3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.
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.”
A monetary institution can emerge without a designer, yet changing a currency requires deliberate choices with unequal consequences. Hans Sennholz explores this tension through Carl Menger’s monetary writings and proposals for Austria-Hungary’s currency reform. In this chapter, republished in 1992, he connects Menger’s account of money’s spontaneous origin with practical concerns about convertibility, debt contracts, and governmental discretion. Menger’s advocacy of gold appears not as a demand for exclusively metallic circulation, but as a case for dependable redemption and a cautious transition that would avoid arbitrary gains for creditors or losses for debtors. Sennholz also identifies what Menger left unexplained about purchasing power. The resulting portrait shows how a theorist of individual exchange confronted the difficulty of making a legally declared monetary standard work in actual markets.
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.
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.
Unemployment, on this account, is not an inevitable calamity but a labor surplus manufactured by law - the predictable result of wage rates held above the level at which willing workers could be hired. Treating labor like any other market factor whose price clears supply and demand, Sennholz converts the moral language of jobs policy into price theory and turns it against the reformers, accusing minimum wages, the Davis-Bacon Act, benefit mandates, unemployment compensation, and union privilege of causing the very misery they claim to cure. He roots sustainable wages in productivity and the division of labor rather than political pressure, exposes the racist origins of Davis-Bacon, dismantles the natural-rate doctrine and the Phillips curve, and closes by arraigning the college textbooks - Samuelson's above all - that teach Keynesian orthodoxy as settled truth.
If they are set above the market rate they create surpluses, called unemployment.
The savings-and-loan collapse is usually blamed on private greed or reckless deregulation; Sennholz reads it instead as the predictable failure of a politically designed housing-finance cartel. Tracing the thrifts from voluntary building societies through federal chartering, the Home Loan Bank System, and flat-rate deposit insurance, he argues that Washington restricted entry, socialized risk, and forced institutions to borrow short while lending long on favored mortgages. When 1970s inflation lifted market rates above regulated ceilings, the protected structure buckled. The 1989 Reform and Rescue Act, in his account, merely renamed agencies and shifted losses to taxpayers while prosecuting managers and sparing the legislators who built the system. His remedy is abolition: liquidate insolvent firms through bankruptcy and privatize deposit insurance entirely.
Federal deposit insurance subsidizes risk in direct proportion to the degree of risk taken.
The early-1990s downturn was no temporary relapse, Sennholz argues, but a crisis of profit, capital, and investment concealed beneath financial inflation. He refuses the reassurance of Keynesian stimulus and Federal Reserve ease: business profitability is the mainspring of a private-enterprise order, and its savage contraction, sharpest in manufacturing, makes stagnation and unemployment predictable. Cheap money cures none of it; it drives savers out of deposits and into equities, inflating bubbles of value even as thrifts and banks fail by the thousands. Sennholz compares the moment to the 1920s, when price stability masked deep capital-market distortion, and warns that the real danger is not a 1970s-style inflationary outbreak but hidden malinvestment and depleted profitability. His conclusion is guarded rather than apocalyptic: no exact repeat of the Depression, if trade barriers and business taxes fall.
An old error is always more popular than a new truth.
Americans condemn federal deficits in principle while resisting nearly every specific cut that would touch their own families' benefits—and that contradiction, not the venality of politicians, is where Sennholz locates the roots of the entitlement state. Broadening the category of beneficiary far beyond formal recipients—Social Security relieves children of supporting parents, Medicare relieves families, student subsidies help spouses—he argues that visible benefits obscure hidden costs to character, productivity, and republican institutions. Invoking Jefferson on public debt and Madison on majority tyranny, the essay reframes fiscal imbalance as a moral rather than budgetary problem: majority rule cannot legitimate taking from minorities, and a republic dependent on forced redistribution drifts toward despotism unless the majority voluntarily limits its own numerical power.
Although most people readily support reduction in federal spending, they balk at virtually every proposal of specific cuts.
Strip away the reverent abstraction, and a government reduces to identifiable persons - legislators, tax collectors, judges, policemen - exercising coercive command over other people. This brief note turns that deflation into a libertarian critique of political worship, attacking the habit of treating the state as a sacred, benevolent being to be petitioned and idolized. For such command, Sennholz argues, no obvious moral foundation exists: those entrusted with protecting natural rights have repeatedly hardened into rulers, oligarchs, and tyrants. He sets Jefferson's jealousy of power against the modern appetite for state benefits, entitlements, and public works, in which questions of right dissolve into struggles over distribution. Political power, he concludes, feeds on its spoils and dies only when its victims refuse to be despoiled.
No man has ever seen a government.
Knowledge and wisdom are not the same: a person may command many facts and still misuse them, for wisdom is the moral use of knowledge, not its mere possession. This short essay in moral political economy carries that distinction into economics, where theory can judge whether means suit chosen ends - prosperity, employment, health care - but never pronounces on the ends themselves. Most political quarrels, Sennholz observes, are disputes over means, not goals; communists, socialists, and fascists too promise prosperity while choosing destructive means. Yet economic wisdom refuses the value-neutral posture and asks whether a policy rests on justice or on vice, condemning forced redistribution as an attempt to steal by political vote. Its closing maxims defend thrift, self-reliance, and refusal of debt laid on future generations: wisdom, he writes, begins at home.
We cannot progress individually or nationally by spending more than we are earning. Thrift is an essential condition of all economic progress.