The archive.

To the ordinary citizen the four-trillion-dollar federal debt feels as remote as another galaxy, and that indifference is exactly what lets it grow. Sennholz treats the debt as consumed wealth, a mortgage on the future, and a source of social conflict, then asks why Congress incurs it so readily. His answer reinterprets the two-party system as a functional three: a Parochial Party chasing district spending, a Vocational Party serving organized producer and occupational interests, and a small Consumer Party defending open markets, low prices, and the dispersed public against coercive redistribution. Concentrated beneficiaries speak louder than scattered consumers, which is why redistribution flows to electorally powerful blocs. The critique is public-choice in structure but moral in language: reelection incentives, he argues, have displaced political conscience.

There are 18.3 million civil servants with more than 30 million dependents living—and some feasting—on the taxes they extract.

Americans measure their institutions against wisdom, righteousness, justice, and liberty, and so feel the painful distance between the Founders' principles and modern interventionism - yet measured against the world's actual alternatives, Sennholz argues, they remain unusually fortunate. Moving from lament to comparison, he surveys Canada's stagnating welfare state, Mexico's one-party corruption and currency collapse, Britain's diminished pound, Germany's "double-barreled" post-reunification transfers, and Japan's ordered but statistically distorted prosperity, reading each outcome as a consequence of taxation, regulation, monetary instability, and ideology rather than accident. The American advantage is not perfection but relative room for enterprise and correction. Writing in the mid-1990s, he detects signs that the interventionist habit is weakening as anti-business politics and organized labor lose their grip, and closes on conditional rather than triumphant hope.

The sixty-year-old death grip of government is loosening.

Valuable chiefly as a peaceful procedure for changing rulers, democracy degenerates—on Sennholz's account—the moment majority power slips its constitutional limits and turns toward economic leveling. He strips government of mystique (officials are ordinary people, not a higher caste), grants the state only a protective task, and then draws his central distinction: between mere majoritarianism, which can violate individual rights and destroy the very conditions of its own existence, and constitutional democracy, which shields minorities from the majority's whims. Enforced economic equality, he argues, denies human difference and the division of labor, requiring coercion and exploiting resentment. The essay's moral psychology rests on envy, which it names the engine of demagoguery—turning politics into an art of promises and evasions, and the body politic into a source of strife.

Envy is more irreconcilable than hate. It is the most corroding of all political vices and also a great power in our land. The friends of freedom are content to be envied, but envy not.

Kirzner presents his fullest single statement of a modern Austrian microeconomics, one built not on equilibrium but on the process that might produce it. Mainstream theory, he objects, treats the relevant knowledge as already given, so that Walrasian models cannot explain how mutually compatible plans ever emerge — a gap Arrow exposed in 1959, since if every agent takes prices as given, none is left to adjust them. His alternative fuses Mises's uncertainty-bearing entrepreneur to Hayek's knowledge problem: markets coordinate through alertness to profit opportunities left by earlier error, and 'sheer' ignorance is reduced not by costly search but by surprise. The framework recasts antitrust, distributive justice, welfare economics, and the Lange-Lerner socialism debate. Yet Kirzner keeps the conclusion guarded — the market tends toward coordination without guaranteeing it, so the case is against obstructing discovery rather than a proof of laissez faire.

The mathematical description of various states of equilibrium is mere play. The problem is the analysis of the market process.

Rome, the Hapsburg monarchy, the Soviet collapse—Sennholz ranges across empires to argue that ethnic and racial diversity is not inherently destabilizing. Plurality turns dangerous, he contends, only when political institutions abandon equal liberty for group favoritism, redistribution, or cultural fragmentation. Rome flourished through toleration, citizenship, and law until military centralization made it a garrison state; the Hapsburg polyglot dynasty endured through impartial reform until nationalism dissolved it. Lacking common ancestry, Americans depend instead on a shared system—Judeo-Christian values, equality before the law, individual freedom, economic opportunity—and it is this framework, he warns, that multiculturalism and the public schools erode when they teach citizens to understand themselves through separate group grievances rather than the principles that unite them.

Diversity in freedom makes for social peace, economic productivity, and great prosperity.

Europe's malaise, on Sennholz's February 1997 diagnosis, is self-inflicted—the predictable yield of welfare-state transfers, high mandated fringe benefits, and rigid labor rules dressed up as social progress. His argument is marginalist: labor costs do not cause unemployment until law and policy push total compensation above a worker's productive contribution, at which point the least productive are priced out of work. Comparing labor costs across Germany, France, Italy, Britain, and Spain, he traces stagnation and deficits to the benefit burdens heaped on business in the 1970s and '80s, then dismantles the rival explanations—computer technology as neo-Luddism, cheap foreign labor and immigrants as scapegoating, job-sharing as the fallacy that work is a fixed stock. Europe, he closes, is a warning the United States would be foolish to ignore.

Yet, no matter how high the labor costs may be, they do not cause unemployment provided they do not exceed labor productivity.

Dictators and avowed socialists are the obvious threats to liberty, but Sennholz's polemical diagnosis reaches further: the more durable enemies are the ordinary beneficiaries of coercive systems—government employees, public educators, tax consumers, and the recipients of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, Pell Grants, Social Security, and Medicare—whose incomes depend on the state's expansion. Translating political economy into a moral psychology of dependence, he argues that bureaucracy breeds a class with no interest in deregulation or fiscal restraint, and that when voting follows income interest, democracy becomes an engine of endless redistribution. Yet the essay refuses fatalism. Because these constituencies quarrel among themselves and defend only their own subsidies, no unified anti-liberty coalition can form, and a residual attachment to freedom survives in every human heart.

Power pollutes whatever it touches.

The share of national income flowing to America's top fifth rose sharply between 1968 and 1994—a fact Sennholz concedes before turning the standard explanation on its head. Rising inequality, he argues, is not a market failure calling for more redistribution but the predictable result of intervention itself: deficit spending crowds out private investment, consumes capital, lifts interest rates, and depresses wages while inflating returns to capital. He indicts Federal Reserve easy money for the era's financial bubble, adds corporate taxation and regulation that push firms toward downsizing and mergers, and notes how dual-earner professional households widen the gap further. From Roosevelt's New Deal through Johnson's war on poverty to Clinton's tax increases, egalitarian effort has produced its opposite, confirming his rule that political intervention in economic life is bound to make matters worse.

It is ironic that the spenders create the very pressures that cause interest rates to rise and capital income to soar.

The Machlup-Hutchison quarrel over economic method, Rothbard contends, missed the alternative that mattered most: Misesian praxeology. Both disputants assumed economic theory must be validated against observed data as in the natural sciences—Machlup by defending unrealistic assumptions vindicated through prediction, Hutchison by demanding empirical testing. Rothbard reframes the question entirely. Because economics begins not from unknown ultimate causes but from the self-evident axiom that human beings act, employing means toward chosen ends, its laws are deduced rather than experimentally confirmed; historical statistics, the joint product of many causes, illustrate theory but cannot falsify it. Along the way he clarifies psychic profit, the limits of money-maximizing assumptions, and Robbins's place in a praxeological lineage—and denies that Mises smuggles laissez-faire values into pure science, since policy follows only once citizens choose peace and abundance as ends.

For human action is not like physics; here, the ultimate assumptions are what is clearly known, and it is precisely from these given axioms that the corpus of economic science is deduced.

Freedom becomes 'inscrutable,' Sennholz contends, when a single word names two opposing principles: the individual's liberty against coercion, and the collective power exercised in the name of social provision. Setting the lovers of freedom against the devotees of power, he defines liberty concretely—freedom to move, worship, vote, and trade within the equal rights of others—and warns that economic freedom is the first casualty when tyranny advances. The essay's sharpest edge falls on the American welfare-state vocabulary of 'freedom from want,' traced unbroken from Franklin Roosevelt to Clinton as a coercive entitlement funded by taxpayers. Every entitlement, he insists, is a legal claim on another person's earnings; government is no deus ex machina. Invoking Madison's warning about gradual and silent encroachments, he concludes that liberty is lost less by open coup than by popular demand.

The evils of tyranny are seen and felt only by those who resist it.

Oskar Lange had been Mises's most formidable socialist antagonist; his final, posthumous treatise, Rothbard argues, quietly retreated toward the praxeology it once opposed. Reading Lange's late Political Economy, Rothbard tracks the concessions: that monetary calculation and profit-seeking made rational conduct explicit, that economic laws can be deduced from broad axioms of rational action, that Austrian utility theory is ordinal preference rather than hedonistic psychology. Each admission carries a threat Lange cannot face—if economics simply is praxeology, Marxism forfeits its claim to be the foundational science of historical economic forms. So Lange widens praxeology to swallow cybernetics, programming, and input-output analysis, grafting institutional categories onto the logic of choice. Rothbard reads the maneuver as evasion, and draws the larger point: the calculation debate was always also a contest over the foundations of economics.

In this way, Lange accepts the essential deductive Misesian methodology for economic theory: beginning with broadly general praxeological principles as axioms and from these elaborating necessary laws by logical deduction.

Not administrative regulation, not Coasean bargaining, not judicial balancing of 'social' costs—only a strict law of property, Rothbard argues, should govern air pollution. Reconstructing environmental tort law from libertarian first principles, he holds that coercion is justified solely against an overt physical invasion of another's person or justly held property: smoke, odor, dust, or excessive noise crossing a boundary, proven by strict causation beyond a reasonable doubt. His most distinctive move ties pollution to homesteading—a factory or airport that first emitted over unused land may acquire a prescriptive easement, leaving later arrivals to 'come to the nuisance.' From this follow his rejections of a general right to clean air, the ad coelum doctrine, statutory clean-air rules, vicarious 'deep pocket' liability, and binding class actions, and his proposal to collapse criminal law into a tort law prosecuted only by victims, heirs, or assigns.

In sum, no one has a right to clean air, but one does have a right to not have his air invaded by pollutants generated by an aggressor.