The archive.

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.

March 1946: price controls, food shortages, labor-management strife, and the global prestige of socialist planning form the backdrop against which Leonard Read founded the Foundation for Economic Education. Writing from the vantage of its fiftieth anniversary, Sennholz remembers FEE not as one nonprofit among many but as an 'intellectual fort of resistance,' a counter-institution built for civilizational recovery. He gathers its personnel into a division of intellectual labor—F. A. Harper, Paul Poirot, Bettina Bien Greaves, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt—and describes The Freeman as nonpartisan argument standing above the fray of politics. Lasting political change, he holds, flows downstream from patient intellectual work. The America of the 1990s, less captive to planning than that of the 1940s, vindicates the long labor of economic education—though it had first to unlearn much of what it thought it knew.

For five decades, FEE has been the Rock of Gibraltar of sound economics and moral principle, of devotion to individual freedom and the private property order, in a turbulent and dangerous world.

Charity, plunder, and politics can move identical sums between the same hands; what separates them, Sennholz begins, is motive and means. From that premise he develops Machiavelli less as a historical figure than as a conceptual type—the politician who subordinates truth and justice to advantage, treating winning as superior to moral consistency. American democracy, in his account, does not abolish this Machiavellianism but democratizes the struggle over spoils: officials flatter senior citizens, minorities, women, farmers, and workers with entitlements while shifting costs onto less decisive voters, bound always to the short horizon of reelection. Government, he insists, cannot make everyone prosperous; it can only take from one to give to another, consuming much of the sum in the apparatus of transfer. The essay ends with departments recast as warring advocates of partial constituencies, enemies of the common interest.

They think of the next election, rather than of the next generation.

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.

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.

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.

A man may mourn his neighbor's death and then approve the estate taxes that fall on the widow and children; he may love his own children and still support the public debt and inflation that shift burdens onto the next generation. Around such contradictions Sennholz builds a moral indictment of democratic interest politics. People honor one standard in private life, condemning theft, fraud, and coercion, and quietly suspend it in the voting booth, where the same acts acquire legal form through taxation, privilege, and majority rule. His ethical rule is one of consistency: what one may not rightly do as an individual does not become righteous because done collectively, legally, or by vote. Liberty, bounded by the equal freedom of others, is not permission to invade another person's life, labor, or property.

Politics is strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

To most people inflation means rising prices in the shops, but this 1997 commentary insists the word has escaped that definition. The financial boom of the mid-1990s, Sennholz argues, is itself an inflation, one lodged in stocks and real estate rather than consumer goods and therefore invisible to journalists who read stable price indexes as proof of a Fed under control. What makes it different is its mechanism: the money stock has stayed relatively stable, while low rates, brokerage cash-management accounts, money-market funds, credit cards, and global dollar holdings accelerate the velocity and leverage of existing balances, leaving the system awash in liquidity. Sennholz sets the episode beside America in the 1920s and Japan in the 1980s, calm consumer prices over overextended speculation, and warns that the credit structure beneath such a boom must eventually break.

The Fed has not significantly increased the stock of money but managed to accelerate its use.

Stepping down in May 1997 after a decade as president of the Foundation for Economic Education, Sennholz turns his farewell into an unsentimental study of how a think tank survives. The libertarian educator, he insists, cannot live by doctrine alone: the chief executive wears two hats, scholar and businessman, and a charitable foundation is healthiest when it competes not only for the donor dollar but for the customer dollar. He reports the rejuvenation of his tenure, seventy-nine new books in five years, computerization, and a broadened Freeman carried worldwide after Soviet communism fell, and marks the 1996 Golden Jubilee with Margaret Thatcher as its high point. His succession agenda dwells on a stubborn obstacle: academic credentials function as licenses, and liberty-minded teachers are too often kept from the classroom. Mary Sennholz's counsel supplies the memoir's moral center.

"Honor can only be purchased by your deeds. You cannot quit with honor."

A budget declared balanced while the national debt keeps climbing is not fiscal discipline but disguised borrowing—the deception Sennholz sets out to expose in this March 1997 commentary. The trick, he argues, lies in spending Social Security and other trust-fund surpluses to finance current outlays, leaving future claimants government IOUs rather than assets; the Balanced Budget Amendment then before Congress would only legitimate the practice. His larger target is the transfer state itself, with Social Security as its institutional center and model. Against it he sets concrete exits: privatizing welfare functions, freezing transfer spending to shrink the system over time, and granting the young and conscientious objectors a right to withdraw—for a transfer scheme that permits its victims to leave ceases to redistribute by force at all.

They want us to believe that the annual budget deficits are declining although the national debt continues to soar.

Output rising, unemployment and inflation falling, stock prices soaring, politicians claiming credit—the late-1990s expansion had economists reaching for superlatives. Sennholz reads it instead as a credit-driven bubble in the lineage of the 1920s United States, 1980s Japan, and the 1997 Asian crisis, its danger masked precisely because consumer prices stayed stable. Conventional aggregates like M1 and M2, he contends, miss the real fuel: bank credit expansion, loan securitization, derivatives, offshore banking, the yen carry trade, and foreign central banks recycling current-account dollars into U.S. Treasuries. Rising equity values signal mergers and buybacks, not capital formation. Written in December 1997, the essay anticipates later debates over asset inflation and global imbalances, and predicts that when the bubble bursts officials will blame speculators and foreigners rather than the monetary order.

All these symptoms do not make a “new era economy” but rather a highly vulnerable “bubble economy.”

Rome, the Hapsburg monarchy, the Soviet collapse—Sennholz ranges across empires to argue that ethnic and racial diversity is not inherently destabilizing. Plurality turns dangerous, he contends, only when political institutions abandon equal liberty for group favoritism, redistribution, or cultural fragmentation. Rome flourished through toleration, citizenship, and law until military centralization made it a garrison state; the Hapsburg polyglot dynasty endured through impartial reform until nationalism dissolved it. Lacking common ancestry, Americans depend instead on a shared system—Judeo-Christian values, equality before the law, individual freedom, economic opportunity—and it is this framework, he warns, that multiculturalism and the public schools erode when they teach citizens to understand themselves through separate group grievances rather than the principles that unite them.

Diversity in freedom makes for social peace, economic productivity, and great prosperity.