The archive.

Reform is easy to want in rhetoric and costly to endure in fact—and that gap, Sennholz argues, is why electoral hope so reliably disappoints. Saving the dollar from inflation, he insists, cannot be a mere central-bank adjustment; it is a political willingness to let earlier errors be liquidated. Halting credit expansion would expose years of malinvestment, raise interest rates, depress stocks and bonds, and bring recession—the price of a sound currency. Drawing on Gustave Le Bon, he frames monetary reform as a moral problem before a technical one: laws only express popular ideas, and the public that cheers reform balks at its consequences. Because stabilization also strips unions of the inflationary cover for rigid wages, genuine reform would mean abolishing the National Labor Relations Board and restoring a market in labor—something he doubts any administration would endure.

Monetary stabilization means price stabilization, which is a fatal enemy of labor unions.

The pound was sliding, French reserves draining, and the Group of Ten meeting in emergency session—yet Sennholz reads the 1968-69 turmoil not as a passing squall but as the postwar gold-exchange system nearing collapse. Monetary crisis, his thesis runs, is the international face of domestic inflationism: once de Gaulle decreed wage increases after the strikes of 1968, France had to inflate to make them payable, and rising prices then drove gold and capital abroad. Gold, for Sennholz, is no symbolic reserve but the disciplinary mechanism that exposes monetary mismanagement. He groups Britain, America, and France as inflationary debtors whose liabilities outrun their bullion, and predicts that devaluation or suspension of gold payments will bring runaway inflation and split the Free World into a dollar bloc and a hard-currency gold camp.

After all, gold is the only international money and, like all other economic goods, tends to flow towards areas where it commands greater purchasing power.

Grant, for the sake of argument, that pollution is grave: the real question, Sennholz proposes, is whether its cause is private enterprise or political control. Answering the charge that pollution proves the failure of capitalism, he reverses the accusation—the state itself is the chief polluter, through public dumps, incinerators, sewer authorities, and navigable waters treated as common property, with Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River as exhibits. Urban smog he traces not to the automobile, which he defends as a genuine gain of enterprise, but to zoning, subsidized roads priced as free goods, and transit strangled by regulation. His deeper move recasts pollution as a failure of property-right enforcement rather than of property itself: where law exempts owners from the costs they impose, harm follows. The remedy is not a new bureaucracy but tort liability, damages, and injunctions—an early manifesto of free-market environmentalism.

As government is the prime polluter of our environment we must call on government to cease and desist.

After Nixon closed the gold window and Bretton Woods came apart, Sennholz set out the Austrian case in its starkest constitutional form: inflation is not high prices but the authorities' creation of new money, and rising prices merely its later, uneven effects. The true target is political power over money, which lets governments tax, borrow, and redistribute without open consent—financing a welfare state whose social programs are too popular to oppose while credit expansion breeds the boom-bust cycle and hidden transfers from savers to debtors. Against this he defends the gold-coin standard as the monetary constitution of a free society, distinguishing it from gold-bullion and gold-exchange arrangements that keep gold's name while centralizing reserves and inviting suspension. His reform is liberal, not technocratic: legal gold ownership, enforceable gold clauses, private minting, and competing monies rather than a parity decreed by the same state that destroyed convertibility.

It is not money, as is sometimes said, but the depreciation of money — the cruel and crafty destruction of money — that is the root of many evils.

Can a growing economy outrun its supply of gold? The objection sounds practical, but Sennholz treats it as a conceptual confusion useful to governments seeking elastic finance. His reply separates money from wealth: people who demand more money usually mean more goods and capital, and multiplying units creates neither—any quantity of gold can serve as a medium of exchange, since fewer units simply gain purchasing power and more units lose it. The belief in the monetary needs of business, he argues, already concedes that some authority should manage money, a dogma Keynesians and monetarists share while quarreling only over method. Turning to the charge that mining gold is wasteful, he makes the law of costs a monetary virtue: gold's expensive production guards its value, whereas paper's negligible cost exposes fiat money to depreciation, redistribution, and the political incentives that keep the presses running.

There is no shortage of gold today and there has been no such shortage in the past.

Marx and Engels demanded the abolition of inheritance, and in John W. Robbins's framing that demand hovers over America's federal estate and gift taxes—the subject Sennholz dissects as a central symptom of the fiscal state. His argument is chiefly economic: death duties consume capital, not luxury hoards, since large fortunes are mostly farms, factories, inventories, and business organizations that serve consumers. Tracing the levy from temporary wartime measures to the permanent 1916 estate tax and its climb toward seventy-seven percent, he reads its survival as moralized resentment rather than fiscal necessity, nourished by Henry George, institutionalism, and progressive reform. Both predecessor and successor bear it—the one altering saving, risk, and succession in anticipation, the other forced to liquidate productive assets, with widows, family firms, and farms as casualties. Inflation silently compounds the damage, and progressive death taxation, he concludes, breeds class rigidity rather than equality.

Inflation and tax progression are pushing all estates towards the top rate of taxation.

Between the Depression and the Deutsche Mark of 1948, the mark was destroyed a second time—and Sennholz, in this 1978 lecture, insists the destruction was political, not merely monetary. Nazi full employment after 1933 he grants as fact but reinterprets as coerced cost-cutting: unions abolished, wages frozen, and deficits disguised through special intermediaries issuing discountable bills. As the Reichsbank was subordinated and Schacht fell, wartime finance proved his central point—that inflation need not first appear as rising official prices. Rationing, price controls, and prosecutions defended posted prices while money surpluses fed black markets, hoarding, and substitute monies, the American cigarette emerging as a more honest currency than state fiat. The 1948 reform he judges ambivalently: it worked, he argues, only because Ludwig Erhard simultaneously abolished controls—proof that honest money depends on free exchange and property rights, not expert currency management.

No central bank can safeguard the currency from the inflationary expenditures of government.

A 1984-85 high-school debate resolution proposing federal employment for every employable poor citizen gives Sennholz his foil, and his answer inverts its premise: government is not the cure for unemployment but a leading cause. He first contests the category of American poverty, arguing that an income-threshold definition confuses relative inequality with destitution and points to homeownership, savings, appliances, and cars among households counted poor. Employment, he then insists, is a price-and-cost phenomenon: taxes, mandates, union privileges, minimum wages, and Federal Reserve boom-bust cycles raise the cost of hiring until workers whose output cannot cover it are priced out. Business, not the state, is the genuine source of jobs, since government has no productive fund of its own and must finance make-work through taxation, borrowing, or inflation. To hand that state the role of employer of last resort, he warns, only expands dependency while eroding the production that funds it.

To make government their employer of last resort is to put the culprit in charge and urge him to continue his transgressions.

Compassion for laid-off workers, in Sennholz's reading, hardens into a coercive levy on their employers—the mechanism behind the plant-closing laws spreading through the states, notably the Massachusetts statute Michael Dukakis signed. He does not deny the pain of a shutdown; he reframes it as a defensive, loss-minimizing act rather than predation, since profit rates signal where consumers most want scarce capital employed and keeping it in declining uses only misallocates resources. Against the claim that owners owe workers reinvestment in the same plant, he deploys the Austrian logic of consumer sovereignty and attacks the socialist exploitation theory beneath residual worker claims, treating union job rights as state-created privileges dressed up as human rights. His policy inversion is the sharpest stroke: restrictions on exit become restrictions on entry, for mandated severance and retraining raise the penalty on failure until firms invest elsewhere, substitute capital for labor, or never open at all.

In the end, the law that means to prevent unemployment by order of politicians, judges and policemen, actually creates it.

A society that borrows to fund present consumption, Sennholz argues, is quietly eating its own productive capital. Written against the fiscal record of Reagan-era Washington, this Austrian-libertarian indictment treats deficits, entitlements, inflation, and off-budget government as linked symptoms of a public that wants benefits without sacrifice. The federal budget becomes a contest among organized interests seeking income through law; Social Security is exposed as intergenerational transfer rather than insurance; privatization is dismissed as counterfeit unless assets are actually sold at market prices. He draws a pointed parallel between the credit expansion that preceded 1929 and the easy money of the 1980s, warning that debt is disguised default and that no line-item veto or balanced-budget amendment can discipline a people who prefer dependence. Reform, he concludes, demands moral limits as much as budgetary ones.

To live beyond its means is to invite poverty and deprivation in the end.

Before money is a technical problem, it is a question of freedom, property, and power - and inflation, on this account, is no accident of markets but the fruit of statist monetary ideas turned into coercive institutions. Offered here in the Spanish translation of the 1985 Money and Freedom, the essay dismantles the Federal Reserve as a politically protected monopoly, an instrument of Treasury finance whose independence is an institutional fiction. Legal tender is the coercive core: by forcing creditors to accept depreciated paper, the state expropriates without consent. Sennholz rejects the false solutions alike - Keynesian demand management, Friedman's monetary rule, the administered gold of Mundell and Laffer - because each keeps government in charge of money. His remedy is a parallel standard: abolish legal tender, permit free banking, and let gold, silver, and private notes compete for acceptance.

La moneda fuerte y la banca libre no son imposibles, simplemente son ilegales.

English translation: “Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal.”

Redistribution is not charity but coercion - so runs the moral axis of this compact essay, which defines entitlement programs as the state taking wealth from some citizens to hand it to others. Sennholz insists on a sharp line between the Good Samaritan, who gives his own property, and the welfare state, which commands the property of others. What egalitarians imagine as idle surplus, he argues, is mostly productive capital, so seizing and consuming it in the name of compassion weakens the very order the poor depend on. He rejects the Pigovian welfare-economics claim that transfers maximize total satisfaction, since utilities cannot be compared across persons, and defines justice as proportional reward rather than enforced sameness. Its blunt conclusion: the true beneficiary of redistribution is not the needy but government itself.

To be a helper in need is to lend a friendly hand to a needy person; it is personal effort and sacrifice.