Ron Paul for President in 2012: Yes to Ron Paul and Liberty
Walter Block is Harold E. Wirth Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics, College of Business, Loyola University New Orleans, and senior fellow at the Mises Institute. He earned his PhD in economics at Columbia University in 1972. He has taught at Rutgers, SUNY Stony Brook, Baruch CUNY, Holy Cross and the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of over 400 articles in professional journals, two dozen books, and hundreds of op eds. He lectures widely on college campuses, delivers seminars around the world and appears regularly on television and radio shows. He has been a friend of Ron Paul’s since the 1970s. Block is a leading Austrian School economist and an international leader of the freedom movement. His earliest work Defending the Undefendable (first edition Fleet 1976, latest edition Mises 2008, translated in 12 languages) is now, more than 30 years later, regarded as an overlooked classic on libertarianism. This collection of essays, which argues for societal villains as economic scapegoats based on the principles of nonaggression, forces its reader to think and to rethink his or her initial knee-jerk emotional responses, and to gain a new and far sounder appreciation of economic theory and of the virtues and operations of the free market economy. Block’s writing was inspired by Henry Hazlitt, the author of the most widely read economics text Economics in One Lesson.  Block has been a fixture in the libertarian movement for some four decades. He actually met Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, and was friends with Murray Rothbard.  His contributions to academic libertarianism and to Austrian economics have been prodigious. Block’s writings continue to challenge the conventional wisdom (or ignorance) of how economics works and will retain its freshness for decades to come.