Murray Rothbard on the scapegoats of American society defended by Walter Block

All right, some readers might concede, we grant that these people [the pimp, prostitute, scab, slumlord, etc.] are performing valuable economic services.  Why is the pimp or the medical quack any more "heroic," and therefore in a sense more moral, than other, more respectable producers: the grocers, clothiers, steel manufacturers, etc."?  The explanation is precisely wrapped up in the extreme lack of respectability of Professor Black's scapegoats.  For the grocer, the steel producer, and the others are generally allowed to go about their business unmolested, and indeed earn respect and prestige from the fellow members of the community.  Not so these scapegoats; for not only are their economic services unrecognized, but they face the universal bile, scorn and wrath of virtually every member of society, plus the additional restrictions and prohibitions that governments have almost universally placed upon their activities.  Scorned and condemned unmercifully by society and state alike, social outcasts and state-proclaimed outlaws, Professor Block's collection of scapegoats go about their business nevertheless; heroically proceeding to confer their economic services in the teeth of universal scorn and outlawry.  They are heroes indeed; made so by their unjust treatment at the hands of society and of the state apparatus.

Heroes yes, but not necessarily saints.  When the author confers the moral stature of hero on the scab, the usurer, the pimp, and so on, he does not mean to imply that these activities are intrinsically more moral than any other.  In a free market, and in a society that treats the usurer, slumlord, and sweat shop employer precisely the same just way as it treats other occupations, they would no longer be heroes, and they would certainly be no more moral than anyone else.  Their heroic status, for Professor Block, is solely a function of the unjust restrictions that other men have been placing upon them.  It is the happy paradox of this book that if its implicit advice is followed, and the men and women described in these pages are no longer treated to scorn and legal coercion, then and only then will they no longer be heroes.  If you don't like the idea of a usurer or a slumlord being a hero, then the only way to deprive him of this stature is to remove the shackles that misguided people have placed upon him.

~ Murray N. Rothbard, forward to Defending the Undefendable (1976)