The archive.

Government planning and the disintegration of the world economy, Sennholz argues, are two faces of one process: the tariffs, exchange controls, and nationalizations that wreck the international division of labor also spawn the unification schemes meant to repair it. Writing from Mises's orbit with Earhart Foundation support, he marches through the postwar projects, Streit's federal union of democracies, Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, the socialist United States of Europe, the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund, the European Payments Union, and the Coal and Steel Community, and finds each fatally wedded to the interventionism it cannot survive. Capitalism and socialism, he insists, cannot coexist in one customs-free federation; the ECSC is a supranational monopoly over coal and steel. His alternative is unilateral free trade, sound gold-backed money, and a state confined to protecting life and property.

There is only one reason for an unsatisfactory operation of the market economy: it is government intervention.

The demand that produced the Federal Reserve was for a 'more flexible currency,' but Sennholz reads flexibility as legalized discretion rather than market responsiveness. Tracing the system to the panic of 1907 and to European models—the Bank of England's lender-of-last-resort doctrine, the Reichsbank's elastic note issue—he dissects its three instruments of credit control: rediscounting, open-market operations, and reserve requirements. Each, he argues, lets appointed governors manufacture money by administrative decision, while member banks' nominal ownership of the Reserve Banks masks decisive political control. The charge is that a body advertised as neutral monetary technique is in fact the governing board of a socialized monetary industry—the engine of dollar depreciation, boom and bust, and deficit finance. Written for American Opinion in 1958, the essay ends not in reform but abolition.

For in payment for securities the Federal Reserve merely draws, on itself, a check which constitutes newly created money.

Marx's Communist Manifesto lists ten transitional measures for wresting capital from the bourgeoisie, and Sennholz turns them into a scorecard for the United States of 1961. Point by point—land ownership, progressive income and estate taxes, centralized credit, regulated communications and transport, state production, labor obligations, public education—he argues that America has quietly realized much of the program not through outright nationalization but through control that leaves private title merely nominal. The Federal Reserve, in his reading, has already achieved the Manifesto's fifth plank; confiscatory taxation makes government the controlling partner in every enterprise. What separates America from the Iron Curtain, he concludes, is only surviving markets, constitutional restraints, and due process. A 1961 American Opinion polemic fusing Austrian economics with Cold War anti-communism.

As the second item in the communist program, the Manifesto demands “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” In this regard we are probably more communistic than the Russians and Chinese.

As the Goldwater campaign was being branded a 'radical right,' Sennholz set out to reverse the label, arguing that true extremism means allegiance to collectivism rather than distance from the reigning liberal consensus. His Extreme Right is Jeffersonian—committed to private property and limited government—and appears radical only because the political center has drifted left. He then prosecutes three men of the Kennedy circle: Walt Rostow, whose stages of economic growth he reads as disguised Marxian materialism; Arthur Schlesinger Jr., convicted of importing class conflict into American politics; and McGeorge Bundy, whose call for a presidentially defined 'national purpose' he likens to Führer and Gefolgschaft. Closing with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, this 1964 American Opinion essay recasts the political axis as liberty versus collectivism.

The materialism of Marx and Rostow denies man's freedom of choice. Instead it makes everything a superstructure of man's material basis, especially of his state of technology.

Behind Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Sennholz sees no new social vision but New Deal liberalism rebranded—an 'Everything Deal' that promises education, medicine, poverty relief, housing, and clean cities while enlarging federal paternalism and eroding the market's disciplines. Nearly cost-free college, he warns, damages the moral fiber of the young; Medicare inserts bureaucracy between doctor and patient; the War on Poverty misreads unemployment, which he calls a cost phenomenon, pricing marginal workers out of jobs through minimum wages and union privileges. Urban renewal clears neighborhoods like bombed-out districts. Widening from domestic policy to Vietnam and a looming dollar crisis of gold outflows and balance-of-payments deficits, this 1965 American Opinion essay treats welfare expansion, no-win war, and monetary fragility as one interlocking symptom of national blindness.

Indeed, the "Great Society" is a Calamity Deal on the eve of the greatest debacles in our history.

The word 'communism,' Sennholz argues, once named a policy program rather than a foreign allegiance—and by that older Marx-Engels meaning, much of it now sits lodged in American institutions. Liberals may cherish civil rights and representative government yet still adopt collectivism's instruments; his distinction is between motive and mechanism. He traces a shared 'ontological materialism' running from Marx through W. W. Rostow's stages of growth and Alvin Hanson's verdict that the market no longer works, then assembles his documentary case: the 1964 Socialist Party platform laid beside Johnson's Great Society, with Norman Thomas boasting that the New Deal had already stripped socialist demands of their taint. Radicalism, in this 1965 American Opinion essay, is not an outside infection but the logical offspring of compromised anti-capitalism.

Even in this land of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, most of the Communist Manifesto has been realized during the last third of a century, and the remaining points are now scheduled on the agenda of President Johnson’s Great Society.

Hidden taxation, coerced redistribution, a levy no legislature dares to vote—Sennholz treats inflation as the welfare state's quiet means of financing promises it cannot openly tax into being. He grounds the argument in Austrian theory: sound money restrains government by forcing spending to face public consent, so officials turn instead to deficits and central-bank credit. He overturns the comforting notion that inflation merely punishes rich creditors and rewards debtors, showing how it devours the savings, pensions, and insurance of prudent, salaried, and retired citizens. Keynesian remedies for unemployment, he charges, all reduce to one word: inflation. The 1965 essay then follows the wreckage into the business cycle, progressive tax brackets, vanishing silver coinage, and the strained gold-dollar standard—a quiet thief that builds dependence even as it steals.

Few policies are more calculated to destroy the existing basis of a free society than the debauchery of its currency.

Ludwig von Mises appears here as both systematic economist and uncompromising defender of liberty, surveyed book by book in a 1965 American Opinion cover profile. Sennholz moves from Human Action—which Rose Wilder Lane ranked beside The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital—through Socialism and its proof that planners lacking the guidance of prices cannot allocate resources or reckon profit and loss, to The Theory of Money and Credit, where sound money and the gold standard become restraints on political power. Theory and History, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science extend the case from calculation to epistemology, grounding economics in purposeful human action against positivism. Each volume adds a layer to one thesis: that Mises's economics cannot be severed from his defense of freedom.

Without the common denominator for economic calculation, which is the market price, a socialist society cannot rationally allocate its labor, capital, land and other resources, and fairly distribute the yields of production.

A public quarrel among Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Walter Heller over tight money and recession opens this 1966 essay, which Sennholz quickly recasts as a deeper confusion over what inflation even is. Properly, he insists, inflation means the expansion of money and credit; rising prices are only its delayed effect, and by narrowing the word to prices officials shift blame from the central bank to business and labor. Marshaling figures on Federal Reserve credit, Treasury currency, and bank deposits from 1960 to 1966, he builds an Austrian diagnosis: cheap manufactured money signals savings that do not exist, luring investment that later collapses. The 'zigzag course' of 1966 shows a Fed trapped between lowering prices and lowering rates. The ration book, he warns, waits at the end of the road.

The Federal Reserve Banks fathered the Great Society boom through vast injections of money and credit.

Rising orders, wages, and profits looked like recovery in 1967; Sennholz hears in them the opening report of a coming collapse. The boom, he argues, is manufactured by expansionary Federal Reserve credit and deficit finance, above all the 'even keel' policy that pins interest rates down while the Treasury borrows heavily—which forces the central bank to create the very money that suppression requires. A proposed tax surcharge, in his view, would only feed further Great Society spending. He dwells on the victims: widows, pensioners, savers, and bondholders who meet inflation as lost purchasing power rather than prosperity, since prices never rise evenly. Artificially cheap credit breeds malinvestment, and the boom carries its own bust within it. Only the federal government, he concludes, can inflate and depreciate the currency—so only it bears the blame.

The inflation that generates the boom is a hidden tax on all money holdings.

Supermarket boycotts misidentify their villain: the housewives picketing chain stores before the 1966 elections blame merchants for prices that government, not retailers, produced. Only Washington can legally run the printing presses that depreciate the currency, Sennholz argues, yet the Johnson administration exploits a semantic shift—redefining inflation as mere price increase—so that businessmen absorb the blame officials have earned. He turns the charge back on the picketers, many of whom champion the very spending programs that breed the deficits behind rising prices, and traces the cost of a can of tomatoes through farm supports, crop restriction, subsidized exports, embedded taxation, and union work rules. Chain supermarkets, he counters, are low-margin, fiercely competitive institutions; the boycott is coercion by a minority against the majority's own preference.

They themselves are infected with the very bacillus that is breeding the inflation.

When Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler laid out his 1968 tax-reform agenda—exempt the poor, tax high incomes shielded by preferences, revisit estate and gift duties, curb tourists' spending abroad—Sennholz read compassion as compulsion. His counter-move is to redefine "the rich" not as idle hoarders but as businessmen and investors whose saving builds the factories and stores that employ the poor; to tax their capital, he argues, is to consume the very fund on which rising wages depend. He defends municipal-bond exemption as a constitutional shield for state borrowing, treats a proposed seventy-seven-percent estate levy as either demagoguery or socialism, and reads the curb on foreign travel as a police measure. Invoking Marshall's warning that the power to tax is the power to destroy, he joins economic, constitutional, and civil-libertarian objections to Great Society redistribution.

Taxing Peter to pay Paul has become a respectable way of life with countless pressure groups and their vociferous spokesmen in Congress.