Against Both Private and Public Counterfeiting

A bstract .   In his highly provocative and otherwise brilliant book Defending the Undefendable (1991), Walter Block defends the private counterfeiting of state-counterfeited money. His argument fallaciously relies on an idiosyncratic linguistic definition of the counterfeiter, which is invalid from a legal point of view. In this short response, we analyze private counterfeiting in legal and economic terms rather than linguistic, and show why the behavior of the private counterfeiter should not be considered acceptable, let alone heroic, as claimed by Block. The present article is strongly influenced by Rothbard (1982 ).     

Cantor’s Diagonal Argument: An Extension to the Socialist Calculation Debate—A Comment

In a recent article Robert P. Murphy (2006) uses Cantor’s diagonal argument to prove that market socialism could not function, since it would be impossible for the Central Planning Board to complete a list containing all conceivable goods (or prices for them). In the present paper we argue that Murphy is not only wrong in claiming that the number of goods included in the list should be uncountable, but also that the number of equations/prices is irrelevant from the point of view of market socialism.