Hans F. Sennholz’s “Two Yardsticks of Morality” is a compact moral and political essay built around a stark contrast: people often condemn coercion, seizure, and harm in private life while approving the same conduct when it is performed through political institutions. The essay begins not with policy detail but with a philosophical account of human striving. Human beings cannot finally explain the mystery of existence, but they can recognize their desire for security, self-direction, and happiness.
To be free and independent, to be happy, to do what he pleases without restraint and coercion, that's probably the most important single force in the world today.
Sennholz immediately sets this longing for freedom against the social reality of dependence. No person can live as an isolated sovereign. Food, clothing, shelter, transport, and education arise from cooperation, exchange, and division of labor. The desire to be left alone must therefore be reconciled with the equal claims of others.
Yet this force faces the reality of complete dependence of every individual on the cooperation of other individuals.
From this tension Sennholz derives the essay’s ethical standard. Liberty is not permission to impose one’s will without limit; it is bounded by the reciprocal duty not to invade another person’s life, labor, or property. The central moral rule is thus simple: what one may not rightly do as an individual does not become righteous because it is done collectively, legally, or democratically.
The essay’s title names the failure Sennholz sees in modern political life. In ordinary relations, people usually recognize the wrongness of theft, violence, fraud, and exploitation. Yet as voters, party members, union members, taxpayers, beneficiaries, or organized interests, they often support coercive transfers and privileges from which they gain and others lose.
Indeed, there seem to be two modes of behavior, two yardsticks of morality: one for our personal relations and one for the body politic.
Sennholz’s critique is therefore ethical before it is institutional. He does not merely object that government programs are inefficient, but that political mechanisms allow people to redescribe self-interest as public justice. Majority vote, legislation, taxation, and regulation may give coercion legal form, but they do not alter its moral character. His sharp formulation of politics captures this suspicion of collective moral camouflage.
Politics is strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
The essay develops this charge through contrasts between private decency and public predation. A person may mourn a neighbor’s death while approving estate taxes on the widow and children. Parents may love their children while supporting public debt, inflation, and benefits that shift burdens onto the next generation. Respectable citizens may reject robbery in person while endorsing confiscatory policies through the state. The examples are intentionally severe because Sennholz wants readers to see continuity between private coercion and political coercion.
“Two Yardsticks of Morality” is thus a libertarian moral indictment of democratic interest politics. Its core claim is not that citizens lack all virtue, but that politics tempts them to suspend the moral standards they otherwise honor. Sennholz’s argument turns on consistency: if it is wrong to seize, burden, or coerce another person for private advantage, it remains wrong when performed through law, office, association, or majority power.
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