The archive.

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.

To the ordinary citizen the four-trillion-dollar federal debt feels as remote as another galaxy, and that indifference is exactly what lets it grow. Sennholz treats the debt as consumed wealth, a mortgage on the future, and a source of social conflict, then asks why Congress incurs it so readily. His answer reinterprets the two-party system as a functional three: a Parochial Party chasing district spending, a Vocational Party serving organized producer and occupational interests, and a small Consumer Party defending open markets, low prices, and the dispersed public against coercive redistribution. Concentrated beneficiaries speak louder than scattered consumers, which is why redistribution flows to electorally powerful blocs. The critique is public-choice in structure but moral in language: reelection incentives, he argues, have displaced political conscience.

There are 18.3 million civil servants with more than 30 million dependents living—and some feasting—on the taxes they extract.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

When the dollar slid against the mark and yen in the mid-1990s, the political reflex was to blame the Bundesbank, Japan, and speculators. Sennholz redirects the causality homeward: a weak dollar, he argues, is the endogenous product of Treasury deficits and Federal Reserve credit creation, its central mechanism the monetization of federal debt. Bond purchases supply banks with reserves, deficits crowd out productive investment, and present political consumption is charged to future generations as capital erodes. Rejecting the Keynesian case for monetary ease and distrusting official inflation figures produced by the very authorities inflating, this compact monetary polemic reframes a currency-market event as a crisis of the American fiscal-monetary nexus—one that electoral pressure for low rates makes unlikely to correct.

The dollar weakness is no foreign phenomenon; it is an American calamity with its roots in Washington.

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.