Eric Winsberg’s recent paper on “bureaucratic science” is a gift to anyone who’s spent the last few years watching “The Science™” harden into a credentialed priesthood with a budget, a comms shop, and a taste for policing dissent. Winsberg’s core move is to treat pandemic-era “gatekeeping” not as a mysterious moral lapse or a one-off emergency overreach, but as the predictable output of institutional incentives—exactly the sort of thing public choice theory was built to explain.
From a libertarian point of view, aside from being interesting, this is an indictment of the modern regime’s scientific apparatus, which is increasingly fused to state power, dependent on state money, and trained (by the logic of bureaucracy) to prefer status, coordination, and narrative control over open-ended truth-seeking.
Winsberg is careful: he’s not writing a libertarian manifesto. But his framework points straight toward Rothbard’s warning that once science becomes an arm of government, it stops being “science” in the classical sense and becomes administration—what you might call regime epistemology: a system for producing usable consensus on schedule, under budget, with minimal political risk.
Winsberg’s Point: Gatekeeping is Rational Inside Bureaucratic Incentives
Winsberg’s paper (in broad strokes) argues that during COVID-19, high-status scientists and institutions often acted as gatekeepers: not merely weighing evidence, but managing what counted as respectable inquiry and what got treated as disreputable, dangerous, or beyond the pale. It’s not that scientists are evil, but when science is embedded in bureaucratic and political structures, the incentives push toward behavior that looks like: message discipline, reputation defense, turf protection, and suppression-by-stigma.
This is exactly what a libertarian expects; it is not necessary to assume bad people to explain bad outcomes. The state doesn’t have to corrupt everyone personally; it corrupts the rules of the game. Once careers, grants, access, prestige, and policy influence flow through centralized channels, you get the normal pathologies of monopoly and bureaucracy—just in a lab coat.
Rothbard’s Point (Decades Earlier): State Science Becomes Bureaucratized Science
Long before “trust the experts” became a moral commandment, the libertarian tradition was warning that government patronage doesn’t merely support research—it reshapes it. Rothbard’s “Innovation and the State” reads today like prophecy: political control and public funding “bureaucratize” science and technology, redirecting effort toward what the state wants—measurable outputs, administrable programs, and projects that flatter power—rather than what a free society would spontaneously prioritize. That’s the deep continuity with Winsberg. Winsberg describes gatekeeping as a public-choice phenomenon inside modern scientific institutions; Rothbard explains why the institutions take that shape in the first place.
Why “Peer Review” Becomes a Cartel Mechanism
Winsberg’s gatekeeping story pairs naturally with a second, older libertarian suspicion: peer review isn’t just quality control—it’s also cartel enforcement when the surrounding ecosystem is monopolized and subsidized. Jerry Kirkpatrick’s article on “Drop Errors and The Trouble with Peer Review” frames peer review as vulnerable to groupthink, conformity pressures, and status protection—especially when publication and funding are tightly coupled and reputations are policed by the same narrow networks.
In a genuinely competitive knowledge marketplace, bad journals lose readers, bad certifiers lose clients, and dissent finds alternative institutions. But, under the modern research regime—where government money and credential hierarchies dominate—peer review easily becomes what Rothbard would call a guild structure: a way to control entry, punish deviation, and secure rents.
“Public Health” as a Bureaucratic Empire
Winsberg’s paper focuses on scientific gatekeeping, but the pandemic response made the adjacent reality impossible to miss: public health agencies behave like bureaucracies, not like humble truth-seekers. Libertarian writers here at Mises.org, such as Ryan McMaken, hammered this repeatedly in the covid era, describing how agencies such as the CDC respond to incentives—risk aversion, jurisdiction preservation, public messaging, and face-saving—rather than pure epistemic norms.
A libertarian translates that into plain English: bureaucracies are not truth machines; they are survival machines. They expand budgets, protect prestige, and minimize political exposure. When science becomes the legitimating language of bureaucracy, you get “scientific” pronouncements that behave like bureaucratic outputs: standardized, cautious in one direction (protect the agency), aggressive in another (discipline outsiders), and always sensitive to institutional reputation.
The Core Libertarian Conclusion Winsberg’s Model Implies
Winsberg’s public-choice lens makes a devastating implication hard to avoid: If gatekeeping is incentivized, then “more deference to experts” is not a solution—it’s fuel. The typical demand—just give the experts more power so they can manage misinformation—treats the problem as if it were a shortage of authority. A libertarian sees the opposite: authority is what converts scientific disagreement into political conflict, and political conflict into censorship pressure.
Put differently, when scientific institutions are entangled with the state, disagreement becomes seen as a threat—to policy, to budgets, to careers, to the legitimacy of the apparatus itself. Under those conditions, gatekeeping isn’t a tragic deviation from the scientific method. It’s a rational adaptation.
What a Libertarian Remedy Looks Like
A libertarian doesn’t propose “better gatekeepers.” He proposes competing institutions and decentralized accountability. Some practical directions (none requiring utopian virtue) would be:
- Defund the monopoly channels: The more research prestige and survival depend on centralized state funding, the more research norms will adapt to political constraints.
- Radical pluralism in publication: Break the journal cartel model by encouraging competing review standards, post-publication review, replication markets, prediction markets, and adversarial collaborations.
- Separate “science” from policy authority: Experts can advise; they should not rule. The moment advice becomes coercive policy, “scientific consensus” turns into a political weapon.
- Liability and transparency where it matters: When institutions make claims used to justify coercive rules, the burden should tilt toward open data, open methods, and reputational exposure, not toward silencing critics.
This is the moral of both Winsberg and Rothbard, even if they arrive by different roads: science flourishes when it is free, meaning not merely free to speak, but free from bureaucratic dependence.
The Uncomfortable Truth: “Scientific Bureaucracy” is the Regime’s Preferred Form of Science
In a free society, science is messy. It is argumentative, decentralized, and often embarrassing. That’s not a flaw; it’s how error correction happens. Bureaucratic science is tidy. It produces unified messaging, authoritative “guidance,” and a clear line between insiders and cranks. That’s why the state loves it. And that’s why, when Winsberg points to gatekeeping as a predictable response to incentives, he is describing something deeper than a pandemic-era scandal. He is describing the governing logic of modern technocracy.
A libertarian doesn’t merely “attack scientific bureaucracy” out of contrarian impulse. He attacks it because bureaucratized science is what you get when knowledge production is conscripted into the project of rule—and because, in the long run, nothing corrupts truth-seeking faster than turning it into an instrument of power.
