This file is a short political-economic essay, originally noted as “Notes, February 1994,” and printed as a compact chapter in Reflection and Remembrance. Sennholz’s scope is not historical narration but polemical diagnosis: he asks why freedom, though widely desired, is continually weakened by political power, bureaucracy, taxation, public employment, and transfer programs. The essay’s central thesis is that freedom’s enemies are not only dictators or explicit socialists, but also ordinary beneficiaries of coercive systems who defend those systems when their income depends on them.
Sennholz begins from a broad moral anthropology of liberty. Freedom is valuable because it enables self-direction across the whole range of human life:
Most people long for freedom—social, economic, political, mental, and spiritual.
That opening is immediately shadowed by a darker claim about power. Freedom is not self-securing because human beings are tempted to dominate others. Sennholz’s core conceptual move is to translate political economy into a moral psychology of dependence and coercion: the central danger is not merely bad policy but the corrupting attraction of command.
Power pollutes whatever it touches.
The essay’s first section treats concentrated economic authority—whether socialist or fascist—as structurally hostile to liberty. Sennholz does not sharply distinguish democratic from despotic governments when both use compulsion for redistribution. In his argument, bureaucracy creates a class whose livelihood depends on regulation and taxation, making it unlikely to become an agent of deregulation or fiscal restraint.
The lust of power is innate in government officials; it is the strongest of all the passions.
From there, the essay shifts from general principle to American institutional examples. Sennholz identifies government employees, public educators, tax consumers, and transfer recipients as constituencies whose material interests align with expanding public authority. His point is not that every member of these groups consciously hates liberty, but that their incentives make them poor guardians of it. Public education becomes his emblematic case: if compulsory taxation for schooling is accepted as consistent with freedom, he argues, then the same logic can be extended indefinitely to transportation, health care, retirement, entertainment, and nearly every social activity.
They are preparing their charges for a comprehensive command system commonly called socialism.
The middle portion of the essay is built around lists of welfare and social insurance programs: AFDC, SSI, earned income tax credits, Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, Pell Grants, Social Security, public pensions, and Medicare. These figures are not offered as neutral social statistics; they function rhetorically as evidence that a vast electorate is tied to transfer payments. Sennholz’s fear is that when voting follows income interest, democracy can become an engine of continuous redistribution and shrinking liberty.
The essay’s relevance lies in this analysis of the political economy of dependency. Written in the 1990s, it anticipates continuing libertarian critiques of the administrative state: the expansion of public employment and entitlement programs creates durable constituencies for government growth. Sennholz’s language is uncompromising, but the argument is more subtle at the end than at the beginning. He concedes that the defenders of state benefits do not always act as one bloc; their interests conflict, and their attachment to freedom may reappear wherever their own subsidy is not at stake.
Consistent champions of freedom are extremely rare.
This closing turn complicates the essay’s apparent fatalism. Sennholz’s final conceptual move is to distinguish inconsistency from hopelessness. People may defend their own privilege while opposing others’, but this very inconsistency prevents the forces of dependency from becoming a perfectly unified anti-liberty coalition. The essay ends by locating freedom not in institutional momentum but in a persistent moral possibility within persons:
Yet, the spark of freedom is in every human heart.
Thus “Freedom Has Many Enemies” is a concise libertarian warning against the seductions of power and the political consequences of transfer society. Its structure moves from moral premise, to critique of government power, to analysis of bureaucratic and welfare constituencies, and finally to a guarded hope that human attachment to liberty can survive even amid dependence on coercive institutions.
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