Walter Block

Walter Block enters this wiki as the most prominent libertarian dissenter on inalienability. Against Rothbard’s view that the will cannot be sold, Block argues that if self-ownership is real it must include the right to alienate oneself — so a genuinely voluntary slave contract is a valid, enforceable transfer of title.

Biographical Frame

Walter E. Block is a libertarian economist. The source article identifies him as the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics in the College of Business Administration at Loyola University New Orleans. He is known for pressing libertarian premises to their logically extreme, and often unpopular, conclusions; his defense of “full” alienability and the validity of voluntary slave contracts, set out below, is a characteristic instance.

Works Present Here

One Block work is currently present in the wiki — Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability, his Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2 (2003) critique of Rothbard, Barnett, Smith, Kinsella, Gordon, and Epstein. In it Block defends what he calls “full” alienability — that everything a person owns may be sold, including the person himself:

• The self-ownership argument for alienability — “if I own something, I can sell it (and should be allowed by law to do so). If I can’t sell it, then, and to that extent, I really don’t own it.”
• The conclusion — “the thesis that voluntary slavery is compatible with libertarianism”, a position he concedes is “not well accepted by libertarians” and which, to the best of his knowledge, only Robert Nozick had previously supported.

Place in This Wiki

Block is the loyal opposition on contract theory. This wiki’s treatment of contract follows Rothbard’s title-transfer and inalienability line; Block marks the live disagreement at its foundation. His paper is the source for the dissenting voice in Voluntary Slavery, Debt, and the Title-Transfer Theory of Contract — included so that article stays honest that the inalienability premise is contested within libertarianism, not settled.

See Also

• Voluntary Slavery, Debt, and the Title-Transfer Theory of Contract - the concept node his dissent feeds
• Murray N. Rothbard - the author whose inalienability position Block critiques
• The Ethics of Liberty - the Rothbard text Block argues against
• Nonaggression and Property Rights - the self-ownership premise both sides share
• Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability - Work reference for Walter Block’s Journal of Libertarian Studies article (17:2, 2003), the principal libertarian argument against inalienability. Reasoning from self-ownership
• The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract - Rothbard’s (after Evers) theory: a contract is a transfer of title to alienable property, enforceable only when breach is an implicit theft
• Open Borders - Walter Block’s non-aggression-axiom case that peaceful migration is not aggression, so that immigration restriction is the coercive act — the libertarian counter to forced integration.

Sources

• Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability (JLS 17:2, 2003) - Block’s full-text critique defending full alienability and the validity of voluntary slave contracts