Hans F. Sennholz, “Political Magic” — Summary

This file is a short, single-author polemical essay in political economy. Its scope is conceptual and diagnostic: Sennholz explains modern statism as a secularized form of magic, then applies that analogy to inflation, unemployment, trade policy, Keynesian economics, and the language of “government” itself.

The essay’s organizing comparison is between primitive sorcery and modern political faith. Sennholz begins with “primitive man,” who invents magical rites to master dangers he cannot understand or control. The central claim is that modern citizens often repeat this pattern in political form: when social and economic problems seem difficult, they turn government into an imagined power capable of suspending ordinary limits.

What the sorcerer is to primitive man, the government is to many modern men.

This is the essay’s main thesis in miniature. Sennholz is not saying that modern people openly believe in magic; rather, they preserve magical expectations while dressing them in rational language. Political superstition survives by calling itself policy, theory, planning, or social concern.

In order to justify his political sorcery, he searches for "reasons" and devises sophisticated "theories."

The essay then moves through cases in which, for Sennholz, political language conceals causal responsibility. Inflation is his first example. Governments ritually “declare war” on inflation, blame prices and businessmen, and impose controls, while the real cause lies in monetary expansion and deficit finance. The “magic” consists in diverting attention from official action to visible market symptoms.

The magic completely obscures the fact that inflation is a willful policy conducted by the monetary authorities for the benefit of legislators, regulators, and their favorite beneficiaries.

Unemployment receives the same treatment. Public authorities hold conferences, announce employment programs, and denounce joblessness, yet pass minimum-wage laws, raise labor costs, and expand incentives not to work. Sennholz’s argument is that political remedies often intensify the conditions they claim to cure, because they ignore price coordination and voluntary exchange.

They create numerous incentives for idleness and then look askance at chronic unemployment.

The foreign-trade section extends the critique to protectionism. Politicians cast foreigners as exploiters or unfair competitors, then restrict imports in the name of protecting domestic workers. For Sennholz, this is another enchantment: the public is taught to fear exchange, though barriers reduce goods and leave both sides poorer.

Spellbound by ancient myths, legislators and regulators limit imports and promote exports.

A further target is Keynesian economics. Sennholz presents Keynesianism as the most influential modern form of “magic economics,” because it attributes creative economic power to public spending and planning. The essay’s objection is not merely technical but conceptual: it rejects the idea that state expenditure can be treated as an independent generator of wealth rather than as a transfer or redirection of resources.

To them, government is the great stabilizer and equalizer and government spending the great generator of economic income and wealth.

The essay’s sharpest conceptual move comes in its critique of the word “government.” Sennholz argues that the term has become reverential, abstract, and morally charged; it hides the actual people and coercive offices through which policy operates. His preferred vocabulary is deliberately disenchanting: instead of “government,” he names legislators, regulators, tax collectors, controllers, policemen, judges, and jailers. This linguistic shift is central to the essay’s method, because it strips political authority of mystical benevolence.

In a sense, it is god on earth.

The relevance of the essay lies in this demystifying strategy. Sennholz treats modern interventionism less as a set of isolated policy errors than as a recurring habit of mind: the hope that coercive authority can overcome scarcity, economic law, and human limitation by decree. The conclusion is sober rather than optimistic. Political magic cannot be defeated merely by pointing out facts once, because its power lies in irrational confidence supported by respectable-sounding theories.

Thriving in the darkness of irrationality, political magic is in a sense invulnerable to reason.

Yet the essay ends by defending persistent criticism as the only antidote: expose the theories, name the agents, and reconnect policy effects to policy causes. Its enduring significance is therefore rhetorical as well as economic. Sennholz asks readers to hear “government” not as a benevolent abstraction but as organized coercion, and to judge political promises by the real incentives and actions they set in motion.