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.

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

Economists have been studying and writing about government bureaucracy for quite a long time. Ludwig von Mises became the first “modern” economist to write a book on the subject with his 1944 Bureaucracy. The public choice school of economics, founded by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, among others, has produced a huge literature on the economics of bureaucracy, much of which is complementary to Mises’s pathbreaking work.

Schoolchildren learn that there are three branches of government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. In actual practice, however, there are four branches of government.

The fourth is what for decades now has been called a “headless fourth branch of government,” the bureaucracy.

New data published in early 2025 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on nearly 24 million people insured in the Marketplaces at the beginning of this year may have sparked considerable enthusiasm among supporters of expanding government influence in healthcare.

[Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative by Alasdair MacIntyre (Cambridge University Press, 2016; 322 pp.)]

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.

As debt piles up, the cost of insuring exposure to U.S. government debt has been rising steadily.