3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.
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.
Can an appeal to intellectual openness become a way of refusing criticism? In this combative review of McCloskey’s Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, Murray N. Rothbard argues that the language of conversation and persuasion can shield methodological claims from scrutiny. His objection is not simply to rhetoric: he welcomes challenges to economic orthodoxy but insists that they remain answerable to evidence and precise argument. The dispute becomes concrete in his defense of The Review of Austrian Economics against charges of doctrinal exclusion and his challenge to McCloskey’s reading of Schumpeter’s “Ricardian Vice.” These encounters let readers examine where a disagreement over scholarly temperament becomes a testable dispute over texts—and whether pluralism can sustain standards without recreating the exclusions it opposes.
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.
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.
How did a religious ambition to perfect society become a program of professional administration and compulsory social insurance? In this essay, republished here in 2017, Murray N. Rothbard locates American welfare-state formation in alliances among Protestant reformers, university-trained experts, wealthy patrons, and corporate employers. His explicitly libertarian account challenges explanations centred on industrial hardship or popular demand: officials and reformers, he argues, helped create the demands they purported to answer. The concrete stakes emerge in his treatment of Social Security, whose compulsory contributions he interprets as benefiting large employers by imposing pension costs on smaller competitors. Following connections from evangelical activism through settlement houses to federal policymaking, readers can examine his provocative contention that moral conviction, professional authority, and economic advantage reinforced one another rather than representing rival explanations of reform.
"The market," Mises told his 1954 seminar, "is a process" — a single sentence Kirzner treats as the key to an entire tradition. Written as a memorial to Murray Rothbard, this essay steps into an intramural Austrian quarrel: Salerno, Rothbard, and Herbener had tried to "dehomogenize" Mises and Hayek into rival paradigms. Kirzner resists. Both men, he argues, saw the market as a corrective process in which entrepreneurs alert to pure profit replace false prices with less false ones. He grants that Mises's calculation problem is genuinely distinctive — money prices are indispensable cardinal aids to appraisal, not mere communication signals — yet insists it can still be read as a knowledge problem, since planners stripped of resource prices simply cannot know what they would need in order to judge profit and loss.
Austrians are a beleaguered minority in the economics profession today.
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.