1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Americans measure their institutions against wisdom, righteousness, justice, and liberty, and so feel the painful distance between the Founders' principles and modern interventionism - yet measured against the world's actual alternatives, Sennholz argues, they remain unusually fortunate. Moving from lament to comparison, he surveys Canada's stagnating welfare state, Mexico's one-party corruption and currency collapse, Britain's diminished pound, Germany's "double-barreled" post-reunification transfers, and Japan's ordered but statistically distorted prosperity, reading each outcome as a consequence of taxation, regulation, monetary instability, and ideology rather than accident. The American advantage is not perfection but relative room for enterprise and correction. Writing in the mid-1990s, he detects signs that the interventionist habit is weakening as anti-business politics and organized labor lose their grip, and closes on conditional rather than triumphant hope.
The sixty-year-old death grip of government is loosening.
Valuable chiefly as a peaceful procedure for changing rulers, democracy degenerates—on Sennholz's account—the moment majority power slips its constitutional limits and turns toward economic leveling. He strips government of mystique (officials are ordinary people, not a higher caste), grants the state only a protective task, and then draws his central distinction: between mere majoritarianism, which can violate individual rights and destroy the very conditions of its own existence, and constitutional democracy, which shields minorities from the majority's whims. Enforced economic equality, he argues, denies human difference and the division of labor, requiring coercion and exploiting resentment. The essay's moral psychology rests on envy, which it names the engine of demagoguery—turning politics into an art of promises and evasions, and the body politic into a source of strife.
Envy is more irreconcilable than hate. It is the most corroding of all political vices and also a great power in our land. The friends of freedom are content to be envied, but envy not.
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.
Europe's malaise, on Sennholz's February 1997 diagnosis, is self-inflicted—the predictable yield of welfare-state transfers, high mandated fringe benefits, and rigid labor rules dressed up as social progress. His argument is marginalist: labor costs do not cause unemployment until law and policy push total compensation above a worker's productive contribution, at which point the least productive are priced out of work. Comparing labor costs across Germany, France, Italy, Britain, and Spain, he traces stagnation and deficits to the benefit burdens heaped on business in the 1970s and '80s, then dismantles the rival explanations—computer technology as neo-Luddism, cheap foreign labor and immigrants as scapegoating, job-sharing as the fallacy that work is a fixed stock. Europe, he closes, is a warning the United States would be foolish to ignore.
Yet, no matter how high the labor costs may be, they do not cause unemployment provided they do not exceed labor productivity.
Dictators and avowed socialists are the obvious threats to liberty, but Sennholz's polemical diagnosis reaches further: the more durable enemies are the ordinary beneficiaries of coercive systems—government employees, public educators, tax consumers, and the recipients of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, Pell Grants, Social Security, and Medicare—whose incomes depend on the state's expansion. Translating political economy into a moral psychology of dependence, he argues that bureaucracy breeds a class with no interest in deregulation or fiscal restraint, and that when voting follows income interest, democracy becomes an engine of endless redistribution. Yet the essay refuses fatalism. Because these constituencies quarrel among themselves and defend only their own subsidies, no unified anti-liberty coalition can form, and a residual attachment to freedom survives in every human heart.
Power pollutes whatever it touches.
The share of national income flowing to America's top fifth rose sharply between 1968 and 1994—a fact Sennholz concedes before turning the standard explanation on its head. Rising inequality, he argues, is not a market failure calling for more redistribution but the predictable result of intervention itself: deficit spending crowds out private investment, consumes capital, lifts interest rates, and depresses wages while inflating returns to capital. He indicts Federal Reserve easy money for the era's financial bubble, adds corporate taxation and regulation that push firms toward downsizing and mergers, and notes how dual-earner professional households widen the gap further. From Roosevelt's New Deal through Johnson's war on poverty to Clinton's tax increases, egalitarian effort has produced its opposite, confirming his rule that political intervention in economic life is bound to make matters worse.
It is ironic that the spenders create the very pressures that cause interest rates to rise and capital income to soar.
Freedom becomes 'inscrutable,' Sennholz contends, when a single word names two opposing principles: the individual's liberty against coercion, and the collective power exercised in the name of social provision. Setting the lovers of freedom against the devotees of power, he defines liberty concretely—freedom to move, worship, vote, and trade within the equal rights of others—and warns that economic freedom is the first casualty when tyranny advances. The essay's sharpest edge falls on the American welfare-state vocabulary of 'freedom from want,' traced unbroken from Franklin Roosevelt to Clinton as a coercive entitlement funded by taxpayers. Every entitlement, he insists, is a legal claim on another person's earnings; government is no deus ex machina. Invoking Madison's warning about gradual and silent encroachments, he concludes that liberty is lost less by open coup than by popular demand.
The evils of tyranny are seen and felt only by those who resist it.
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.
Theft remains theft even when a majority blesses it—the austere charge at the heart of Sennholz's essay on democratic redistribution. Beginning from cooperation as the basic fact of economic life, he contrasts the market's contractual order of private property with command systems that direct labor by official decree, then argues that each rests on a distinct ethical order. His decisive move applies the commandments against theft, violence, and fraud not only to private persons but to democratic majorities: people who would never steal individually endorse tariffs, transfer payments, and compulsory benefits collectively. Inflation earns special scorn as hidden redistribution enriching politicians while robbing savers and pensioners, and public debt as a promise the spenders mean to inflate away. Two souls, he writes, contend in every breast—one honest, one eager to plunder by ballot.
A very popular form of thievery is inflation. It takes property away from millions of unsuspecting individuals and enriches politicians and their favorites by printing and emitting ever-new quantities of money.
No wage mandate, Sennholz argues, can manufacture the productivity that sustains high wages; it can only forbid employment below a statutory cost and so bar the least skilled from the first rungs of the ladder. Treating the minimum wage as a prohibition rather than a gift, he insists the posted hourly rate understates the real barrier: employers must also carry payroll taxes, Social Security, unemployment insurance, workmen's compensation, and paid holidays, so the relevant floor is the total cost of employment. When that cost exceeds a worker's output, hiring becomes a loss and the worker goes unhired—teenagers, the untrained, and minority youth first. Unions and Northern industry back the floor, he claims, to blunt lower-cost Southern and nonunion competition. If decrees could create prosperity, poor nations could abolish poverty by statute.
Few economic laws, if any, are more malicious and malignant than minimum wage laws.
Rename the welfare state an 'exploitation state,' and its politics look different: not a set of correctable errors but a structure that lives off its productive members and rewards its own expansion. Sennholz's diagnosis is that electoral rollback fails because the transfer system has already manufactured its own constituencies—students, retirees, public employees, welfare recipients, regulated interests—who experience spending as right and livelihood, while reform's gains stay diffuse and delayed. Once interest on accumulated debt competes with transfer payments, he warns, the state reaches its terminal crisis, resolved only through inflation or capital levies. Yet the essay's decisive turn is outward: modern communications, transportation, and global commerce give capital and enterprise the mobility to escape predatory jurisdictions, so that national governments must now compete for the productive property they once simply seized. Hope drives lengthy campaigns, he concludes, but increasingly cannot deliver reform.
Markets have sprung up virtually everywhere, internationalizing commerce and capital and depriving governments of their restrictive powers. They have given productive capital unprecedented mobility, allowing it to escape exploitation and confiscation with the speed of E-mail.