The Tom Woods Show, Released on 11/26/20
David Stockman, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, strongly opposed the re-election of Donald Trump — not on NeverTrump grounds, but because Stockman favors sound money and fiscal rectitude. Walter Block, probably the most prolific academic libertarian in the world, thinks Trump needs to be compared to the likely alternative. Today they hash it out.
David Stockman is a former Republican congressman from Michigan and was President Reagan’s budget director from 1981 to 1985. After leaving the White House, Stockman became a managing director at Salomon Brothers, and he later founded a private equity fund. David is the founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner, and he is the author of The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back and Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp And The Fantasy Of MAGA.
Walter Edward Block is an American Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist. He currently holds the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at the J. A. Butt School of Business at Loyola University New Orleans, and is a senior fellow of the non-profit think-tank Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He is best known for his 1976 book Defending the Undefendable, which takes contrarian positions in defending acts which are illegal or disreputable but Block argues are actually victimless crimes or benefit the public.