This file is a short single-author political-economic essay. In scope it is compact and programmatic: Sennholz explains why citizens who profess common economic aims diverge so sharply over policy, and he traces that divergence to rival social philosophies. It is not a technical model of growth, wages, or prices; it is a first-principles argument about intervention, market coordination, and the moral limits of majority rule.
Most Americans are in full agreement on the basic goals of economic policies.
Starting from consensus rather than conflict is central to Sennholz’s method. He lists prosperity, employment, price stability, environmental health, social peace, and care for the disadvantaged as shared ends. The dispute, he argues, comes when means are chosen.
They concur on economic ends, but differ sharply on some—but not all—of the means that should be used to achieve those ends.
The essay first divides policy camps. “Activists” seek state direction—mandates, taxes, spending, deficits, and monetary expansion—while the opposing camp seeks to reduce political interference and trust market institutions. For Sennholz, this is not merely a practical disagreement over instruments; it reflects incompatible theories of social order.
They would use the full weight of the political apparatus to mandate, coerce, punish, tax, spend, engage in deficit spending, and print money in order to attain their ends.
Sennholz then identifies the intellectual adversary as “conflict” philosophy, especially in its Marxian form. He argues that a doctrine originally centered on capital and labor has expanded into wider idioms of race, gender, and generational struggle, all of which interpret society as a field of exploiter and victim classes.
We reject and repudiate the conflict dogma.
The essay’s positive thesis is the “harmony” thesis of classical liberal political economy. Sennholz invokes Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” to claim that private gain under property and exchange is socially productive rather than socially destructive. Harmony is not sentimental goodwill; it arises from the material fact that cooperation and specialization raise productivity.
What makes for this harmony is the higher productivity of cooperation and division of labor.
This is the central conceptual move: he replaces the category of exploitation with the category of cooperation. If workers, employers, entrepreneurs, and consumers are linked through voluntary exchange, then their prosperity is mutually reinforcing. The division of labor, not political redistribution, becomes the mechanism through which social peace and abundance are achieved.
The labor-market argument extends this logic. Competition among employers, workers’ freedom to accept the highest bid, and the possibility of self-employment are said to prevent systematic underpayment. In this frame, wages are not an imposed class relation but the market value of contribution under conditions of freedom.
There can be no exploitation in an unhampered labor market.
The final section shifts from economics to political ethics. Sennholz contends that activists not only misread markets; they also moralize disagreement by imputing bad ends to those who reject their means. In his account, the advocate of markets is portrayed as hostile to prosperity, employment, ecology, and social peace simply because he doubts coercive instruments.
To disagree on the means to be employed is to stand condemned also on the ends sought.
The essay concludes by rejecting democratic majoritarianism as a sufficient moral standard. For the “liberal” or “moderate” conflict theorist, Sennholz says, majority will becomes the test of fairness; but for him, rights and justice cannot be reduced to votes.
The state is their instrument of coercion, the supreme arbiter of fairness and morality.
Against that view, Sennholz insists that majorities can violate rights just as surely as private actors can. His closing principle is terse and deliberately absolute:
Evil is evil; it is none the better for being committed on behalf of the majority.
“Economic Ends and Means” therefore proceeds in four steps: consensus on economic ends; division over state versus market means; rejection of conflict doctrine in favor of social cooperation through property, competition, and division of labor; and a final defense of individual rights against majoritarian coercion. Its relevance lies in its concise statement of market-harmony liberalism: if voluntary cooperation is productive and nonexploitative, then state intervention is not only inefficient but morally suspect when it substitutes compulsion for exchange.
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