1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Ancient Mesopotamia gave the world law, commerce, and art; modern Iraq, in Sennholz's telling, has produced mainly bloody revolution, coups, and war. Writing weeks after American and British forces toppled Saddam Hussein, he warns that military victory is not the same as liberal reconstruction: a centralized apparatus can be shattered far faster than a free order can be built. Saddam's rule figures here as the culmination of militarized Arab socialism, its shortages, black markets, and inflation the predictable fruit of political control over economic life. Against triumphalism, he cautions that occupation may inflame Islamic and nationalist resentment, and that immediate national elections would only turn office into the prize of sectarian struggle among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. His prescription is decentralized: local self-government, secure property, free speech, and open markets as peace-making institutions.
Only the market order, which has no borders and makes no ethnic or religious distinctions, would bring peace and prosperity to Iraqi society.
When the dot-com boom collapsed, Alan Greenspan pleaded that no central banker could know a bubble existed or prick one without triggering recession. Sennholz reverses both claims. The 1990s, he argues, furnished abundant warning—extreme price-earnings ratios, debt-financed mergers, stock buybacks, collapsing savings, swelling consumer debt—and the Fed held concrete instruments to restrain the mania: margin requirements, reserve requirements, the discount rate, open-market operations. Greenspan preferred popularity and accommodation to discipline. But the polemic reaches past one man to the institution itself: a politically created fiat-money monopoly that, by holding interest rates below market levels, inevitably breeds speculation, malinvestment, and cyclical collapse. Sennholz extends the postmortem to housing, Treasuries, and precious metals, warning that fresh rate cuts merely relocate the fever rather than permit the liquidation recovery requires.
Economic bubbles have plagued the American economy ever since the First United States Bank opened its doors in Philadelphia in 1791.
Executive pay had become a public scandal by the early 2000s, and this compact essay enters the fray by refusing both the egalitarian outrage and the blanket defense. Compensation genuinely paid for scarce managerial ability, Sennholz argues, obeys the same law of supply and demand as any wage; he decomposes executive income into three parts—managerial labor, interest on invested capital, and entrepreneurial profit—and applies a property-rights test, since a firm that overpays gives away stockholder wealth while one that underpays loses the best manager. Most large-company CEOs, he insists, are not entrepreneurs in the Rockefeller or Ford mold but trained organization men. What deserves censure is the 1990s windfall: Federal Reserve credit expansion inflated equity prices far past corporate earnings, turning stock options into unearned "bubble lucre" and tempting some executives into accounting fraud.
Nothing sharpens the sight like envy.
Not all borrowing is alike, and the distinction is where this October 2003 essay begins. Sennholz separates productive debt—which finances investment that earns future income and raises labor productivity—from consumptive debt, which finances spending and leaves no capital behind once the good is gone. Rising American household, mortgage, and federal obligations, he argues, reflect a love of spending propped up by artificially low Federal Reserve rates that distort entrepreneurial calculation and conceal the true burden. His chain of consequences is bleak: cheap credit invites malinvestment; public deficits invite currency depreciation as a hidden tax on creditors; depreciation threatens the dollar's reserve role; and debt-driven transfer politics corrode civil peace until, he warns, a society that can no longer cooperate submits to a strong president armed with emergency powers.
Private debtors may find it difficult to pay for bread that has been eaten.
Politicians praise fiscal discipline in their election oratory and then govern by borrowing, and Sennholz reads George W. Bush's post-September 11 turn toward deficits and tax cuts as one instance of a permanent pattern. Deficits, he insists, are not harmless accounting entries but claims on real resources, capital markets, and foreign dollar creditors; when voluntary saving falls short, the Federal Reserve creates the credit that keeps spending afloat, shifting the burden from explicit taxation to a depreciating currency. Tracing the dollar from Bretton Woods through Nixon's suspension of gold convertibility to today's floating fiat standard, he argues that reserve-currency privilege only delays adjustment while magnifying the eventual danger. Foreign confidence is the hinge: should creditors liquidate their dollar holdings, the essay warns, monetary upheaval and deep global recession lie straight ahead.
It is a fiat standard, unbacked and irredeemable, which can be inflated and depreciated at will.
Poverty, stagnation, and authoritarianism across the Muslim world are usually blamed on rulers or resources; Sennholz asks instead whether they follow from religiously grounded rules about income, credit, family, and authority. Reading the Koran and Shariah as sources of economic organization rather than private belief, he builds his case around a fourfold division of income - wages, interest, profit, and transfers - and argues that Islamic doctrine accepts labor and redistribution while restricting the categories capitalism most needs. The prohibition of riba, he contends, chokes credit markets, banking, and the conversion of savings into productive capital, much as medieval Christian usury doctrine once did. Extending the critique to Baathist Iraq's transfer economy, to population growth pressing against stagnant capital, and to the exclusion of women from market production, he treats these constraints as mutually reinforcing causes of underdevelopment.
American observers are dismayed about the dreary economic conditions in most Islamic countries.
Neither historical grievance nor military force can by itself produce peace: that is the organizing claim of this classical-liberal reading of Arab-Israeli enmity. Sennholz's central target is restorationism—the demand that political arrangements be returned to some earlier moment—whether in the Palestinian right of return, which he says would dispossess later inhabitants and invite renewed war, or in appeals to the pre-1967 map. He faults Arab governments, militant movements, and international aid systems for preserving refugee camps as a permanent political indictment, and asks whether Oslo-era Israeli concessions strengthened militant expectation rather than moderation. Against repression and welfare-state controls alike, he proposes an order of private property, equal protection, civil rights, and free exchange, placing moral burdens on both peoples. Violence persists, he argues, where historical claims, ethnic discrimination, and economic closure dominate public life.
The wars did not bring peace; they generated ever more hatred which breeds more wars.
IBM's announcement that it would relocate thousands of programming jobs to India and China opens this January 2004 commentary on outsourcing—and Sennholz immediately turns against the popular verdict. The exodus, he argues, springs not from employer greed, foreign predation, or disloyalty but from domestic American policy. Two causes carry the weight: a monetary regime of low interest rates and vast trade deficits that sends capital abroad, and an accumulation of labor-cost mandates—Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, health insurance, pensions, litigation, regulation—that lifts the total cost of employment far above take-home pay. Productivity alone, he insists, cannot save a job whose full cost is raised to inflict losses on employers. Citing a National Association of Manufacturers study, he warns that tariffs, currency pressure, and fresh regulation would only hasten the very departures they mean to halt.
Even the most productive labor in the world can be rendered uneconomical and unproductive, if its costs are raised to inflict losses on employers.
Gold owes its value not to mysticism but to the same considerations that price any economic good, utility and scarcity, and in extremity bread or shelter may matter more. With that correction to the goldphiles who preach the metal's eternal worth, Sennholz's March 2003 essay establishes gold's real monetary fitness: its marketability, durability, storability, and a stock so vast relative to annual production that supply shocks barely register. From there he reaches the political drama he cares about, governments coveting gold yet fearing its discipline, hoarding it, monopolizing the mint, at times criminalizing private use. The 1971 suspension of gold payments installed the dollar standard and freed the Federal Reserve to finance deficits by credit creation. Chronic depreciation, he concludes, could exhaust confidence in fiat money, leaving gold once more the implicit alternative.
The special characteristics which man ascribes to gold have made it the most marketable economic good of all, the popular medium of exchange and unit of economic calculation and account; they have made it man’s money.
Far from being a neutral stabilizer, the International Monetary Fund is portrayed here as an internationalized extension of the very monetary interventionism that produces crises in the first place. Written in October 1998 amid the Asian financial collapse, the essay traces business cycles to political control over money and reads Bretton Woods less as a remedy than as institutionalized error. Sennholz stresses the asymmetry of a Fund supplied by a few hard-currency states and drawn upon by weak-currency debtors, and identifies its power with the United States and the dollar system. Bailouts, he argues, reward profligate governments and export welfare-statist fiscal assumptions—his Guatemala and Indonesia cases supply the evidence—while teaching borrowers and lenders to expect rescue. Against them he sets lower taxes, balanced budgets, freely adjusting interest rates, and the refusal to save failed financial managers.
In other words, only unstable high-risk debtors may apply.
When the Census Bureau reports falling median household incomes, rising poverty, and more Americans without health insurance, most readers see a distributional grievance; Sennholz sees capital consumption. Living standards, he argues, rise or fall with labor productivity, and productivity depends on capital per head, the tools, structures, and savings that make work effective. Read through that principle, declining income signals an impaired production structure rather than a mere failure of welfare administration. The culprits are fiscal and monetary: deficit spending at every level of government competes for savings, while household debt, mortgage expansion, tax rebates, artificially low interest rates, Federal Reserve money creation, and foreign purchases of Treasury debt sustain present consumption by drawing on future income. Apparent recovery, the essay warns, can mask a capital erosion that the statistics will register only after the credit boom fails.
When the present bubble finally bursts, the Census Bureau will keep us informed about falling household income.
With most American economists singing happy days are here again after the market's recovery from the early-2000s slump, a minority marched to a different drummer, forecasting falling asset prices, recession, and depression. Sennholz sides partly with these deflationists—granting that they grasp bubbles and overvaluation better than the optimists do—then reverses course. The danger in February 2004, he argues, is not pure deflation but dollar weakness, rising prices, and stagnation, because Federal Reserve inflation, federal deficits, and the dollar's reserve-currency role make inflationary pressure decisive, especially if China and Japan stop absorbing dollars through Treasury purchases. He rereads the Great Depression as the handiwork of Hoover-Roosevelt intervention—Smoot-Hawley, tax hikes, farm controls, the Wagner Act—rather than Fed inaction, and likens Japan's prolonged stagnation to the same obstruction of readjustment. His forecast: controls and dreary stagflation.
They plan the future by the past, by the Great Depression and the Japanese recession.