The archive.

When a worldwide movement demanded the cancellation of debts owed by poor nations in the name of biblical release, Sennholz answered that charity and debt forgiveness are not the same act. This short policy-theological essay from April 1999 concedes the moral force of Jubilee 2000 while insisting that mercy be governed by consequences: does remission restore the destitute, or does it reward the banks, connected corporations, and governing elites who helped manufacture their poverty? Distinguishing the helpless debtor from the merely insolvent from the one whose ruin is his own doing, he separates private debt—priced voluntarily and better resolved through bankruptcy—from sovereign debt that too often finances civil war and socialist mismanagement. The tap root of poverty, he argues, is war and destruction, not debt service, and indiscriminate cancellation may simply preserve the regimes that impoverish.

Poor people in poor countries are no debtors; they live from hand to mouth, often shunned and despised, and without a credit rating.

Discovering in a course catalogue that Ludwig von Mises taught at New York University, a young German émigré made his choice, enrolled, and became one of Mises's first doctoral students. Part memoir and part vindication, this tribute presents Mises as the scholar who defended laissez-faire capitalism when academic opinion treated it as a discredited creed. Sennholz reconstructs the whole arc: Böhm-Bawerk's refutation of Marxian exploitation theory through subjective value, the 1920 calculation argument holding that planners without market prices cannot compare uses of scarce resources, the assault on inflation and interventionism, and the praxeological foundation of Human Action. Oskar Lange's market socialism fails, in this account, because simulated prices cannot reproduce entrepreneurs, capital markets, or genuine consumer sovereignty—and the later Soviet collapse reads as vindication of warnings issued decades before events made them fashionable.

There can only be one master: either the consumer who is guiding businessmen or the commissar director who exerts absolute authority over the economic lives of the people.

The dot-com euphoria of the late 1990s looked, to most observers, like the dawn of a new economy powered by the Internet. Reading it in October 2000, Sennholz saw instead a speculative bubble in the lineage of 1929 and Japan's 1989 asset mania—one sustained less by earnings than by faith, easy credit, and official reassurance. Valuations had abandoned dividends, earnings records, and tangible assets for hopes of future dominance among NASDAQ and Internet firms that mostly ran losses. The deeper cause, he argues in Austrian terms, was Greenspan's Federal Reserve, expanding money faster than output; because Internet competition held consumer prices down, the inflation surfaced in asset values instead. Rising household debt, margin borrowing, and foreign financing of U.S. deficits left the boom poised for a correction that policy could delay but not abolish.

Nine years of credit expansion have created countless maladjustments which the market sooner or later will correct.

Globalization, its critics charged, destroys jobs, exploits the poor, degrades the environment, and hands the world to big business. Against that indictment this polemic defends global commerce as peaceful, voluntary cooperation—made possible by falling trade barriers, post-Soviet liberalization, and capital mobility—while locating the real threat in protectionism and international management. Sennholz champions multinational corporations for raising wages and productivity abroad, denies that human rights and property rights are enemies, and rebuts Marxian exploitation theory by insisting that market alternatives, not political controls, are what shield workers from domination. His targets cut both ways: anti-globalists who would throttle trade, and the IMF, WTO, NAFTA, and EU insofar as they preserve subsidies and privilege behind liberal rhetoric. The closing warning invokes Hawley-Smoot and the Depression, when moralized attacks on trade hardened into ruinous economic nationalism.

Three market features negate any such power: competition among employers, the mobility of labor itself, and the freedom of self-employment.

How could the dollar stand so strong while America ran its largest trade deficits on record? That apparent contradiction opens a July 2000 diagnosis that credits neither American productivity nor Federal Reserve mastery, but capital inflows that can reverse. Reaching for Böhm-Bawerk's analysis of the passive trade balance, Sennholz shows how an incoming capital account can sustain imports, asset markets, and a firm exchange rate at once—until it doesn't. He reads Southeast Asia's 1997 collapse as the template: pegged currencies, central-bank credit, real-estate speculation, and sudden foreign withdrawal. Rapid M3 growth, record current-account deficits, borrowed share buybacks, unprecedented margin debt, and derivatives concentrate leverage until the Fed is trapped between defending the currency and cushioning recession. The maladjustments of years of monetary manipulation, he concludes, must be liquidated, not gently unwound.

Political intervention is ill-designed for soft landings.

By the 1980s, foreign observers held up Japanese manufacturing, management, and export prowess as proof of superior institutions—until land and share values collapsed and a decade of stagnation set in. This Austrian-style reckoning refuses the flattering reading in both directions: if ministries and industrial policy are credited for the boom, they must be blamed for the bust. Japan's real gains, Sennholz insists, came from saving, enterprise, and capital formation; the late-1980s asset mania was a creature of cheap money and guided lending, malinvestment already built into the boom. The response after 1990—public works, bank rescues, deposit guarantees, near-zero rates—treated a structural and monetary disease as a demand-management problem, keeping insolvent banks alive and postponing the reckoning. Falsified interest rates, he warns, misprice saving, investment, and public finance alike, converting correction into malaise.

A financial bubble is a manifestation of inflation and credit creation, insubstantial, groundless, and ephemeral, that comes to nothing.

Sennholz opens this November 2000 essay by dismantling the very concept that fuels the alarm: for an individual, double-entry bookkeeping means the balance of payments can show neither surplus nor deficit, and national balances are mercantilist artifacts that serve collectivism and nationalism. America's record current-account deficits—$331 billion in 1999, an estimated $425 billion in 2000—do not stem from the Asian crisis, he insists, for Thailand and South Korea were far too small. The cause is domestic and monetary. Because the dollar has displaced gold as world money, the Federal Reserve can conjure fresh dollars, export money claims, and import goods, financing the current account through capital inflows. Yet fiat world money holds only while foreigners trust it. Should confidence break, the flow reverses—dollar falling, capital fleeing, interest rates rising—into an inflationary crisis.

The risk of a painful readjustment of both the American economy and the global economy is growing rapidly with the growth of American debts and deficits.

As old as government itself, the hidden economy springs, in this 1984 pamphlet, from human nature choosing among the alternatives that taxation and regulation leave open. Sennholz's first move is to separate the underground producer from the criminal underworld: the latter preys on persons and property, the former supplies wanted goods and services outside official permission, reporting, or taxation. Minimum wages, overtime mandates, building codes, licensing, union privileges, taxi medallions, and Social Security earnings limits all price willing workers out of lawful jobs, so informal work becomes a labor market for people whom law has excluded, students, retirees, moonlighting teachers, gypsy cabs, barter networks, undocumented field hands. Even the unemployment rate, he shows, dissolves once hidden workers misreport themselves idle. The verdict is libertarian: the underground is no anomaly but the shadow cast by intervention itself.

There is no doubt that the underground economy is essentially an employment phenomenon. Where government causes disemployment the underground offers ample opportunities for employment. It offers jobs to the officially unemployable.

Written in the shock after September 11, this essay treats the attacks as a declaration of war not on the United States alone but on civilization itself, on the peaceful exchange and association Sennholz equates with civilized life. The enemy is new because he is faceless and stateless, linked to regimes yet fighting as none. Sennholz traces the anger to Islam's fusion of faith and rule, to the Taliban, and pointedly to American blowback: the money and intelligence that once armed anti-Soviet jihad, a bitter harvest whose seeds Washington helped sow. He roots much of the hatred in U.S. support for Israel and prescribes a libertarian peace of secure property, privatization, and open land markets. Against calls for expeditionary war he warns of another Vietnam, rejects nuclear vengeance absolutely, and urges intelligence-led self-defense: detection, pursuit, arrest, and trial.

To wreak a nuclear holocaust on any Muslim city would be a crime against humanity and the start of a hundred-year-war between Islam and the West.

April 1999: the dollar is slipping against the yen and the euro, and Sennholz reads that weakness as a symptom of a credit disease hidden beneath the era's celebrated low consumer-price inflation. Subdued CPI figures, he insists, prove nothing when the real action lies in asset prices, credit aggregates, and the world dollar standard. He widens the meaning of inflation from narrowly measured money to the expansion of credit and claims, securitization multiplying leverage outside conventional statistics, Long Term Capital Management, asset-backed paper approaching four trillion dollars, a Wall Street bubble fed by the very institutions the Fed oversees. Real saving meanwhile collapses as borrowing accelerates, and foreign capital and mercantilist central banks prop up the whole edifice. The Fed, he concludes, is trapped: cut rates and the dollar flees, raise them and the bubble bursts into deflationary recession.

Unfortunately, the popular faith in sophisticated computer systems and speculation models is no substitute for basic economic knowledge.

Beneath America's rhetoric of surpluses and fiscal restraint, Sennholz finds chronic deficit spending disguised by raided Social Security trust funds and debt ceilings suspended through Treasury maneuver, creative financing, as he dryly names it. His method is demystification: surplus becomes hidden deficit, the dollar safe haven becomes a mortgaged harbor carrying the biggest debt on earth, and Treasury wealth becomes capital already consumed. The reserve currency, unlike gold, costs almost nothing to issue and rests entirely on belief; on that base banks, offshore lenders, and foreign central banks pile expanding layers of dollar credit. Low Federal Reserve rates inflate housing and tempt owners to extract equity, the domestic face of the wider pyramid. Should confidence break, liquidation could sink the dollar and equities alike, leaving military overreach after September 11, and a looming Iraq war, resting on a fragile financial base.

Many a victory has been suicidal.

A brief 2002 tour of a few Russian towns becomes the occasion for an Austrian diagnosis of why the passage from command socialism to markets stayed slow, painful, and morally confused. Sennholz reads post-Soviet Russia through Ludwig von Mises's socialist-calculation argument: without private ownership and market prices, the USSR was not merely mismanaged but structurally incoherent, and seventy years of institutional and psychological habit could not be shed by decree. He follows Yeltsin's price liberalization, voucher privatization, and land and housing reform against the resistance of the Duma, subsidy expectations, and inflationary finance, distinguishing formal ownership from real capitalism. The economy, he argues, hovers between command, market, and black-market orders, while oligarchs gain wealth through political connection. Prosperity, he concludes, waits on a change in economic thought toward freedom.

The distance from Communism to democratic freedom and a market order is greater by far than the distance from the poorest market economy to the most productive and prosperous country.