The archive.

Voluntary ethnic pluralism is one thing; the doctrine Sennholz calls contemporary multiculturalism is another, and his essay drives a wedge between them. Inherited languages, customs, and religions freely transmitted he defends without reservation; what he attacks is a creed that elevates race and gender above universal moral standards—'multi-morality,' he renames it, a counter-culture aimed at the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western society. Grounding morality in the Ten Commandments read as restraints on evil rather than a program of state virtue, he traces group-defined ethics through Marxism's class morality and Nazism's racial sovereign to present-day identity politics, arguing that each rejects any transcendent source of right. There is no black justice or feminine justice, he insists, only justice. The essay ends on providential confidence: immoral orders are self-destructive, and only the moral will endure.

There is one moral law for all humanity.

Soviet communism's collapse did not kill socialist habits of thought—so runs the diagnostic core of this companion commemoration of the Foundation for Economic Education, founded in 1946 against a consensus that debated only who should manage economic life, not whether government should. Sennholz recovers Leonard Read's conviction that education stands prior to politics and defines 'freedom education' as moral as much as economic: training in self-reliance and responsibility, not merely instruction in prices and property. His sharpest theoretical claim holds socialism and welfare-statism to be cousins of one family—both politicize economic life, weaken property, and replace contract with public command, breeding a 'conflict system' of rival claimants, welfare debt, and civic fracture. The remedy, he argues, cannot come from government schooling, itself part of the structure, but from principled private education outside politics.

It cares more for the truth than for popularity, for truth is its own witness.

Christian churches have always shaped the economic affairs of their believers, but two modern movements trouble Sennholz precisely because they pursue mercy and justice through political coercion rather than charity: the Social Gospel and liberation theology. Separating ends from means, he grants their humanitarian language while arguing that their programs hand moral authority to legislators, regulators, and expropriating states. Liberation theology, in his reading, smuggles the Marxian doctrine of class struggle and Leninist dependency theory into Christian ethics, then blames Latin American poverty on a capitalism that scarcely exists there, the region's economic life being interventionist and bureaucratic rather than free. Against clerical appeals to equality he sets differences in ability, industry, and responsibility, warning that the rhetoric of justice curdles into a politics of envy. Compassion divorced from economic reasoning, he concludes, becomes an apology for coercion and violence.

While the churchmen are speaking of peace, they are sowing the seeds of violence.

Primitive man invents rites to master dangers he cannot understand; the modern citizen, Sennholz argues, does much the same with the state, attributing magical powers to government whenever reason fails. Moderns do not openly believe in sorcery, but they preserve magical expectations dressed in the language of policy, theory, and planning. He runs the analogy through inflation, a willful monetary policy disguised as a war on rising prices; through unemployment worsened by minimum-wage laws; through protectionism that teaches the public to fear exchange; and through Keynesianism, which credits public spending with generating wealth rather than merely redirecting it. His sharpest move is linguistic: replace the reverential abstraction 'government' with legislators, regulators, tax collectors, judges, and jailers, and its mystical benevolence dissolves. Its power lies in confidence rather than argument, and naming its agents remains the only antidote.

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

The federal government, Sennholz observes, was not always in the health-care business; its legitimate work was defense against foreign aggression and domestic crime, not the forced redistribution of income. From that narrow standard he tracks the cumulative politicization of American medicine, from Truman's proposed national insurance and Eisenhower's Kerr-Mills aid to the decisive year 1965, when Medicare and Medicaid embedded medical care in Social Security financing. His diagnosis is that entitlement follows a logic of escalation: the state promises benefits, then taxes, then regulates eligibility and provider costs, and finally threatens to jail those who withdraw. Spending and regulation do not close the gap between cost and access; they widen it, driving prices to double and treble the inflation rate. The road ends not in abundance but in price controls and rationing, reversible, he insists, only by restoring medicine to voluntary exchange and the Eighth Commandment.

Politicized medicine is a formidable system built on political expedience and public immorality.

Why do whole societies remain trapped in low productivity, short lives, and weak institutions? Sennholz answers that collective poverty springs less from scarce resources than from moral, religious, and political ideas hostile to production, dogmas against saving, investment, private ownership, and monetary gain. Contrasting prosperous nations with Ethiopia, Somalia, and Bangladesh, he insists development is always difficult but never impossible, provided a society abandons inherited teachings that slander the private-property order as exploitation. Capitalism, in his redefinition, is not predation but a moral system resting on truthfulness, reliability, and voluntary cooperation, disciplined by every party's freedom to withdraw. Where theft, confiscation, and envy-driven redistribution are commonplace, communities become economic wastelands, because even the fear of expropriation smothers investment. The wealth of nations, he concludes, is decided finally in the realm of moral imagination.

Moral, social, and economic ideas that guide human action are the key to human well-being. They make all the difference between wealth and poverty.

To raise men and women capable of living peaceably and productively, honest, prudent, courageous, charitable, is for Sennholz the true aim of education, a formative task that state schooling converts into an instrument of political direction financed by compulsion. He reads American schooling historically, from the plural order of church schools, academies, and denominational colleges to the mercantilist, Hegelian, Owenite, and Deweyan currents that recast education as social organization from above, with the Dartmouth College case of 1819 standing as a defense of private institutional rights against state absorption. Public schools, he argues, habituate students to taxation and bureaucracy, dulling their critical sense and normalizing a life of political provision. School choice remains incomplete, he insists, while dissenting parents must still fund the state system through taxes; genuine educational freedom rests on voluntary payment and competitive markets, not coercion.

Government education from kindergarten to the university has paved the way for armies of legislators, regulators, tax collectors, assessors, inspectors, policemen, judges, and jailers.

Everyone, it seems, is suing, workers against employers, patients against doctors, even the weather bureau for failing to predict a storm. From that panorama Sennholz builds a diagnosis: the malpractice and product-liability crises are symptoms of an entitlement culture in which political claims displace private responsibility and ordinary relations turn adversarial. Rising premiums and defensive medicine, some $15 to $30 billion in unneeded tests, drive doctors from obstetrics and urban practice, so patients inherit both cost and scarcity. He refuses the easy scapegoat; patients are not out to get their physicians. The real culprit is ideological: Americans have come to treat rights as enforceable claims to transfers, producing a 'legal medicine' saturated with entitlements, each generating a claimant, a defendant, and an insurer. Behind the tort explosion, he insists, lies not greed but a transfer politics that pits citizen against citizen.

The malpractice crisis that is touching the quick of the professions and the product-liability crisis that is crippling several industries reveal a moral crisis that is putting all free societies in jeopardy.

Sold to the public as insurance, Social Security is in Sennholz's account a coercive political transfer, class legislation that rewards early beneficiaries who drew far more than they paid while loading mounting payroll taxes onto workers and generations yet to come. Born of the New Deal as a full-employment measure that failed, it survived by becoming the most powerful welfare mechanism ever devised, moving trillions from the working population to some thirty million retirees, Medicare included. Every such transfer, he argues, splits society into beneficiaries and the victims forced to bear the cost, breeding a conflict that grows with its size. His remedies aim less at solvency than at honesty: benefit stubs disclosing contributions and payouts, means testing once recipients recover their own money, renewed family responsibility, and freedom to opt out. Reform, he insists, begins by naming the system's true nature.

Politicians love it because it buys votes and re-elections.

Citizens fleeing oppressive taxes into black markets have a public-sector mirror image, and it is the real subject here: the off-budget enterprise, through which officials expand spending and debt beyond any voter's scrutiny. Authorities, boards, corporations, and trusts, formally outside normal government accounting, lack taxing power yet wield vast spending power, borrowing without debt limits or voter approval, monopolizing services, accumulating losses, and passing them to taxpayers. Sennholz walks from municipal airport and sewer authorities to New York, where repeated rejection of bond issues merely prompted the legislature to invent new off-budget entities, and on to federal loan guarantees that redirect private credit. Each device makes the state appear smaller than it is. His warning is constitutional: balanced-budget rules and debt ceilings are futile so long as these legal backdoors let government reorganize its costs out of sight.

The possibilities for concealment, deception, pretext, sophistry, stratagem, and plain trickery are endless.

Historically exhausted, bound up with class conflict, taxation, debt, and monetary debasement, the welfare state may linger a while, Sennholz declares, but not for long. Written after the 1996 federal welfare act, this essay reads that law's devolution to the states, work requirements, and time limits as a partial retreat rather than a genuine reform. Its central move is to shift attention from recipients' incentives to the labor market's legal architecture: even without benefits that discourage work, statutory barriers would still keep the unskilled from being hired. Chief among them is the minimum wage compounded by mandated employment costs, alongside the Davis-Bacon Act, ERISA, and EEOC liability. The result is a self-defeating contradiction, reformers ordering people into jobs while maintaining the laws that price them out. True reform, he concludes, must first dismantle the state's own barriers to work.

The welfare reformers are laboring to roll the welfare stone up the mountain to the barriers they themselves erected.

Do not make money your god, an old Christian saying warns, for it will plague you like the devil, to which Sennholz adds that placing politicians in charge of money plagues worse still. American banking, he argues, has been turned from private intermediation into an arm of the state by cumulative regulation: the Federal Reserve Act, the 1933 gold confiscation, FDIC and FSLIC deposit guarantees, and a myriad of later statutes. His method is inversion, terms of protection recast as instruments of control. Bank 'secrecy' under the Bank Secrecy Act now means concealed reporting to the authorities, and the Community Reinvestment Act supplants creditworthiness with race, gender, and national origin. Compliance costs, he predicts, will force mergers and concentration, hollow out the character of the profession, and drain capital markets toward the conditions of poor countries.

Men of character, integrity, and independent judgment will give way to two types which thrive in all kinds of command systems: the servants and bondsmen who obey all orders and the villains who corrupt all orders.