Editor:

Walter Block, in his recent article (“Free market would alleviate poverty and strengthen family relations,” Jan. 21) exalting the virtues of the free market, went way over the top when he boldly stated that slavery was not able to ruin the black family but welfare did and that the black family was just about as strong as the white in the years following the Civil War but fell apart after Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Black families were literally torn apart at a slave block just a few miles from here on Decatur and Toulouse streets in the French Quarter, now Café Maspero’s. I’ve yet to meet a black person who considers those the “good old days” for African American family life.

I like Block as a person. He is kind and caring with his students. But his thinking disturbs me sometimes. After reading his articles for the past two years, I have come to believe that he has an incredible allergy to social security, public housing, the minimum wage, union legislation and government, while maintaining an obsessive addiction to an extreme version of free market economics.

With all due respect, I believe this allergy-obsession has gone to his HEAD and made him a slave to one idea, “the free market,” and gone to his HEART by insulating him from human suffering as evidenced when he makes light of the darkest days of Black American history.

We need to educate students to think in many dimensions and have recourse to all the academic disciplines (theology, psychology, education, philosophy, sociology) as they explore and propose ways to address a complex problem like poverty. Economics when divorced from these disciplines is dangerous. As a professor of Catholic social teaching, Block more than anyone needs to grasp this complexity. When economic theories are applied like Procrustean beds and human suffering is downplayed, it is the poor who are stretched and suffer. Moreover, economics divorced from the Cross of Christ cannot in any way be called Catholic.

I am afraid that Block has become so enamored of one idea that he has become the slave who needs to be freed, not the market. I think it would also help if he would work in a sweatshop in Nicaragua for a few months and then come back and re-assess his position. I’m convinced he would be singing a totally different tune.

The Rev. Edwin Gros, S.J.Dean of University Ministry