Hans Sennholz’s article presents a free-market interpretation of the supermarket boycotts that appeared before the 1966 elections. Its thesis is that anger over food prices was politically redirected away from what he identifies as the real causes—monetary inflation, federal spending, farm policy, taxation, and union-imposed production costs—and toward supermarkets, which Sennholz presents as competitive, low-margin victims rather than culprits. The essay’s central conceptual move is definitional: Sennholz insists that “inflation” properly names currency depreciation by government, not merely the visible result of higher prices.
No citizen, no businessman, corporation, or labor union—no one but the central government—can inflate and depreciate our currency; for no one but the federal government can legally operate the printing presses whose feverish output of new dollars reduces their value.
From this premise, the article interprets the boycotts as a “Great Society” scapegoating operation. Sennholz argues that the Johnson administration benefits from redefining inflation as price increases, because that semantic shift makes merchants appear responsible for consequences produced by fiscal and monetary policy.
Thus, by a mere change of terminology the blame for the rising costs of all goods and services is quietly laid on businessmen.
The essay’s structure follows that accusation outward. It first criticizes the administration and sympathetic media for encouraging the protests, then asks “Who Is Picketing?” In that section Sennholz turns the charge back on the boycotters themselves, claiming that many urban protesters support the very spending programs that generate deficits and monetary expansion. He presents voters, welfare beneficiaries, and Great Society constituencies as not merely misled but complicit.
They themselves are infected with the very bacillus that is breeding the inflation.
Sennholz then widens the account from money creation to specific state interventions that raise food costs. Agricultural policy is his strongest example. Rather than blaming retailers, he points to federal programs that restrict output, purchase surplus commodities, subsidize exports, and sell food abroad at prices lower than domestic support prices. The supermarket, in this account, is downstream from political decisions that deliberately reduce supply or distort markets.
Most of this money is spent with the open purpose of restricting farm output and raising product prices.
The middle sections catalogue welfare, education, housing, and urban-development spending as further pressures on the Treasury. These passages are less about food pricing narrowly than about Sennholz’s broader fiscal theory: popular demands for federal benefits create deficits; deficits invite currency expansion; currency expansion reduces purchasing power; consumers then mistake the resulting price increases for business profiteering. The relevance of the article lies in this larger critique of democratic spending politics, where the public both demands benefits and resents their inflationary consequences.
A second conceptual move is to treat taxation as embedded in every commodity price. Sennholz uses the example of canned tomatoes to show that taxes accumulate through land, labor, fertilizer, processing, shipping, wholesaling, retailing, and business ownership. Prices are therefore not merely market signals but carriers of governmental extraction.
In fact, the retail price milady must pay for the can may comprise more taxes than remuneration for services rendered toward the can's existence.
He then adds labor unions to the causal chain. Union wage demands, restrictive work rules, strikes, and coercive tactics are said to raise costs and reduce output, producing price increases that consumers experience in the same way as inflation even if the mechanism differs.
To the hard-pressed housewife, both look alike—higher prices.
The closing section returns to supermarkets. Sennholz argues that chain stores grew because they lowered prices and expanded consumer choice; boycotting them therefore injures one of the institutions most responsible for economizing food distribution. His final ethical distinction is between individual consumer choice and collective coercion. A dissatisfied shopper may take her trade elsewhere, but a boycott that blocks others from patronizing a store imposes minority will on majority preference.
A boycott constitutes a concerted effort by one group of people to inflict injury upon another.
The article therefore presents a conservative-libertarian interpretation of a 1960s political controversy. Its immediate target is the supermarket boycott; its deeper target is the Great Society’s fiscal, monetary, and regulatory order. Sennholz’s core argument is that public protest misidentifies the agent of harm: supermarkets display higher prices, but government policy produces them.
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