The Public Health Bureaucracy: Enemy of the Public, Enemy of Health

This article is adapted from Woods’s lecture at the Our Enemy, the Bureaucracy Mises Circle in Phoenix on Saturday, April 26.

Now, this being a Mises Institute event and on the bureaucracy, I decided that in advance of this event, I would reread Ludwig von Mises’s 1944 book published by Yale University Press—if you can believe that; it was a different world in those days—simply called Bureaucracy.

I want to apply it to the public health bureaucracy under covid.

The Tobacco Standard in Colonial America

One cannot study the history of colonial America, especially Virginia, without realizing the significance of tobacco. In 1612, John Rolfe was the first in Jamestown to grow marketable tobacco after obtaining superior seed from the West Indies, where the Spanish had outlawed the sale of tobacco seed to foreigners on penalty of death. Tobacco helped early colonial Virginia move from subsistence to exchange.