LIBERTARIAN PAPERS VOL. 5, NO. 1 (2013) 67 COUNTERING WALTER BLOCK’S “HEROIC” PRIVATE COUNTERFEITER LAURA F. DAVIDSON * 1. Introduction IN HIS PROVOCATIVE BOOK, Defending the Undefendable, Walter Block (1976) presents a cast of seemingly nefarious characters, such as the slumlord, the prostitute, and the moneylender, whose actions, he shows, are harmless and even beneficial when looked at from a free-market and natural law perspective. There is, however, one case where his defense is more than a little controversial: that of the private counterfeiter. According to Block, an individual counterfeiter who creates his own notes commits no real crime because money issued by the government is itself counterfeit, and counterfeiting counterfeit money is analogous to seizing stolen goods from thieves. Block points out that under the natural law, if B steals property from A, and C takes the stolen property away from B, C is not guilty of theft if the property in question cannot be returned to A; for example, if A no longer exists or cannot be found. Block contends that a similar proposition can be applied to counterfeiting, where B are the government and banking institutions, who throughout history have fraudulently misrepresented their notes as being equivalent to genuine money such as gold and silver, A are the past depositors of these precious metals who were the original victims of B’ s counterfeiting fraud prior to the establishment of a universal fiat currency, * Laura F. Davidson MA (davidsonlaura@hotmail.com) is a graduate of Oxford University, and an independent scholar. The author would like to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are entirely her own. CITATION INFORMATION FOR THIS ARTICLE: Laura F. Davidson. 2013. “Countering Walter Block’s “Heroic” Private Counterfeiter.” Libertarian Papers. 5 (1): 67-88. ONLINE AT: libertarianpapers.org . THIS ARTICLE IS subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (creativecommons.org/licenses ).