Hans F. Sennholz, “Counting Our Blessings” — Summary

This short 1995 political-economic commentary is a single-authored essay. Sennholz writes in a comparative, polemical mode: he begins from libertarian dissatisfaction with American public policy, then turns outward to Canada, Mexico, Britain, Germany, and Japan in order to argue that Americans, despite justified complaints, remain unusually fortunate. The piece is structured as a movement from criticism, to comparison, to guarded optimism.

Sennholz opens by acknowledging the moral energy of criticism. Americans judge their institutions against ideals of “wisdom, righteousness, justice, and liberty,” and therefore see a painful distance between founding principles and modern interventionism. Yet his first conceptual move is to caution against a politics made only of denunciation:

We rarely are mindful that it is easier to destroy than to build up.

The essay’s central contrast is between ideals and actual alternatives. Sennholz does not deny the growth of the American state; indeed, he describes the twentieth-century welfare-regulatory order as a betrayal of the Founders and a “politicization” of ordinary life. His libertarian premise is clear:

As political command and coercion encompass our lives, individual freedom is diminished.

But the essay’s thesis is comparative rather than utopian. The United States looks flawed when measured against liberty in principle, but enviable when measured against neighboring and allied societies. Thus Sennholz shifts from internal lament to international comparison:

If we compare our conditions with those of all other nations around the globe, we are tempted to sing about America, the beautiful.

The country-by-country survey gives the argument its structure. Canada represents the stagnating welfare state: high taxation, transfer programs, unemployment, deficits, weakened currency, deteriorating nationalized healthcare, and a growing underground economy. Mexico illustrates the connection between political disorder and economic hardship: one-party dominance, corruption, inflation, currency collapse, and mass migration toward the United States. Britain, once associated with financial strength, appears burdened by unemployment, inflation, taxation, borrowing, and a diminished pound.

Germany receives a more complex treatment. Sennholz credits the earlier “pure market economy à la Erhard” with postwar recovery, but argues that reunification expanded welfare-state politics into a “double-barreled” system. He treats currency union and mandated wage parity as political acts that transferred wealth without generating vitality. Japan, finally, is admired for social order and low crime, but Sennholz qualifies its impressive income statistics by noting exchange-rate distortion and the persistence of socialist political strength.

The recurring conceptual move is institutional: Sennholz interprets national outcomes less as accidents than as consequences of taxation, regulation, welfare policy, monetary instability, and political ideology. He reads unemployment, migration, smuggling, currency decline, and public deficits as symptoms of state intervention. The American advantage, then, is not perfection but relative space for enterprise and correction.

The closing passage turns the comparison into a patriotic and political conclusion. America is not exempt from decline, but Sennholz sees in the mid-1990s signs that interventionist habits may be weakening:

The sixty-year-old death grip of government is loosening.

His relevance lies in this tension: the essay is both a warning against the administrative state and a refusal of despair. It asks readers to maintain high standards without losing comparative judgment. Sennholz’s final note is not triumphalist certainty, but conditional hope rooted in the retreat of anti-business politics and organized labor power:

There is new hope that tomorrow will be better yet.