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.

Mises, in that book, identifies fundamental problems with bureaucracy that make bureaucratic management both inefficient and arbitrary, and that are also comparable to the problems faced by pure socialism.

Now, by pure socialism, we don’t mean Denmark and Sweden.

Pure socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. And the problem, as the Misesians in the room may well know, with pure socialism, according to Mises, is not the problem most people think it is.

Most people think, “If I live in a society based on equality, why would I work hard if they’re going to distribute the money equally?” That’s not the main problem. The main problem is much more fundamental, and it’s a problem that bureaucracies in their own way also have to overcome.

The problem that a planning board in a socialist society tries in vain to solve is this: If one entity owns all the means of production—that would be capital goods, factories, all these sorts of things—it’s impossible to engage in economizing behavior. Because if one entity owns it all, there’s no buying and selling. Why would there be buying and selling? You already own everything. Without buying and selling, there are no prices, because prices emerge from the process of buying and selling. And without prices, all of our allocation decisions are arbitrary and wasteful.

The money prices that buying and selling give rise to are the means by which we are able to calculate profit and loss, to compare the value of the outputs of a production process with the cost of the inputs used to make them. And that way we can see when we’re wasting resources. That’s what losses mean. At that point, we either stop or modify what we’re doing. Or when we’re earning profits and thereby learn that we’ve been adding value to society, we continue or even expand what we’re doing.

Every bureaucracy is in a similar kind of situation. A bureaucracy generates no sales revenue. It’s given a budget that comes from taxes, but it’s not generating sales revenue, so it’s not getting feedback from the public.

It can’t calculate profit and loss. It can’t tell us whether what it’s doing is value productive for consumers, and society has no way of knowing which of its activities add value and which of its activities delete value. It’s all arbitrary.

Now, of course, it knows that it can do more if it spends more money. We all know that. But it has no way of calculating whether, from the point of view of society, the most value productive use of the money in question lies in the further expansion of that bureaucracy’s activities, as opposed to some other course of action. These are the kinds of problems that face what we might call mundane bureaucracies, like the department of motor vehicles or the sewer department. And these seem to be mostly what Mises has in mind, but the public health bureaucracy is of a different caliber from these.

The public health bureaucracy, unlike the department of motor vehicles, is at its root ideological.

Now, if I had said that in 1880, no one would’ve understood what I meant, because in 1880, the primary concern of the public health bureaucracy was getting the horse manure off the streets. And, you know, imagine living in a time when there was a bureaucracy you could actually agree with. “Hey, you know what? As a matter of fact, I do want to get the horse manure off the streets. That I’m on board with.”

There’s nothing really ideological about that. But if you look at the current public health bureaucracy, it is ideological to its core. And our dear friend Tom DiLorenzo wrote a book 25 years ago called From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America in which he laid out the ideological bent of the public health establishment. And if you had read that book, you would not have been surprised at how the establishment handled the covid matter. We have lived through his predictions in the past few years.

Don’t forget, racism is a public health emergency. That’s an ideological statement. Gun violence is a public health emergency, and therefore we have to implement all the left-wing responses to that.

If you go to conferences of big public health associations, you will look at the program and no doubt you’ll find a handful of physicians, but it is not uncommon or out of the ordinary or unheard of that your keynote speaker will be the head of the AFL-CIO, which has nothing to do with anything if we’re talking about public health.

But public health “experts” will say things like, “Well, we need to have a redistributive welfare state because that contributes to health.” You can already see where all this is going.

The policies they recommend really are not coming from a place of health. They’re coming from a place of very predictable, typical left-wing ideology. The problem that we need to fear from the public health bureaucracy is not so much this Misesian one, that it’s going to use resources arbitrarily because it has no consumer feedback. It’s more the complete unresponsiveness to the public and its dedication to rule following.

Mises emphasizes that bureaucracies are all about following the rules, which by the way, is how left-wing radicals used to try to break aspects of society they didn’t like. In the ’60s, they wanted welfare payments to be made much, much more liberally, so they overwhelmed the bureaucracy. They just overwhelmed them with cases of people coming in, and they didn’t know what to do, so they liberalized the whole process. They understood that bureaucracies are rule followers. You’re going to find that bureaucracies are not responsive to changing conditions.

If the rule says you have to wear a mask, and there is no evidence this does anything, this has no effect on them. It has no effect, nothing. They don’t have to worry that the public might be getting antsy or upset. They don’t have to respond to them. They have no need to respond to public unhappiness.

In the case of covid, we had a bureaucracy overseeing a destructive campaign that harmed people’s health, their financial and emotional well-being, and the normal functioning of society. But even then, no market feedback mechanism existed that could make them stop.

Now, a good portion of the altogether justified complaints against the public health bureaucracy involved its disregard of the collateral damage of its covid-19 monomania. And as we’ll see in a few moments, this horrific problem was entirely predictable and would not have surprised Ludwig von Mises at all.

So-called public health institutions purported to be protecting the public against a deadly disease, but they generally failed even to acknowledge the many collateral harms done to society in the process, harms that are so well-known as hardly to need mentioning, but which, for the sake of completeness, I shall briefly catalog. The collateral effects on society of these radical interventions can probably never be fully calculated. Some of them, like the way these policies ruined friendships and pitted family members against one another, cannot be quantified in the first place.

In some countries, two years went by with no education of any kind for children. Not Zoom school, nothing. Nothing. In Myanmar, we heard stories of people resorting to eating snakes and rats. What was done to Africa was a crime against humanity all its own, and I recommend a book by a leftist incidentally named Toby Green. The book is called The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality, and it’s about the lockdown policies as crimes against the poorest peoples and countries.

Kevin Bardosh did a very comprehensive review of the lockdown harms and summarized them this way: “The promotion of lengthy social distancing restrictions by governments and scientific experts during the Covid crisis had severe consequences for hundreds of millions of people. Many original predictions are broadly supported by the cumulative research data. . . : a rise in non-Covid excess mortality, mental health deterioration, child abuse and domestic violence, widening global inequality, large increases in debt, food insecurity, lost educational opportunities, unhealthy lifestyle behaviours, increased loneliness and social polarization, democratic backsliding, and human rights violations. . . . The pandemic response leaves behind a legacy of poverty, mental health illness, learning loss, debt, food insecurity, social polarization, erosion of respect for human rights and elevated excess mortality for non-Covid health conditions.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research says that the lockdown unemployment shock—what they mean by lockdown unemployment shock is the tens of millions of people suddenly thrown out of work—is projected to result in somewhere between 840,000 and 1.22 million excess deaths over the next 15 to 20 years.

The New York Times, as a direct result of the lockdowns, conceded that there would be 1.4 million excess tuberculosis deaths, half a million excess HIV deaths, and 385,000 malaria deaths due to complications emanating from the lockdowns.

Now, during the covid years, we heard all kinds of state propaganda about social distancing and masks and why your kids couldn’t play on the playground. But what we did not hear were stories about people who suffered under those restrictions, and there were more of them than we can possibly count. They couldn’t talk to their neighbors and friends. They couldn’t say anything in public. The media had no sympathy for them. That was what we endured.

Now, none of this would have surprised Mises. Mises explained all the way back in 1944 that it was in the nature of bureaucracy to neglect collateral effects and instead to focus obsessively on whatever the area of immediate concern was.

Mises says: “Governments encourage the specialists who limit their observations to a narrow field without bothering about the further consequences of a policy.”

The labor economist deals only with the immediate results of prolabor policies; the farm economist, only with the rise of agricultural prices. Today, in most countries, each department follows its own course, working against the endeavors of the other departments. The department of labor aims at higher wage rates and at lower living costs. But the same administration’s department of agriculture aims at higher food prices. The department of commerce tries to raise domestic commodity prices through tariffs.

One department fights against monopoly, but other departments are eager to bring about, through tariffs, patents, and other means, the conditions required for the building of monopolistic restraint. And each department refers to the expert opinion of those specialized in its respective field.

Now, there’s plenty more we can say about bureaucracy that rings true when we apply it to public health. Bureaucracies are rigid, and they prioritize compliance with rules. Likewise, bureaucracies seek to expand their scope and justify their existence, often exaggerating problems or creating new ones to maintain relevance and power.

Here’s Mises: “The bureaucrat’s opportunity to derive profit from his activities is much greater than that of the average citizen. Every expansion of government activities increases his chances for promotion and power.”

Was this an opportunity to do precisely that? I mean, inflexibility, obsession with rule following, and grasping for more power? That sounds a teensy-weensy bit like what we observed during those years. I’ll never forget Anthony Fauci being deeply, profoundly angry when a federal judge said, “You don’t have to wear masks on interstate travel, particularly airplanes anymore.”

He was so angry about that. And he said, “The Department of Justice has nothing to do with this. This is a public health matter.”

So in his view, we should be living under a dictatorship of “public health.” We shouldn’t have these judges. And nobody complained at that time, “Oh, he doesn’t respect the separation of powers!”

No, they only say that when it’s the wrong ox being gored. They don’t care about that principle. So he thought public health ought to be superior to the legal system. That sounds a little bit, to me, like grasping for more power.

By the way, let’s not be deceived. The reason they were afraid of the masks coming off on the planes was not that they thought we would all get sick. It was that they knew we would not get sick, and then we would start asking other questions.

Probably the most consistent offense of the public health bureaucracy was the nonstop spread of propaganda, even as it had the nerve to accuse other individuals and institutions of engaging in misinformation. But this too is to be expected from bureaucracy.

“Propaganda,” wrote Mises, “is one of the worst evils of bureaucracy and socialism. Propaganda is always the propaganda of lies, fallacies, and superstitions.”

Well, the greatest superstition of all was this: Follow the rules of the public health bureaucracy, and things will go well for you. Despite the obvious uselessness of these rules, you’ll avoid the plague. Disregard them, and you’ll get what’s coming to you.

Their supporters held a superstitious belief in what the state could accomplish. If the state says it can protect you from a deadly pathogen and maintain your health, who’s to say it can’t? But the covid situation was really perfect for the kind of people who tend to populate government agencies, particularly in the area of health. It involves so-called experts dictating to the stupid rubes.

That’s their preferred model of government right there, and it allows them to ridicule the working-class people they despise. Why, if these backward hicks would just follow the science, we’d be out of this already.

I will conclude by pointing out that we have accomplished some things.

We have accomplished some things just by being people.

The bureaucracy has a lot of advantages over us, including an endless supply of other people’s money. But we, the disorganized masses, accomplished things. For example, those so-called vaccine passports that popped up in a number of American cities. You know for a fact they wanted to keep those in place in perpetuity, and they hardly lasted at all.

We all know that was not a health measure. I mean, come on. We all know that. The real point was to make your life so miserable that you would just surrender.

Well, enough of us didn’t comply that the whole thing collapsed, and that’s not a small thing. That’s a miracle. After what was done to us, that’s a miracle, and that should give us hope. That should turn that black pill into a gray one, that all is not lost. Who would have predicted in 2020 that one of the best-known lockdown critics, Jay Bhattacharya, would be the director of the National Institutes of Health a few years later?

No one would have predicted that.

So what it comes down to is we have more skeptics than ever of the official bureaucracies because what we observed during these crazy years, that stuff was not how decent and honest people running agencies aimed at improving the public welfare behave, and that’s obvious to everybody.

So we can run society according to the rules of private property and freedom, or we can run it by bureaucratic decree, and the covid episode reminded us of just how important that choice is. Thank you very much.