Mike Smith, columnist at the Province newspaper.
It's always my pleasure, my privilege to fill in for Bill for one more day.
I want to welcome all our listeners now along the Chorus Radio Network,
wherever you are in British Columbia this morning.
Well, we all know there's a lot of anger out there over the HST.
So many people are upset about this consumer tax hit at the tail end of a recession.
But here's a point of view on taxes that you might not have thought too much about before.
Forget about the HST, forget about tax grabs, how about no taxes at all? Everything private,
private roads, private courts, private police forces and fire departments, private money supply.
My next guest is one of the most well-known libertarian thinkers around. His name is Walter
Block. You might remember him when he was at the Fraser Institute for many years. He is now a
professor of economics at Loyola University in New Orleans and I'm very pleased to welcome him to the
Show.
Hi.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for coming on the show.
I appreciate it.
Now, the HST...
Now, you still live in Vancouver, right?
No.
I am a resident of New Orleans.
Okay.
I have a...
My wife lives here and I visit her a lot when school is not in session.
All right.
But you're from North Van?
My wife has a house in North Van, yes.
Right.
Okay.
Because you were with the Fraser Institute for a long time.
The HST, which I'm sure you're familiar with Walter and how it's provoked pretty much kind
of a brush fire of anger here in the province, I know you're against the HST but maybe not
for the same reasons that a lot of people are angry with this tax.
Yes, well I'm sort of angry with all taxes.
As far as I regard taxes as akin to highway robbery and Armageddon, I think that the problem
with them is that they're compulsory, and it seems to me that there are two ways that
we can deal with each other.
One is as barbarians and the other is as civilized people.
Now, if you have something I want, like I admire your socks, I have two ways of getting
your socks.
One, I can come up to you with a point of a gun and say, give me your socks or I plug you,
which I take as the barbaric, uncivilized way, and the other way is I say, hey,
I like your socks, I'll give you a hundred bucks for them, or I'll be your best friend forever, or something like that,
and if you agree, then I get the socks, and if you don't agree, I don't get the socks. That's the civilized way of behaving.
Well, what are taxes? Taxes are people come to you with a point of a gun and say, look,
we need your money, give us your money, we're going to give you some services, but
The choice is not up to you, you have to pay.
And I don't regard that as particularly humane.
Okay, well I guess you're articulating a kind of a free market theory or a libertarian point
of view on this, but I guess most people would consider it counterintuitive if we're going
to have the civilized society that you're describing, that we have to have taxes in
order to pay for the common goods and services that everybody needs, whether it's roads or
Well, my most recent book is on why we should privatize roads, highways, streets, avenues,
whatever.
In the U.S., some 40,000 people a year die on the roads.
In Canada, it's about 4,000.
We have roughly one-tenth their population, so it's roughly 4,000, give or take.
And most people, you know, like how many people, how many Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan,
about 120 or so?
and each life is precious and each life is a shame and that is a shame that it was lost
and then there were Afghanis that were killed but you know Canada is very upset about that
hundred and twenty roughly number of soldiers that died but four thousand people die every
year on the Canadian roads and nobody says boo about that I mean that's much worse than
the AHST or you know this problem or that problem I mean every time someone drowns or
or a little girl gets lost in a well, our hearts go out to that. What about the fact
that people buy like flies on our socialist roads, our roads run by government?
How would private roads make a difference?
Well, you'd have competition. Look, the reason we have pretty good restaurants and pretty
good grocery stores is if you've got a lousy one, people don't go there. And when people
don't go there, they go broke and someone else takes over their premises. Well, you
You don't have that in roads. If one road is, people are dying like flies on it, nobody
loses money, nobody ever goes broke. You don't have the benefit of competition. Look, suppose
restaurants were run by government. Every restaurant was a government restaurant. Well, if you
didn't like Restaurant X, you know, you didn't go there. Restaurant X stays just like the
post office or the motor vehicle bureau or any other government bureau. See, what I'm
What I'm trying to do is apply the insight that all economists have, that competition
brings a better product, and apply it to esoteric cases that are unconventional, such as roads
or hospitals or what.
Speaking of hospitals, I guess there's obviously a radical notion that you're espousing when
it comes to healthcare services.
I mean, even right-wing conservative thinkers here in Canada would be hard pressed to argue
against a health care service in which vulnerable people or poor people are not protected by
some kind of health insurance.
We take a look in the United States, where you are, at the millions of people who are
uninsured or the millions of people who go bankrupt just because they get sick.
You're quite right that right wing conservatives would be hard put to find a right wing conservative
who would say that, but I'm not a right wing conservative, I'm a libertarian.
The Equidistant from Right-Wing Conservatives and Left-Wing Liberals
We are the only ones who really favor free enterprise
Look, if you were right, by the way, health care is important
But if you don't have health care, suppose we had a magic wand and we just got rid of
all health care
How many people in Canada would die today?
Oh, I don't know, a dozen or so, or maybe a hundred or so
Suppose we got rid of all food
How many people would die today or tomorrow?
Well, the whole country would die.
Namely, if you take all food versus all health care, food is more important.
Well, if food is more important than health care, and it's important to have the government
run things that are important, which seems to be the idea here, well, why don't we get
the government to run all food?
Namely, why don't we go to the Soviet system of centralized planning and collectivized
farming and stuff like that?
The reason we don't is we know we'll starve if we go that route, as the Soviets and the
Okay, when you approach these problems from the libertarian point of view that you do,
Walter, is it essentially an efficiency argument that you argue that if we privatize these
systems that the invisible hand of the free market will just effectively make everything
more efficient and will eliminate the waste?
I think it's a two-shot or a two-barrel approach.
One is the ethics, which I talk about when I try to grab your socks and say that there's
a moral way and an immoral way, and the moral way is the voluntary market way.
And also there's an efficiency argument, namely that markets bring about a better product
at a lower price through competition than governments do.
In some ways we have a government here in British Columbia that is trying to introduce
more of a user pay principle.
You specialize in roads and your last book was about privatizing roads.
Here in BC we've got a lot of things called P3s, private-public partnerships and toll
booths going up on roads and highways.
Do you like that idea?
No.
Private-public partnerships is just a synonym for fascism.
Under socialism the government owns all the means of production as in the Soviet Union.
In fascism, think Mussolini and Hitler, without the racism, fascism doesn't require the racist
or the anti-semitic stuff.
We have a lot of fascism and socialism in Canada and in the United States and in other
Western democracies.
No, public-private partnerships are just a name for fascism.
There's no reason to...
I mean, government is in effect a criminal gang because what they're doing, even though
So they have majority, they have tyranny of the majority, they are using force and compulsion.
So it's sort of like a horrible miscegenation to have public and private together.
What we ought to do, I think on moral and efficiency grounds, is to get rid of the public
insofar as is possible, keep reducing it, that government is best, which governs least,
and keep reducing it, whereas these public-private partnerships are just a way of tapering over
for Government Inefficiencies and Immorality with a veneer of private enterprise which
is both moral and efficient.
I guess that these ideas you come up with and write about, this is strictly an intellectual
exercise I suppose, I mean the idea of everything private, no public services or institutions
at all, no taxes, I mean has this ever been tried anywhere in the world, ever?
Well, no, unfortunately, unhappily, we've had countries that have come closer to it than others.
For example, the Fraser Institute, the rating of the economic freedom of the various nations,
that was one of the projects I worked on when I was at the Fraser Institute.
Hong Kong and Singapore are the freest countries in the world, and Switzerland is up there.
And those are the ones that most closely resemble this ideal, even though they haven't reached it.
There were some cases in Ireland and in Iceland in the 16th century or so that closely approached this.
No, we never have really achieved it, but that's no argument against it. Look, we're all against crime and we're all against rape, right?
And yet we've never achieved no rape and no crime and no murder, have we?
That doesn't stop us from proposing a society free of murder, rape and theft, does it?
Your ideas, of course, I think, are much more on the minority in Canada, I suggest to you,
than they are in the United States, where a guy like Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman,
has a large following, and I'm sure you're a fan of his.
Oh, actually, I've just invited Ron Paul.
He's going to be speaking at my college, Loyola University, New Orleans, and I'm one of his advisors.
Yes, I'm a big fan of his, but there is a libertarian movement in Canada also.
The Libertarian Party gets its 1 or 2 percent of the vote, and the Libertarian Party in the U.S. doesn't do much better than that. Oh, it gets 3 or 4 percent of the vote. Ron Paul, by the way, did once run for president on the Libertarian ticket, and he got his usual 3 or 4 percent. He made great inroads when he ran as a Republican, but he certainly is a Libertarian, and of all politicians that you might have heard their name of, he's certainly the one closest to my views.
This is libertarian economist Walter Block, got some calls for you Walter.
I remember when I was a young guy at school I once read a book called The Fountainhead.
Ah, magnificent, magnificent book.
It didn't, and it was like a lot of young people would check that book out sometimes,
maybe not so much these days, I don't know.
But I remember reading it and being somewhat intrigued or interested.
It did not change my life, but Anne Rand kind of changed your life though, right?
Well, you know, there's a modern library or some librarian-type group of listing of the top hundred books, and Ayn Rand has got four out of the top ten.
I think Atlas Shrugged is second, and The Fountainhead is third, and then there are two others, We The Living, that are seventh and eighth, something like that.
You met her, right?
Oh, yes. I wouldn't say I was a buddy of hers, but she was certainly a mentor of mine, and it's because of her and her colleague Nathaniel Brannon that I became a libertarian.
at one time I was a pinko New York City Jew socialist, which is a redundancy.
I'm just kidding.
And then you went to one of her lectures, I understand.
Yes.
And that was the turning point.
Well, I had private discussions with her and Nathaniel Brennan, and I went to many of her lectures.
I'm not a Randian, but I am very sympathetic to her, and I wasn't so much of a fan of her movement,
The movement, which I think is a bit cultish, because if you disagree with her on anything, you're going to get kicked out, very brutal, but I still revere her, her writings. I don't favor the movement so much, but I'm a big fan of her and her writings.
Okay, let's take some calls in the open line now. Alex, hi.
I support what you're saying. I'm totally in favor of smaller government, lower taxation. You're not going to find any sympathetic support here in Canada.
Canadians support, from the time they go to school, their condition to accept a giant, overwhelming, overburdening, stifling government.
This is the way we live up here. It's disgusting. I bang my head against the wall every day.
I will pay way too much taxes, and the services are getting worse, and they're being diminished.
It's just a bad scene up here, so maybe you can get some better luck taking care of the
states and pushing the movement down there.
Thanks for the call.
I think we definitely have a different cultural outlook on government, perhaps in our country
than in the United States.
What do you think, Walter?
Seymour Martin-Lipsud has written several books on Canadian-U.S. comparatives, and he
bases it on the Loyalists who were sort of more
pro-king in 1776 coming to Canada.
I think he's right. The Libertarian Party does much better in the U.S. than in Canada.
But there is something, I mean,
you know, talking about the overburdening that this caller mentioned, the
serfs during the age of serfdom, only had a
work two or three days a week for the master,
and yet the Frasers to Tax Freedom Day now shows that it's three and a half, four days
a week that we have to work for our surf masters in Ottawa and in Victoria.
Are you telling me the surfs were better off?
Well, no, obviously not. They weren't better off. They lived two, three hundred years ago when
technology wasn't good. But I'm just saying that the proportion of their income
that they had to give to their masters was less than the proportion that we now have to give.
We've only got one minute left, Pat, hi.
Yeah, there's a reason why you get the same percentage of votes as the rhino parties because
you both have kind of wacky ideas and people understand that they're wacky.
My question is, do you believe in democracy?
Because democracy is where we entrust the government with our money, and if we don't
like the way they spend the money, we get to kick them out every four years.
Okay, Walter, you've got 30 seconds to prove you're not a wacko.
Well, I'm not sure I want to prove I'm not.
I'm happy with the wacko, at least if that means minority position. Look, Hitler came
into power as a result of a democratic vote, and that doesn't give the imprimatur to what
he did. There is such a thing as turning the majority, just because a lot of people agree
to something doesn't make it right or efficient.
Thank you for being on the show today.
I have spoken.
You have indeed. Thanks a lot for coming on.
Thanks, Pat.
I appreciate it. Walter Block, Loyola University.