I was reading an open letter from Walter Block to Gary Haugen, the president of International Justice Mission, in which he addresses a speech that Haugen gave at Regent University in Vancouver. Among some of his other rather odd claims he writes this:

"In closing, one last criticism of your presentation: lose that film clip showing a child buyer being tied up by the police. You may not have noticed it, but it also showed a television set in the background. But this implies electricity, and a certain minimal level of prosperity – all totally incompatible with your story of people selling their kids motivated by dire poverty."

Television is no longer, nor has truly ever been exclusive to the rich, and its mere presence does not exclude the possibility of a person being under dire financial duress. Also, Mr. Block is an economist and therefore his knee-jerk reaction is to focus only on economic issues and ignore the many other factors that cotribute to human trafficking in his letter. If these issues were simply to be solved with money, then we should all simply begin to give them aid as a disincentive to participate in slavery- the way that we give aid to countries to stop them from developing the atomic bomb, or pay farmers to not produce crops so that the market will not crash. If only it were only economic issues that created slavery. Much of the time economics are an issue, but also at fault is the lower value placed of female lives, the deciet of the few (many women are hired as housekeepers or child care providers and then trapped into prostitution.) Also much of the time race is the primary issue.

In his open letter, which I am presuming was never answered- Mr. Block also mocks someone he assumes is a theological seminar student because, "since his remarks were based on the usual Marxist claptrap taught in such establishments of higher learning," and also says that humainity will never think of others because it is "sociobiologically" ( a word he likes a lot, but really means very little) wired into us from the time we were cavemen to think of our narrow communities. Good thinking there, try to dispute the argument of someone who doesn't believe in evolution on the basis of "evolutionary hard-wiring."

Block also largely quotes "Wealth of Nations" which advocates merit based economic systems where people are allowed to succeed or fail based upon their individual abilities. The flaw in this thinking in association with social justice is first that many of those effected are children who are unable to acheive this economic freedom- unless Block is advocating sweat-shops, which I doubt is his intention, and also that for many of these people there is a societal history of subjugation to the extent that there is no possibility of their gaining freedom through free trade.

While the idea behind this is systematically appealing-- with little effort on our parts, this seems to be the "Baker's Dozen" rule of justice- that if one or two fail and must be thrown out, at least on the whole it works. And the sad thing is, in many of these cases it is not simply one or two that are thrown away, but thousands. The problem is, we are not dealing with economic systems, we are not dealing with the conceptual, we are dealing with real persons. Sometimes there is too much of a false sense of security in statistics.

If you want to read all of the letter, it can be found at:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block41.html