The archive.

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.

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.

Saving produces genuine growth; credit expansion produces boom and bust, Garrison compresses the Austrian theory of the business cycle into that contrast. When artificial credit pushes the bank rate below the natural rate of interest, he argues, the result is not merely too much investment but malinvestment: capital committed to the wrong stages of an economy's intertemporal production structure, later exposed and unwound in the downturn. Drawing the line from Menger, Boehm-Bawerk, Wicksell, Mises, and Hayek back to the British Currency School, the summary sets capital-based macroeconomics against the Keynesian aggregates that see only investment in the lump, and against demand management as a cure. Its policy conclusion is spare: prevent the distortion at its monetary source through hard money and decentralized banking.

Changes within the capital structure may be significant even when the change in net investment is not.

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.