This file is a short political-economic essay. Sennholz’s scope is narrow but ambitious: he uses the federal debt as an entry point into a moral and institutional critique of congressional spending, redistribution, and electoral incentives.
To most Americans the $4 trillion federal debt is like another galaxy, trillions of light years away.
The essay’s thesis is that public debt is not an abstract accounting matter but the accumulated result of political incentives that consume wealth, shift burdens into the future, and normalize coercive redistribution. Sennholz frames debt as something hidden from ordinary perception unless one brings “economic knowledge and logical reasoning” to bear:
Economic knowledge and logical reasoning are needed to perceive the debt as a vast pyramid of wealth consumed; that deficit spending destroys wealth and substance and mortgages the future; that it is a potent prescription for stagnation and poverty; an open invitation to more inflation; and the cause of much social and political conflict.
From there, the argument turns from economics to political anthropology. Congress does not treat the debt as a moral problem because its dominant motive is career survival. Sennholz’s politicians are not primarily public servants weighing justice and prudence, but pragmatists operating under doctrines useful for electioneering.
To most members of the U.S. Congress who incurred and pyramided the debt, the issue is purely political.
His key conceptual move is to reinterpret the apparent two-party system as a functional three-party system. First comes the “Parochial Party,” whose members seek federal spending for their districts and resist cuts that would reduce local benefits. Second is the “Vocational Party,” organized around occupational and producer interests—farmers, unions, fishermen, and other concentrated constituencies. These groups invoke redistribution but are governed, in Sennholz’s account, by electoral arithmetic rather than compassion.
Redistribution must bring political advantages without which there would be little redistribution.
The essay is thus a public-choice critique in moral language. Redistribution flows not mainly to “the wretched poor” but to electorally powerful blocs, especially the middle class, the elderly, organized labor, civil servants, and producer groups. Sennholz’s sharpest language appears where he describes the political class and its beneficiaries as relying on compulsion while speaking the language of justice.
Their maxim of behavior which unites and distinguishes them from others is their love of coercion.
Against these two dominant parties, Sennholz posits a small “Consumer Party,” made up of representatives who oppose favors, subsidies, production restrictions, and privileges because these injure the general public. This is not a formal party but a normative category: it represents consumers as consumers, meaning nearly everyone, especially the poor who most need abundant goods at low prices. Its principle is not producer privilege but open competition and freedom.
Freedom, to them, is the liberty to follow their own will in all things, and not to be subject to the uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.
The essay’s structure moves from public indifference, to congressional motive, to a typology of political factions, and finally to the question of why the general-interest “Consumer Party” remains weak despite its theoretical majority. Sennholz’s answer is that concentrated beneficiaries speak louder than dispersed consumers. Civil servants, dependents, and recipients of political largess form a defensive coalition against market freedom.
There are 18.3 million civil servants with more than 30 million dependents living—and some feasting—on the taxes they extract.
The relevance of the piece lies in its compressed diagnosis of fiscal politics: debt grows because spending benefits are concentrated, costs are dispersed, and political morality is displaced by reelection incentives. Sennholz’s closing note is not merely economic but ethical. He insists that citizens can rise above immediate material advantage and recognize the link between coercive policy and social decline.
He may also realize that morally evil acts have bad economic consequences.
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