Sennholz’s essay interprets Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as a continuation of New Deal liberalism rather than a new social vision. Its central claim is that the program promises universal uplift while expanding federal paternalism, weakening responsibility, distorting markets, undermining property, and distracting the nation from war, Communism, racial unrest, and monetary danger. The essay repeatedly reduces ambitious social planning to a fiscal and moral question:
Where is the money coming from?
The education section sets the pattern. Sennholz does not deny that talented young people should find paths to college, but argues that such paths already exist through family effort, work, philanthropy, institutional aid, and private loans. His deeper objection is ethical: when higher education is made nearly costless to the beneficiary, it ceases to teach discipline, sacrifice, and valuation. Subsidy thus appears not as opportunity but as character damage.
To give a college education on an almost cost-free basis is to damage the moral fiber of our youth.
Medicare receives the same treatment. Sennholz presents American medicine as a product of private enterprise, professional independence, and voluntary insurance, not as a field requiring federal administration. The issue is therefore not simply whether the elderly need medical care, but whether care should be mediated by political entitlement. Once the state becomes payer and guarantor, he argues, doctors become subject to bureaucracy and citizens are trained to expect provision from centralized authority.
The poverty program is the essay’s most explicitly economic argument. Sennholz claims that the War on Poverty mistakes transfers and mandates for production, while raising the cost of employing marginal workers through minimum-wage laws, unemployment-insurance charges, overtime rules, and union privileges. Poverty policy, in his view, can worsen poverty when it ignores prices, productivity, and labor costs.
unemployment is a cost phenomenon.
Farm policy and urban renewal extend this critique of redistribution. Agricultural supports are portrayed as an expensive bureaucratic regime that fails to preserve the small farmer while raising consumer costs and entangling production in quotas and penalties. Urban renewal is rendered through the image of Milwaukee neighborhoods cleared like bombed-out districts, a scene Sennholz uses to argue that planning officials destroy existing communities in order to impose a “master plan.” The declared public interest becomes, for him, a means of transferring property and displacing the poor and minorities in the name of progress.
After surveying domestic policy, Sennholz shifts to foreign and monetary crisis. The Great Society’s fixation on benefits and redistribution is dangerous because it dulls awareness of Vietnam and world Communism. He condemns the Kennedy-Johnson approach as a limited-war strategy that sacrifices lives and wealth without permitting victory. The domestic promise of abundance is thus set against a war that drains resources, prestige, and resolve.
The monetary argument is equally central. Sennholz links federal expansion to inflation, gold losses, balance-of-payments weakness, and the fragility of the dollar’s reserve-currency role. Because foreign holders have accumulated dollars, he contends, the United States has temporarily postponed the consequences of depreciation; Great Society spending threatens to expose the gap between dollar claims and gold reserves. The end point he fears is not merely recession but controls, shortages, and a drift toward socialism.
The final movement folds racial radicalism into this crisis narrative. Sennholz treats civil-rights militancy as increasingly attached to demands for redistribution and central planning, warning that inflation, controls, and political dependency could produce revolutionary disorder. Historically, the essay captures a mid-1960s right-wing synthesis in which welfare-state expansion, no-win foreign policy, civil unrest, and monetary instability appear as mutually reinforcing symptoms of national blindness.
Indeed, the "Great Society" is a Calamity Deal on the eve of the greatest debacles in our history.
The title’s implied “Everything Deal” is therefore more than a joke about generous federal programs. It names Sennholz’s core claim that when government assumes responsibility for education, health, poverty, agriculture, cities, money, and peace, it promises everything while eroding the mechanisms—prices, property, savings, voluntary provision, and personal duty—that make prosperity and liberty possible.
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