2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler laid out his 1968 tax-reform agenda—exempt the poor, tax high incomes shielded by preferences, revisit estate and gift duties, curb tourists' spending abroad—Sennholz read compassion as compulsion. His counter-move is to redefine "the rich" not as idle hoarders but as businessmen and investors whose saving builds the factories and stores that employ the poor; to tax their capital, he argues, is to consume the very fund on which rising wages depend. He defends municipal-bond exemption as a constitutional shield for state borrowing, treats a proposed seventy-seven-percent estate levy as either demagoguery or socialism, and reads the curb on foreign travel as a police measure. Invoking Marshall's warning that the power to tax is the power to destroy, he joins economic, constitutional, and civil-libertarian objections to Great Society redistribution.
Taxing Peter to pay Paul has become a respectable way of life with countless pressure groups and their vociferous spokesmen in Congress.
Reform is easy to want in rhetoric and costly to endure in fact—and that gap, Sennholz argues, is why electoral hope so reliably disappoints. Saving the dollar from inflation, he insists, cannot be a mere central-bank adjustment; it is a political willingness to let earlier errors be liquidated. Halting credit expansion would expose years of malinvestment, raise interest rates, depress stocks and bonds, and bring recession—the price of a sound currency. Drawing on Gustave Le Bon, he frames monetary reform as a moral problem before a technical one: laws only express popular ideas, and the public that cheers reform balks at its consequences. Because stabilization also strips unions of the inflationary cover for rigid wages, genuine reform would mean abolishing the National Labor Relations Board and restoring a market in labor—something he doubts any administration would endure.
Monetary stabilization means price stabilization, which is a fatal enemy of labor unions.
The pound was sliding, French reserves draining, and the Group of Ten meeting in emergency session—yet Sennholz reads the 1968-69 turmoil not as a passing squall but as the postwar gold-exchange system nearing collapse. Monetary crisis, his thesis runs, is the international face of domestic inflationism: once de Gaulle decreed wage increases after the strikes of 1968, France had to inflate to make them payable, and rising prices then drove gold and capital abroad. Gold, for Sennholz, is no symbolic reserve but the disciplinary mechanism that exposes monetary mismanagement. He groups Britain, America, and France as inflationary debtors whose liabilities outrun their bullion, and predicts that devaluation or suspension of gold payments will bring runaway inflation and split the Free World into a dollar bloc and a hard-currency gold camp.
After all, gold is the only international money and, like all other economic goods, tends to flow towards areas where it commands greater purchasing power.
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.
Grant, for the sake of argument, that pollution is grave: the real question, Sennholz proposes, is whether its cause is private enterprise or political control. Answering the charge that pollution proves the failure of capitalism, he reverses the accusation—the state itself is the chief polluter, through public dumps, incinerators, sewer authorities, and navigable waters treated as common property, with Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River as exhibits. Urban smog he traces not to the automobile, which he defends as a genuine gain of enterprise, but to zoning, subsidized roads priced as free goods, and transit strangled by regulation. His deeper move recasts pollution as a failure of property-right enforcement rather than of property itself: where law exempts owners from the costs they impose, harm follows. The remedy is not a new bureaucracy but tort liability, damages, and injunctions—an early manifesto of free-market environmentalism.
As government is the prime polluter of our environment we must call on government to cease and desist.
After Nixon closed the gold window and Bretton Woods came apart, Sennholz set out the Austrian case in its starkest constitutional form: inflation is not high prices but the authorities' creation of new money, and rising prices merely its later, uneven effects. The true target is political power over money, which lets governments tax, borrow, and redistribute without open consent—financing a welfare state whose social programs are too popular to oppose while credit expansion breeds the boom-bust cycle and hidden transfers from savers to debtors. Against this he defends the gold-coin standard as the monetary constitution of a free society, distinguishing it from gold-bullion and gold-exchange arrangements that keep gold's name while centralizing reserves and inviting suspension. His reform is liberal, not technocratic: legal gold ownership, enforceable gold clauses, private minting, and competing monies rather than a parity decreed by the same state that destroyed convertibility.
It is not money, as is sometimes said, but the depreciation of money — the cruel and crafty destruction of money — that is the root of many evils.
Can a growing economy outrun its supply of gold? The objection sounds practical, but Sennholz treats it as a conceptual confusion useful to governments seeking elastic finance. His reply separates money from wealth: people who demand more money usually mean more goods and capital, and multiplying units creates neither—any quantity of gold can serve as a medium of exchange, since fewer units simply gain purchasing power and more units lose it. The belief in the monetary needs of business, he argues, already concedes that some authority should manage money, a dogma Keynesians and monetarists share while quarreling only over method. Turning to the charge that mining gold is wasteful, he makes the law of costs a monetary virtue: gold's expensive production guards its value, whereas paper's negligible cost exposes fiat money to depreciation, redistribution, and the political incentives that keep the presses running.
There is no shortage of gold today and there has been no such shortage in the past.
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.
Marx and Engels demanded the abolition of inheritance, and in John W. Robbins's framing that demand hovers over America's federal estate and gift taxes—the subject Sennholz dissects as a central symptom of the fiscal state. His argument is chiefly economic: death duties consume capital, not luxury hoards, since large fortunes are mostly farms, factories, inventories, and business organizations that serve consumers. Tracing the levy from temporary wartime measures to the permanent 1916 estate tax and its climb toward seventy-seven percent, he reads its survival as moralized resentment rather than fiscal necessity, nourished by Henry George, institutionalism, and progressive reform. Both predecessor and successor bear it—the one altering saving, risk, and succession in anticipation, the other forced to liquidate productive assets, with widows, family firms, and farms as casualties. Inflation silently compounds the damage, and progressive death taxation, he concludes, breeds class rigidity rather than equality.
Inflation and tax progression are pushing all estates towards the top rate of taxation.
Between the Depression and the Deutsche Mark of 1948, the mark was destroyed a second time—and Sennholz, in this 1978 lecture, insists the destruction was political, not merely monetary. Nazi full employment after 1933 he grants as fact but reinterprets as coerced cost-cutting: unions abolished, wages frozen, and deficits disguised through special intermediaries issuing discountable bills. As the Reichsbank was subordinated and Schacht fell, wartime finance proved his central point—that inflation need not first appear as rising official prices. Rationing, price controls, and prosecutions defended posted prices while money surpluses fed black markets, hoarding, and substitute monies, the American cigarette emerging as a more honest currency than state fiat. The 1948 reform he judges ambivalently: it worked, he argues, only because Ludwig Erhard simultaneously abolished controls—proof that honest money depends on free exchange and property rights, not expert currency management.
No central bank can safeguard the currency from the inflationary expenditures of government.
As old as government itself, the hidden economy springs, in this 1984 pamphlet, from human nature choosing among the alternatives that taxation and regulation leave open. Sennholz's first move is to separate the underground producer from the criminal underworld: the latter preys on persons and property, the former supplies wanted goods and services outside official permission, reporting, or taxation. Minimum wages, overtime mandates, building codes, licensing, union privileges, taxi medallions, and Social Security earnings limits all price willing workers out of lawful jobs, so informal work becomes a labor market for people whom law has excluded, students, retirees, moonlighting teachers, gypsy cabs, barter networks, undocumented field hands. Even the unemployment rate, he shows, dissolves once hidden workers misreport themselves idle. The verdict is libertarian: the underground is no anomaly but the shadow cast by intervention itself.
There is no doubt that the underground economy is essentially an employment phenomenon. Where government causes disemployment the underground offers ample opportunities for employment. It offers jobs to the officially unemployable.
A 1984-85 high-school debate resolution proposing federal employment for every employable poor citizen gives Sennholz his foil, and his answer inverts its premise: government is not the cure for unemployment but a leading cause. He first contests the category of American poverty, arguing that an income-threshold definition confuses relative inequality with destitution and points to homeownership, savings, appliances, and cars among households counted poor. Employment, he then insists, is a price-and-cost phenomenon: taxes, mandates, union privileges, minimum wages, and Federal Reserve boom-bust cycles raise the cost of hiring until workers whose output cannot cover it are priced out. Business, not the state, is the genuine source of jobs, since government has no productive fund of its own and must finance make-work through taxation, borrowing, or inflation. To hand that state the role of employer of last resort, he warns, only expands dependency while eroding the production that funds it.
To make government their employer of last resort is to put the culprit in charge and urge him to continue his transgressions.