Editor:

Thanks for giving me this opportunity to reply to the letters of the Rev. Peter J. Bernardi, S.J. (“Free market idealistic, not a solution,” Feb. 4) and the Rev. Edwin Gros, S.J., (“Professor weary of colleague’s blocked thinking,” Feb. 18). Both are responses to my “Free Market would alleviate poverty and strengthen family relations,” Jan. 21.

I greatly appreciate their willingness to demonstrate that we have true intellectual diversity on campus, something of inestimable benefit not only to students but also to our entire academic community.

Father Bernardi talks of the “cruel, dehumanizing excesses of laissez faire capitalism.” It cannot be denied that things were very rough for most people several hundreds of years ago. But the masses of the populace were “voting with their feet” when they left the farms for the factories, which are emblematic of free enterprise.

Why did they do this? Because, bad as things were in the cities (see Dickens on this), they were much worse in the places from whence they were escaping.

Father Gros, I fear, misreads me when he taxes me with the view that slavery was of benefit to the black family. I only said “it was not able to ruin the black family” in that in the years and decades following the happy demise of that vicious and depraved system, the black family was still intact. In sharp contrast, after the virus of welfare was inflicted on the black family in the 1960s, this was no longer true.

Of course I oppose socialist measures such as social security, public housing, minimum wages, unions, etc; they have all harmed the very people they were presumably supposed to help: the poor.

If we really want to cure poverty, we must move in the very opposite direction: toward economic freedom and respect for private property rights, which have had salutary effects wherever they have been tried.

I credit my two colleagues with vast reservoirs of benevolence and good will. But of more importance in actually curing poverty is a keen appreciation of the economic insight that free enterprise leads inevitably to prosperity.

Walter Block, Ph.D. Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics