The archive.

Free trade is the banner NAFTA raises, Sennholz argues, and then quietly lowers with side accords, labor provisions, environmental restrictions, and a thicket of regulation. This 1994 essay treats the agreement not as liberalization but as managed trade dressed in liberal rhetoric. Against popular fears of mass relocation, he insists that firms follow productivity, infrastructure, and institutions rather than nominal wages, and that Mexico remains burdened by corruption, union militancy, the unproductive ejido system, and PEMEX oil kept in political hands. Economic law, he maintains, will override political design, but the agreement itself cannot improve business conditions on either side of the border. What it most resembles, he concludes, is mercantilist policy—promoting exports while limiting imports and empowering commissions and bureaucrats.

NAFTA officially raises the beautiful flag of free trade and peaceful exchange, but then quietly takes it down again with numerous qualifications, regulations, side accords, sequels, and supplements.

The official price of crime is radically understated, this 1994 essay contends, because statistics count offenses while missing fear, lost production, defensive spending, and the diversion of police and courts toward regulatory enforcement. Sennholz sorts illegality into three kinds—violent crime, property crime, and violations of government rules—arguing that the third often criminalizes mutually beneficial exchange and manufactures the caseloads that agencies then cite to demand larger budgets. American crime control, he estimates, exceeds $150 billion a year yet grows more expensive without producing security. Fear itself becomes a social tax that suppresses movement, work, and investment. Behind the inefficiency he sees a welfare-transfer state that, by normalizing coercive redistribution, teaches private criminals to imitate its logic on a smaller scale.

A fearful society is a poor society that is crippled by fear and burdened by high costs of defense.

To retire into idle leisure while still capable of work is, in this brief essay of moral economy, a form of waste—of human energy and of the capital that future generations will need. Sennholz opposes a “trough philosophy,” in which retirees draw down private savings or public benefits, to an “accountability philosophy” that treats continued productivity and capital preservation as duties owed to one's descendants. Every consumption of capital, he argues, diminishes society's productivity regardless of who does it. Drawing on Austrian capital theory and a Protestant-inflected discipline, he holds up Ludwig von Mises, who taught and wrote until death, as his model of productive old age, and indicts Social Security and Medicare for sustaining a leisure class at the expense of active producers.

Fortunately for the world, the great men among us retire only when death calls them.

As the federal debt crosses the $5 trillion mark, Sennholz calls it bankruptcy already underway—not the legal kind that liquidates a debtor, but a moral and monetary default achieved through inflation, taxation, and currency debasement. He dismantles the comforting slogans: “we owe it to ourselves” erases the real distinction between creditor and debtor and ignores the foreign institutions holding much of the debt, while the promise that future income will offset present borrowing founders on the fact that deficits produce political claims, not productive assets. His core Austrian move treats debt as a present reallocation of scarce capital: government borrowing consumes real savings, lowers productivity, and rewards industries tied to public spending, leaving later generations a weakened, politicized economy along with the interest bill.

Debts, follies, and crimes are generally mixed together; the federal debt is a $5 trillion mixture.

When Nixon suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold in August 1971, most observers saw a diplomatic problem to be solved by renegotiated parities. Sennholz reads the collapse of Bretton Woods as something deeper: evidence that money managed by governments is inherently unstable. Writing from an Austrian, market-centered standpoint, he derives exchange rates not from national aggregates but from individual cash balances, expectations, and purchasing power, and contrasts the classical gold-coin standard—an international order requiring no treaties, since coins were valued by weight—with a managed system that concentrated discretion in central banks. Balance-of-payments crises, he argues, are simply people fleeing depreciating money; the dollar's fall traced to domestic deficits and credit expansion, not foreign malice. His remedy is a return to gold, beyond the reach of political manufacture.

Market forces tend to establish the parity between the purchasing powers and thus their exchange ratios.

Envy, once it enters politics, becomes for Sennholz the emotional engine of coercive redistribution, demagoguery, and social conflict. This 1995 “Notes” essay distinguishes natural human inequality—of ability, industry, and productivity—from the equal legal standing that lets unequal persons cooperate in peace. The demand for equal results, he argues, is not justice but force, requiring endless taxation and confiscation because the inequalities it targets keep reappearing; it opens the door to demagogues who convert resentment into electoral power. Against this he sets the market order as an envy-free arrangement in which income tracks service rendered. The deeper danger is capital consumption: confiscatory taxation, welfare transfers, and deficit spending divert savings from future production, pitting present beneficiaries against taxpayers and against generations not yet born.

All kinds of problems are solvable except those which spring from envy.

Strip the language of national defense from protectionism and what remains, Sennholz argues, is raw political force: the power to tax one man to subsidize another's business. This 1995 essay treats tariffs, import restrictions, and export promotion as a recurring alliance of fear, interest-group pressure, and economic fallacy shared by old mercantilism and new labor-nationalism alike. The claim that barriers preserve jobs he answers by showing they lower productivity and purchasing power, destroying more employment than they create. The “cheap foreign labor” argument collapses, he notes, once the fiercest agitation targets high-wage Japan and Germany. And the trade deficit with Japan reflects not foreign unfairness but American policy—low saving, capital taxation, and federal deficits—since Japanese dollar earnings flowed back into U.S. Treasury bonds.

Every form of protectionism builds on raw political force.

Postwar Europe, in Sennholz's telling, defended itself against communism without any confidence in its own inheritance, gripped by a general mood of despair over an order that seemed to have failed of its own accord. This April 1996 commemorative essay reconstructs the climate in which the Foundation for Economic Education arose and advances a pointed revisionist thesis: the classical liberal order had not collapsed but had been smothered and dismantled by political authority. Sennholz gathers the scattered remnant that resisted, from Orwell and disillusioned socialists to Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson and Mises's Human Action, and links Marxian planning to Keynesian deficit finance as forms of the same drift toward political supremacy. He closes by reading election-year credit expansion and permanent deficits as a political business cycle of manipulation and debt transfer.

It was the surrender of freedom that provoked the return of autocracy and tyranny.

Prosperity, employment, stable prices, a clean environment, care for the disadvantaged: on such ends most Americans agree, this compact 1996 essay argues, and the bitter quarrels begin only over means. Sennholz sorts the combatants into activists who would mandate, tax, and print money and those who would trust property and exchange, and traces the split to incompatible theories of social order. Against the Marxian conflict dogma, which he sees extended into later idioms of race, gender, and generational struggle, he sets Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and a harmony thesis grounded not in sentiment but in the higher productivity of cooperation and the division of labor. The closing turn is ethical: rights and justice cannot be reduced to votes, and a majority can violate them as surely as any private actor.

Evil is evil; it is none the better for being committed on behalf of the majority.

By the mid-1990s measured consumer-price inflation had fallen to roughly 2.5 percent across the developed world, and mainstream economists were ready to declare the long battle won. Sennholz accepts the statistics and rejects the conclusion. Reduced price indexes, he argues in this August 1996 note, say nothing about the inflationary institutions that remain intact: the central bank's legal monopoly over money, legal-tender laws, welfare-state deficit finance, and the paper-dollar standard completed when the United States cut its last gold tie in 1971. Easy credit has not vanished but migrated from consumer goods into securities, leveraged speculation, and soaring stock valuations. So long as legislators and central bankers keep discretionary control of fiat money, he warns, inflationary pressure will surface again in one form or another.

Inflation is not dead but very much alive. It has moved from Main Street to Wall Street.

If imports truly destroyed jobs, Sennholz observes, the vast expansion of American imports after 1950 should have produced permanent mass unemployment, yet living standards rose instead. This July 1996 essay dismantles three explanations of joblessness: the Marxian reserve army of labor, the Keynesian shortfall of spending, and the protectionist charge that low-wage foreigners displace domestic workers. Employment, he insists, is a phenomenon of productivity and cost; jobs are not a fixed national stock that foreign sellers can drain but arise wherever labor can be employed productively at a price buyers will bear. Unemployment thus signals maladjustment rather than market failure, as training and specialization drift away from what commerce actually values. International competition disciplines sellers and steers labor and capital toward better uses, while tariffs merely shelter high-cost producers and raise prices.

Free trade is fair trade; those who deny it to others do not deserve it for themselves.

What affluent Americans call a sweatshop, Sennholz contends, the workers inside may hail as an opportunity shop, and what looks from above like a slave wage may be, by local measure, a living one. This adversarial November 1996 essay reinterprets foreign factory labor as a step out of worse deprivation rather than its cause, insisting that wages and working conditions rise with the stock of capital invested per worker, not with legislation or union command. The same productivity, not reformist law, once freed Western women and children from the early mills. Campaigns against child labor abroad, he argues, court unintended consequences and often mask ordinary protectionism dressed in humanitarian sentiment. He defends the post-Cold War order of expanding trade and multinational production as an exchange from which both foreign workers and American export industries visibly gain.

They are old-fashioned protectionists who seek to disguise their odious intentions in the sweet talk of great love for children.