The archive.

Unemployment, on this account, is not an inevitable calamity but a labor surplus manufactured by law - the predictable result of wage rates held above the level at which willing workers could be hired. Treating labor like any other market factor whose price clears supply and demand, Sennholz converts the moral language of jobs policy into price theory and turns it against the reformers, accusing minimum wages, the Davis-Bacon Act, benefit mandates, unemployment compensation, and union privilege of causing the very misery they claim to cure. He roots sustainable wages in productivity and the division of labor rather than political pressure, exposes the racist origins of Davis-Bacon, dismantles the natural-rate doctrine and the Phillips curve, and closes by arraigning the college textbooks - Samuelson's above all - that teach Keynesian orthodoxy as settled truth.

If they are set above the market rate they create surpluses, called unemployment.

Strip away the reverent abstraction, and a government reduces to identifiable persons - legislators, tax collectors, judges, policemen - exercising coercive command over other people. This brief note turns that deflation into a libertarian critique of political worship, attacking the habit of treating the state as a sacred, benevolent being to be petitioned and idolized. For such command, Sennholz argues, no obvious moral foundation exists: those entrusted with protecting natural rights have repeatedly hardened into rulers, oligarchs, and tyrants. He sets Jefferson's jealousy of power against the modern appetite for state benefits, entitlements, and public works, in which questions of right dissolve into struggles over distribution. Political power, he concludes, feeds on its spoils and dies only when its victims refuse to be despoiled.

No man has ever seen a government.

Knowledge and wisdom are not the same: a person may command many facts and still misuse them, for wisdom is the moral use of knowledge, not its mere possession. This short essay in moral political economy carries that distinction into economics, where theory can judge whether means suit chosen ends - prosperity, employment, health care - but never pronounces on the ends themselves. Most political quarrels, Sennholz observes, are disputes over means, not goals; communists, socialists, and fascists too promise prosperity while choosing destructive means. Yet economic wisdom refuses the value-neutral posture and asks whether a policy rests on justice or on vice, condemning forced redistribution as an attempt to steal by political vote. Its closing maxims defend thrift, self-reliance, and refusal of debt laid on future generations: wisdom, he writes, begins at home.

We cannot progress individually or nationally by spending more than we are earning. Thrift is an essential condition of all economic progress.

Politics once demanded judgment about law and principle; it has decayed, this polemic charges, into a science of self-interest and logrolling - the trading of votes and influence to pass laws that favor organized claimants on the treasury. Sennholz anatomizes the machinery of capture: lobbyists, pressure groups, and party hierarchies through which even corporate representatives seek advantage rather than defend free markets. The compassionate politician draws his sharpest scorn, a figure who wages theatrical wars on poverty and disease with other people's money, dressing legal plunder as benevolence. Invoking Tocqueville's warning about majorities voting themselves largesse, he treats such men as immune to economic reasoning and therefore answerable only on moral ground. His remedy is not another bargain but withdrawal: cease worshiping political saviors, and lead others by walking upright.

Special interests, grasping, self-serving, narrow private interests, are the moving force for much of government activity today.

Prosperity, in this compact Austrian essay, is nothing but accumulated productive capital — tools, machinery, inventories, and the savings that sustain them — and a nation can enlarge its consumption while quietly devouring the base on which future wages depend. Sennholz traces that hidden erosion through progressive taxation, deficit spending, inflation, regulation, and union privilege, each converting productive capital into present consumption. Estate taxes confiscate working businesses rather than luxury; inflation lets firms mistake nominal profits for real gains and pay their taxes out of capital; artificially cheap credit seeds the malinvestment a bust later writes off for good. His warning is as political as economic: once citizens grow accustomed to benefits, a shrinking base provokes louder demands rather than reform. The remedy is austere — sound money, lower taxes, market pricing, and restored thrift.

Government spending seems to be an all-purpose remedy for economic and social ills, the key to important political ends.

The entitlement society, on Sennholz's diagnosis, is a conflict society - and the 1993 Clinton health-care plan is merely its latest battlefield. Reading universal coverage as one more episode in a redistributive war running from the New Deal through Kerr-Mills, Medicare, Medicaid, and catastrophic care, he argues that each intervention manufactures the deficiencies that justify the next, driving toward comprehensive command. The proposed National Health Board becomes the emblem of that drift, a body empowered to define benefits, cap spending, and discipline prices with the federal purse and federal judges behind it. His sharpest economic point targets the fiction of costless employer mandates: whatever the law assigns to employers, workers finally pay through lower wages, higher prices, or lost jobs. Entitlement politics, he insists, converts social problems into permanent struggles over government force.

In the end, every worker will pay one hundred percent of his insurance costs.

Opponents of nationalized medicine, this introduction to Politicized Medicine warns, usually lose before they begin, because they accept government control everywhere else and protest only when it reaches their own profession. Sennholz presses for consistency: if public education, licensing, subsidies, and welfare are legitimate, health care cannot be exempt, since the difference between partial and comprehensive state provision is one of scale, not kind. He attacks the doctrine of social rights as disguised claims on the labor and property of others, turning cooperation into conflict as each declared benefit imposes a matching burden. His closing turn indicts professional licensing and accreditation not as neutral quality controls but as state-backed shelters from competition, for once a profession accepts the state as author of its credentials, it concedes the state's authority to author a national health system too.

They yield the very premise on which all tyranny rests: the right of some individuals to control others.

Environmental law, in this 1993 essay, has quietly become a vehicle for political control over private economic life. Beginning with NEPA's environmental-impact requirement and the EPA, Sennholz argues that what looks like procedural prudence is in fact a standing license for federal agencies to supervise investment, construction, and enterprise through permits and purse strings. The visible costs of cleanup, he contends, are the smallest part; the real burden hides in delayed projects, lost jobs, higher prices, and diminished living standards that never appear as a single budget line. As overt socialism retreats, he claims, global-warming and ozone alarms hand the old regulatory impulse a new name - the production czar now is an environmental czar - and, lacking market prices, environmental planning repeats the socialist calculation problem: command without coordination, waste dressed as rescue.

Without the help of market prices, which reflect the value judgments of all the participants in the economic process, he cannot calculate, that is, rationally compare the value of input with that of output.

The savings-and-loan collapse is usually blamed on private greed or reckless deregulation; Sennholz reads it instead as the predictable failure of a politically designed housing-finance cartel. Tracing the thrifts from voluntary building societies through federal chartering, the Home Loan Bank System, and flat-rate deposit insurance, he argues that Washington restricted entry, socialized risk, and forced institutions to borrow short while lending long on favored mortgages. When 1970s inflation lifted market rates above regulated ceilings, the protected structure buckled. The 1989 Reform and Rescue Act, in his account, merely renamed agencies and shifted losses to taxpayers while prosecuting managers and sparing the legislators who built the system. His remedy is abolition: liquidate insolvent firms through bankruptcy and privatize deposit insurance entirely.

Federal deposit insurance subsidizes risk in direct proportion to the degree of risk taken.

Minimum-wage floors, union seniority rules, and the Davis-Bacon Act present themselves as worker protections; here they are recast as barriers that price the least-skilled out of employment. Writing in a classical-liberal register, Sennholz separates the inequalities that arise from differing service and productivity in free markets from those manufactured by coercive policy. He concedes the historical weight of Jim Crow and the real gains of civil-rights law, yet insists the remaining obstacle is state-created: a legal wage floor forbids hiring the low-productivity beginner, seniority layoffs reproduce old exclusions, and prevailing-wage mandates he traces to racial protectionism. His remedy joins anti-racist language to anti-interventionist economics—wages and jobs set by productivity rather than statute or union rank.

The Act was spawned by racism and continues to sow the evils of racism.

Lovers of liberty, Sennholz observes, are strangely prone to despair, reading every new regulation and tax as evidence that freedom is losing irrevocably. This short essay answers that mood on two fronts. Historically, it refuses to romanticize a past that brought world wars, mass murder, and totalitarian brutality far exceeding present policy disputes. Politically, it distinguishes trend from destiny: the New Deal, Great Society, and Reagan-Bush expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are real, yet history, he insists, never moves in a straight line. Reading the late twentieth century as a worldwide retreat from socialism, he grounds his optimism in a Misesian faith that ideas shape policy and that a habitual pessimist can never lead the way toward reform.

Fortunately, history never moves in a straight line.

When Prime Minister Chernomyrdin announced that “the period of market romanticism is over,” Sennholz read it as a confession that reform had been politically defeated. This 1994 commentary examines Russia's stalled post-Soviet transition, where officials favoring “stability” propped up state conglomerates through subsidies, central-bank credit, and inflationary finance. Small shops and service firms flourish under new private titles, he grants, but legal ownership has not yet become economic control, and the large enterprises still look to the state to preserve unproductive employment. Currency confiscations, price controls, and indexation he dismisses as futile inflationist maneuvers. The verdict is uncompromising: no durable middle ground exists between capitalism and socialism, and partial reform will end in monetary collapse before genuine recovery becomes possible.

The failure once again will demonstrate that there is no durable middle-of-the-road between capitalism and socialism and that any attempt at building one invariably will lead to hyperinflation and chaos.