Hans F. Sennholz’s “Love and Envy” is a brief polemical essay in political economy and moral philosophy, published as a reflective “Notes” piece. Its scope is narrow but sweeping: it moves from the psychology of envy to the institutional consequences of egalitarian politics, contrasting market cooperation with welfare-state redistribution and deficit finance.
Love and envy probably are the most bewitching of all emotions.
The essay’s central thesis is that envy, when politicized, becomes the emotional source of coercive redistribution, demagoguery, capital consumption, and social conflict. Sennholz begins by distinguishing natural human inequality from moral and legal equality. People differ in ability, industry, training, and productivity; this inequality, he argues, is precisely why equal legal standing matters. Political equality is not a promise of equal results but a condition for peaceful cooperation among unequal persons.
Social harmony and cooperation depend on the equal treatment of all members of society before the law.
From this point, the essay turns against reformers who regard legal equality as insufficient. Sennholz’s key conceptual move is to identify the demand for economic equality not with justice but with coercion. Redistribution requires taxation, confiscation, and permanent political intervention because the inequalities it seeks to erase continually reappear.
They love force which breeds more force.
The structure of the essay follows this escalation: envy first corrupts moral judgment, then political rhetoric, then institutions. The demagogue becomes the central figure of envy politics. By promising to humble the rich on behalf of the poor, he converts resentment into electoral power and replaces productive achievement with political allocation.
A policy designed to bring about economic equality opens the door for demagogues.
Against this politics of resentment, Sennholz sketches the market order as an “envy-free” arrangement. It is not a utopia of equal outcomes but a system in which income reflects service, contribution, and voluntary cooperation. Those unable to provide for themselves may depend on supporters, but those who refuse productive effort are not forcibly mobilized except under command systems. For Sennholz, liberty means the absence of economic commands, with law restricted to preventing injuries against persons and property.
The market order allocates income in accordance with the services rendered and contributions made to social well-being.
The essay’s relevance lies in its Austrian/libertarian diagnosis of the welfare state: redistribution does not merely transfer wealth but alters incentives, rewards political predation, and undermines saving. Sennholz treats confiscatory taxation as self-defeating because capital owners consume, hide, or export wealth rather than surrender it repeatedly to the state. The deeper issue is capital consumption: welfare policy, deficit spending, and financial regulation divert savings from future production toward present political consumption.
Countries that lose capital suffer economic stagnation and decline; countries that attract capital enjoy rising labor productivity and wage rates.
The final section broadens the critique from taxation to government debt. Social Security funds, trusts, and regulated savings become, in his account, repositories of government IOUs rather than productive capital. Deficit spending pits beneficiaries against taxpayers and present voters against future generations, consuming both accumulated wealth and “seed corn” for the future.
It is difficult to imagine a policy more destructive than deficit spending.
The essay closes by returning to its moral psychology. Love is associated with gentleness and social peace; envy with misery, coercion, and political plunder. Sennholz’s argument is deliberately stark: economic problems may be addressed through production, saving, and cooperation, but envy transforms solvable scarcity into ideological conflict.
All kinds of problems are solvable except those which spring from envy.
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