This file is a short single-author polemical essay. Sennholz’s scope is moral, political, and economic: he begins with the ethics of motive, moves through Machiavelli as a model of power politics, and applies that model to American democratic redistribution and bureaucracy. His central thesis is that once government becomes an allocator of income, privileges, and burdens, politics tends to transform coercive taking into public benefaction and to reward deception, pressure, and electoral calculation.
The morality of an action depends upon the motive from which we act.
The opening premise governs the whole essay. Charity, ostentation, plunder, and politics may involve outwardly similar transfers, but their moral character changes with motive and means. Sennholz’s key move is to treat state redistribution not as neutral compassion but as a political conversion of taking into virtue: income seized from some and given to others becomes a route to public acclaim and election.
Politics is a game in which prizes are distributed and burdens are imposed according to skillful use of pressures and counterpressures.
Politics is therefore presented less as public deliberation than as competitive distribution. The Machiavellian element lies in the subordination of truth and justice to advantage. Sennholz invokes Machiavelli not for historical exposition but as a conceptual type: the politician who seeks power by appearances, promises, and expediency, and who treats winning as superior to moral consistency.
He allowed the conclusion that politics has nothing to do with morals, ethics, and religion, and that it is incapable of observing all the rules of Judeo-Christian morality.
From this premise Sennholz turns to American democratic politics. Democracy, in his account, does not eliminate Machiavellianism; it democratizes the struggle over spoils. Politicians flatter beliefs, cultivate public devotion, promise benefits, and distribute entitlements to electorally important groups while shifting costs toward less decisive citizens. Academic and bureaucratic support for an interventionist state intensifies the problem by placing officials at the center of production, prices, and income distribution.
They think of the next election, rather than of the next generation.
This line condenses the essay’s critique of political time. The politician’s horizon is not long-run prosperity or moral order but reelection. Senior citizens, minorities, women, workers, farmers, and other organized constituencies appear as beneficiaries in a system where favors are exchanged for political support. Sennholz’s argument is not merely that politicians are personally corrupt, but that redistribution gives them institutional incentives to become brokers of dependency.
Unfortunately, it is not in the power of government to make everyone more prosperous.
The economic argument follows directly. Government cannot create universal prosperity by transferring income; it can only raise one person’s income by taking from another. Sennholz’s libertarian political economy joins moral condemnation to an efficiency claim: redistribution is not merely coercive, but wasteful, since the apparatus required to administer transfers consumes resources and distorts conduct.
The taking and giving are not even a zero net game; they require an elaborate apparatus of transfer that may consume a large share of the taking.
The essay’s final movement shifts from politicians to agencies. Departments pursue conflicting mandates: labor policy raises costs, agriculture restricts production and raises food prices, commerce limits imports, housing policy seeks low costs while taxes, deficits, and regulation raise them. Government appears not as a rational coordinator but as a set of competing advocates for partial constituencies.
The various departments of government are vocal advocates of special interests and bitter enemies of the common interest.
The work’s relevance lies in this fusion of Machiavellian political psychology with a critique of the transfer state. Sennholz argues that when officials are empowered to direct economic life, public morality is inverted: coercion is renamed compassion, privilege becomes entitlement, and special-interest competition is mistaken for social policy. Its core conceptual movement is from motive to power, from power to redistribution, and from redistribution to institutionalized conflict.
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