70.
But everyone does 80, and some people go 42, you know, some little old lady type going,
tootling along at 42 miles an hour and usually parked in the left lane and screws up all
sorts of traffic.
Maybe it's the variation in speed.
Maybe what you ought to do is have different speed limits for the three different lanes.
Maybe you should have 55, 70 and 85 for the three right, middle and left lanes.
I don't know.
You don't know.
of Roads. Well, from an Austrian point of view, even apart from roads, just in
general, the Austrian view is free entry. That's what competition is. As long as
anyone is free to set up another road, that's competition. Whether the road
exists or not. Whether the road exists or not, but you see that that is a real
competition because let's say there's only the Jeff Road and you're screwing
it up and you know you're not running it well. Well, the Walter Road might come
into effect and if the Walter Road comes into effect then the present discounted
The last thing you want is my road to start up parallel to yours, so you're going to do everything humanly possible to prevent this entry and under a free market, the only way you can prevent entry is by satisfying consumers, not getting a law passed saying I can't open my road.
So, if there's one railroad going up and down California, that's competition if another railroad is allowed to get in there.
Now, if the law is passed by the first railroad, paying off the Congress of California, saying, well, no other railroad can compete with us, then you don't have competition.
So, Austrians don't look at numbers of competitors. We look at, is their rivalry possible, legal?
And if it is, then it has very great salutory value toward the competitive process.
Well, most people would look at a road as big concrete structure and say, well, you know,
the barriers to entry are not just legal, but they're financial, they're economic.
It's just too expensive to set up another road.
I'm just thinking through this from the point of view of somebody who would object and say,
look, somebody is considering the Walter Road and you put all these enormous capital outlays
The way that I would compete with you is just simply by lowering my price and then you would never get off the ground at all.
I mean, how do these practical issues affect the likelihood of really existing competition?
Well, what you're really getting at, I think, is the holdout problem.
The reason putting up another road is so expensive is not so much because of the concrete.
The concrete. It's more because you get some guy in the middle of where you want to put
your second road, who's going to say, ha-ha, you want to put a road right through my house?
Well, that's going to cost you one trillion dollars. And therefore, it's virtually impossible.
Again, the concrete costs a lot of money, but that's not the key. It's the holdout
problem. And that's the argument showing that why it's unfeasible to privatize roads,
I go into that, I think I have a whole chapter on that in the book. I forget where I put that, but there's a whole series of objections like that. Another objection is, well, you come out of your house and you want to get on the road, and the guy says, well, that'll be a million dollars each time you come out, and you've got to either get a helicopter or become a pole vaulter or something. So there's a whole series of objections to this that are in the book.
This is really good that we're having this interview now because we'll be discussing it during the week when I talk about privatization.
The answer to the holdout problem, and I just had a debate with your friend in mind, Richard Epstein, on this very question.
That debate will come out in the NYU Law Journal or something. I forget the full title of it.
There are two answers to that. First, if you want to build a road from Auburn to New Orleans,
there are several routes you can take one is the as the crow flies right but
then you can go a mile on either side and make sort of an arc and then you go
two miles on either side you go three miles on either side it would be still
feasible to have a road from Auburn to New Orleans where you and I live you
could have any number of arcs maybe even 20 miles this way or 20 miles that way
so you can have a lot and then what you do is instead of trying to buy property
What you do is you buy options to buy property. So you go to a farmer and you say,
OK, Farmer Jones, I'd like to buy your land and I'm offering $50,000, but I'm not sure that I want to buy it.
But I want to buy the right to buy it within a year and I'll give you $100 just for the right to buy it if I choose to exercise it.
And then I try to buy options all around these roots. And if you get ahold of that, well, then you just don't exercise those options which can be bought at a relatively cheap price.
That's one way. The super-duper argument is, well suppose for some reason there's a chasm, or there are mountains, or God knows what, there's only one way to go.
And that's from A to B in the direct line. And now Farmer Jones says, you know, screw you, or a million, zillion dollars for my land.
Well, my son and I co-authored an article on this, which is now a chapter in the book, and we start talking, well how about tunneling under or bridging over?
Remember, would this violate property rights? Well, it would violate property rights if
you adopt the ad colon doctrine. What's the ad colon doctrine? The ad colon doctrine is
that if you own 20 acres of land, then you own a decreasing cone to the center of the
earth and an increasing cone up into the heavens. But that is nonsense on stilts. That's not
at all the Rothbardian, Hoppean, Lockean view of private property, which is based on
and Homesteading. Now this farmer didn't do diddly-squat to land say 500 feet below his farm. So if I dig a tunnel under his land, 500 feet deep, and I don't disturb his property in any way, he has no right to say you can't do it.
Well, what if the farmer likes to live there because he likes to look at the beautiful stars, and the next thing you know there's a highway.
We're getting heavily... That's a very good objection. We're getting into...
Is there no other way? I mean...
Well, one way is the tunnel, one way is the bridge. And then you come into the question, well, can you own a view?
Yeah.
Suppose you own a property over here and there's a big mountain, beautiful mountain that you look at.
And now I buy the house or I own the land between you and the mountain and I build a skyscraper.
Right.
and you can't see the mountain as clearly or you can't see the mountain at all. Do you own the view?
And according to my understanding of libertarian property rights theory you cannot own views.
Because if I own views I don't like the way you part your hair. It disturbs my aesthetic sensibility
and if I own the view of you then I have a right to tell you how to part your hair, which is
crazy because then we have conflicting views. The hair is on your head, you know, so if I own the
view and you own the hair on your head we have a conflict in rights. You've got to buy the mountain,
Well, you can't have a conflict. The whole libertarian theory is that there can never be conflicts in rights. If there are seeming conflicts in rights, you have to dig deeper. And the digging deeper here shows that you can't own views.
Well, let's say that I demonstrated to you that you can own a view.
Ah, well, then I'm in trouble. At least as far as the bridge is current, but a more different
argument is the farmer doesn't own the view, but he owns the rain, and he owns the sunlight
because it hits his crops and all. And here's where this article of my son and I came in.
What we concocted was this drawbridge in case the road wants to have a building transported,
You have to have a drawbridge and the drawbridge has to be mesh so that the rain can come through
and it has to be clear plastic so that the sun can come through.
So in that way, Farmer Jones can still grow his crops, which he has a right to because
he's homesteaded the rights to grow crops and to grow crops you need sun and rain and
this bridge will not interfere with it.
So you're really getting into very fine detail here.
It's silly how much these roads discussions turn on these kind of details, especially
when you consider that most of the time the market finds workarounds to these problems.
Don't businesses want roads to come by them?
This is the overlooked fact.
That's the point of why they wouldn't charge you a million dollars to get out on the road.
What they want to do is encourage you to build there and if they're going to do this sort
of nonsense then you're not going to build there.
I don't know what the politics were behind the interstate highway system, but I gather
there was a lot of rent-seeking going on, whatever.
But I think how much cheaper the whole thing would have been been for a private...
Absolutely.
The latest thing is this bridge to nowhere in Alaska.
There are always roads in places where the congressman or the senator is on the roads
commission, crisscross roads in the middle of West Virginia or something.
I don't know which state it is, but right now we have roads built for political purposes.
In a market system, you'd have them built for economic purposes.
Did you see the movie Cars?
Cars? No, I can't say I did.
There's all this victimology about some town that was overlooked by the highway system.
They were going like gangbusters when Route 66 went through them and they were having a happy life and everything.
And then the interstate highway system redirected traffic and they were crying.
But of course, if this had been a private system, then the business owners of that town would have had every incentive to make sure that the road comes through there.
And the owner would have had to assess the relative benefits of the higher revenue that
would be gained by saving commuters 10 minutes by not going through that town, versus the
revenue obtained by in effect redirecting the road through their town as a way of providing
profits for the road system.
Right.
Whenever a thing is done through the market, it's mutually beneficial.
It's a positive sum game.
is when it's done through the government and they have eminent domain. Then you take someone's
land at the price that you think is justified. Well, that's a horse of a very different color.
You've probably heard every argument imaginable against private roads over the course of the
200 years you've been writing about this subject. But I remember one telling a guy about it,
look, we need to privatize the roads, and he blew up and he said, look, libertarians
are essentially un-American. You know what it means to be an American? It means that
I have the right to get in my car and drive on a road and drive and drive across the country
as far as I want to go and go where I want to go and that's only made possible through
public roads.
Well I still think you'd have that right, I mean, or that ability rather.
Most private road owners would welcome customers.
I mean you have a right to go to any grocery in any state and they're happy to have your
money.
You can go to a McDonald's in any city and they're happy to have your money.
Why wouldn't it work the same way with roads?
They would welcome you.
You'd have to pay for it.
You have to pay for your burger. You have to pay for your toothpaste. Why shouldn't
you pay for your road?
It's not un-American to suggest you have to pay for toothpaste, right?
That's right. It's commie to say that you don't have to pay for toothpaste. What we
really have is the socialization of our roads. That's why they're death traps. That's why
they have these congestion problems.
This is a real problem too that affects so many growing communities because they have
roads and other public infrastructure that's very expensive to put up. And then you get
into all the debates of should we have limits on growth and, you know. Oh, yes. What, what
are, what do you, have you ever thought about this, the feasibility of one town somewhere,
just privatizing, make it Auburn, just privatize its main street and all the roads. Why wasn't,
if, if, why doesn't that happen if this is such a good idea? Well, you know, it sort
of does happen, only the government comes out against it. Like, you take a big shopping
The Leoflitz Mall is a shopping mall, a gigantic shopping mall.
It's got roads, and it's got parking lots, and it's got all sorts of things.
In a sense it's totally private, except if I want a leaflet there, the owner of the mall has no right to stop me.
Because somehow the government has declared this a public road, even though it's a private road.
I mean, I can't leaflet in your living room.
If I come into your living room and I start giving leaflets to your kids, you tell me to get the hell out of there.
But if I come into your mall with leaflets, I can do that.
So they've got all sorts of rules, you have to have handicapped, you have parking zones, you have to do this. So even on purely private areas, like the Mises Institute has a little parking lot in the front of the building and in the back of the building.
I notice you have two or three spots for handicapped people. You'd think it's private property, you could do whatever you damn well please, but you can't.
It's like they've nationalized a certain fraction. It's very strange, and when we had to draw those things, of course we're all in favor of disabled people coming here, and we want them to be able to park, and the very idea that anybody here would be interested in keeping them in, but it's very strange when you've got the state coming in and you've got to paint this official sign on this place, and if I see you parking there, and you're walking around looking totally normal, you're going to be in big trouble. Isn't that odd?
The evidence of this is that private companies with parking lots are now starting new spots, totally unrelated to the government, where it says, pregnant moms, and the government hasn't done anything.
In other words, this supports your point of view that had the government not required this, you would have done it anyway because you want handicapped people to come here.
Yeah, and you know, those pregnant moms' signs are charming. They have a little stork on them. They're painted in blue. They're lovely. And you're so glad not to take that place.
Of course. But in five years, the government is going to compel it. I mean, either it's prohibited or it's compelled. There's no middle ground where people have a chance to do whatever they want.
Isn't that the very definition of a total state that if it's not prohibited, it's required?
Right. That's it. Either it's required or prohibited. There's no middle ground for freedom.
You wouldn't think you've been writing on this subject for so long because you're so animated and excited about it, which is one of the reasons you make such a wonderful, you're such a wonderful teacher.
How many of the students here are from your school?
Well, you know, in past years I've had as many as 17 or 18 and usually the kids from Washington University beat us out by a kid or two.
But this year, I don't know, we're having a lot of trouble with Katrina and all.
I've only got three kids, but all three were in the summer fellowship program.
And, but we've been beat out by, what's that school, Harry Fry's school? Walsh. Walsh has got nine or ten students.
And I think my hat in this regard is mainly off to the Washington University students because there, there are no faculty members supporting it.
The kids do it all on their own. Whereas when I come, I come with five or six professors to an Austrian Scholars Conference and fifteen or twenty students.
Those kids do it all by themselves.
Okay, so this is a good time for you to just go ahead and tell everybody your secret. What
is the key that you've learned over the years to enticing students to Austro-libertarianism?
What's the secret? How come you're so successful at it?
I really don't know. I think luck is a big part of it. I mean, there are other professors
who are more gifted than I, who have not had as many students come through the Mises doors.
of the Wars. I was very lucky last year at the Austrian Scholars Conference. I had a
whole panel of ex-students of mine who now have PhDs on our professors of economics,
which just blows me away.
You spend a lot of time with students, though, don't you?
Oh, yeah.
You hold long office hours, don't you?
Well, they come by and I take them to lunch and I have seminars. They inspire me.
They do. So when a student comes in, you're sitting there, you're working, you're writing
I'm delighted to. I enjoy it. Right now, we're talking and I'm enthusiastic. I guess I'm naturally enthusiastic and maybe the enthusiasm is catching or something like that. That might be it.
You don't ever feel like, gosh, here I am another semester. It's like starting all over again.
Well, I've been in many different schools because I didn't get tenure in many different places and there were some schools where I got no students whatsoever.
I had one or two students come here but none of them really were that interested, whereas
when I was at Holy Cross I got a lot there and now at Loyola even more because now I
have colleagues who are Austro-Libaterians.
I was having a little contest with Jeff Herbiner to see who had a higher percentage of their
economics department that was Austro-Libaterian and we came out with a tie, 100 percent.
Only we beat them because we have five, they only have two.
I think our two schools have the highest percentage of Austro-Libertarians. Now maybe George Mason's
got more absolute numbers, but certainly not in relative numbers. So when everybody is
on point and I get a student and then he goes to your class and then you send him back to
me and the third guy, I've got four other colleagues at Loyola that are Austro-Libertarians.
Reading Human Action, Private Property Rights Theory
So the students are very encouraged by this.
Let me mention one student in particular, Vedran Vuk, who is, I don't know, he must
be up to about 10 or 11 articles now in lewrockwell.com, and he just started writing a couple of weeks
ago or a month or two ago, he sort of churns out an article a week or two a week or something
like that.
He's like a machine.
I'm inspired by kids like that, and the other kids are very productive too.
Nick Snow and Chuck Long are here also, and they've written for the Mises thing.
Yeah, and you also co-author articles for students, which is great.
Yes, yes. I get term papers, and I make them write term papers because I think that if you just fill out a multiple choice, you don't really know it that well, and if you do an essay, it's better.
But if you write a seven-page essay on something, it shows a deeper understanding of it, and some of those essays are gems.
And what I do is I just can't keep my mitts off of them, and I start adding to them, and editing, and writing another paragraph or two, and all of a sudden it's twice as long, and it's a publishable thing, and I've had a lot of luck getting student essays published in referee journals, which is a magnificent thing, if I say so myself.
There's so many other things we wanted to talk about, but you have a couple more books, right?
You have a discrimination book coming out?
Yes, I have a book on discrimination, one on labor, economics, another book with you.
Well, I don't know if I enticed you to be a co-author, a co-editor with me on that, but that's the one on...
Oh, no, no, I'm not going to be a co-editor.
Well, I've offered it. You've been very helpful to me on that.
Yeah, that's an exciting project. There's something like a hundred biographies.
Yeah, autobiographies.
Autobiographies of currently living liberal libertarian thinkers.
Right. My idea is that people like Murray can do an autobiography, Murray Rothbard,
but not all of us are that high up in prestige and accomplishment that we can write an autobiography
or expect other people to write a biography about us. And yet our lives are interesting.
and I think could inspire younger people to take up the banner of freedom and liberty.
So instead of writing an autobiography of 300 pages, you write an autobiography of four or five pages
and we get 100 or 150 people like that and we have a book.
Some of the big names that have contributed?
Well, Ron Paul, he's a big name.
I'd hate to mention names because I'll forget other names and there are about 100 people.
New Rockwell has contributed, and Jeff, if you don't contribute, I'm going to smack you.
Other threats on air? I perhaps shouldn't do that. Your lawyer will now visit me.
I keep changing the story, that's the problem.
Oh, listen, I wanted to tell you. I'm not sure if you know this, but there's a publishing company.
Where is it now? Is it in Poland?
Well, anyway.
Romania.
Romania is doing a book also.
Right, okay.
So a Romanian publisher contacted us and said, we want to publish this book.
And of course, I'm looking at this thinking, great, we don't have to do the typesetting.
You do the editing.
You do the typesetting.
You do the index.
You print it and publish it.
And how can we do to help?
So we bought lots of advanced copies, lots.
Bless you, bless you.
And I forget even the name of it.
You don't remember doing it?
I don't remember that.
I think Building Blocks for Liberty or something like that.
Yeah, something like that.
It's a wonderful collection.
I did not want to be in the position of choosing essays from Walter Block to put into 350 pages.
What are the essays that you need to read by Walter? That's an impossible job.
Well, these guys took on this impossible job and came up with a very nice collection.
Very nice collection. I'm very excited about it.
So the great thing is that I think it's maybe a couple of months away.
And they're going to ship all the books here. We're paying for the freight and everything.
So we're going to offer it for sale.
This is great. This is another book. And the price is going to be right. It's going to be a nice paperback. A good price. I forget now what it is. It's going to be very low.
So this is exciting. So we'll have something else to offer people besides the existing collection. And this is going to be a nice introduction to your thought.
Well, you're very kind to say that. Thank you.
So we can create more block-ins in the world.
Block-headians.
You're tireless. You're an inspiration to all of us, Walter. Thank you so much.
You're very kind to have me, thanks.