Encounters with Walter Block
Encounters with Walter Block

Author(s): Steve Globerman
Subject(s): Economy, Political Theory, Economic policy
Published by: Addleton Academic Publishers
Keywords: Walter Block; Fraser Institute; Canadian content regulations; individual rights;
Summary/Abstract: I can probably claim the distinction of knowing Walter Block longer than almost any other person alive today. I first met Walter sometime in the early 1960s. At the time, I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College majoring in economics. Walter was a friend of my cousin Martin Dubin. Notwithstanding the great distance in time between then and now, I still remember meeting Walter one night when we both were visiting Martin. Walter inquired about my studies at Brooklyn College, and I must have expressed more enthusiasm for the postKeynesian economics indoctrination I was getting in my courses than was acceptable to Walter. He criticized my naïve defense of the need for a large government role in the economy more enthusiastically than I thought was appropriate for a casual social encounter, but in retrospect, it was a wonderful lesson that Walter was particularly well equipped to deliver. The lesson: don’t bandy about opinions on important economic and social issues unless you’ve given good and proper thought to those issues. I was undoubtedly too intellectually unserious at the time to absorb the lesson fully, but it must have made an impression as I remember that encounter with Walter some six decades later, whereas I have forgotten almost all of the lessons from Samuelson’s classic textbook that was the economics Bible for undergraduate students in the 1960s.

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