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 ).