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Here’s a letter to Science-Based Medicine.

Editor:

Dr. Jonathan Howard writes about covid and MAHA that “there was a coordinated effort to numb people to their risks, spearheaded by seemingly credible doctors and academics” (“The Novocaine Pushers: Numbing People to Obvious Dangers of COVID and MAHA,” October 29). I offer no comment here on MAHA, which differs categorically from opposition to covid hysteria. But because I’m among the academics whom Dr. Howard accuses of being part of an alleged “coordinated effort” to resist covid hysteria, I have a word or two to say on that front.

I was no part of any such coordinated effort. My opposition to covid hysteria – and to the resulting lockdowns and mandates – resulted exclusively from my ability to reason, observe, and understand both statistics and economics.

It was clear as early as March 2020 that covid’s dangers are concentrated overwhelmingly among the elderly. Nevertheless, the public-health establishment, the major media, and (most) governments heedlessly hurled everyone into a panic by treating covid as if it would kill us all unless we obeyed their commands without question, including retreating into isolation – isolation that had its own very real dangers that covidians ignored. The fact that Dr. Howard apparently can’t conceive that individuals such as me – and especially ones far more skilled and knowledgeable than me, including Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, Scott Atlas, and John Ioannidis – can reach conclusions different from his own unless they are “coordinated” by some sinister architect reflects only the childish mind common to all conspiracy theorists.

Who, I ask, was this mysterious coordinator? (Or was it a cabal of coordinators?!) And where is Dr. Howard’s evidence of such coordination? He doesn’t say; he merely asserts that it must have been so – which is remarkable given that his piece is published at a site that boasts in its very title that it is based in science.

Dr. Howard further discredits himself by accusing those of us who tried to calm what we sincerely believed (correctly!) to be the unwarranted and lethal covid hysteria as having “yawned” at covid. Nonsense. Drs. Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Gupta authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which took covid’s actual dangers seriously, as it carefully counselled how best to deal with these dangers. Scott Atlas similarly advised the Trump White House that public health would be better promoted by an approach more targeted and science-based than the reckless one-size-fits-all, let’s-shutter-civilization-until-the-disease-is-conquered commands favored by the likes of the Chinese Communist Party and bureaucrats at the World Health Organization.

No physician who is truly science-based interprets disagreement with his prescribed course of action against an ailment as ‘yawning’ in the face of that ailment.

Far from being an example of “science-based medicine,” Dr. Howard’s screed is a nest of baseless insinuations designed to inflame rather than to inform.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

The post Covidian Myth-making Re-emerges appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

~ Ayn Rand from her 1967 lecture "The Wreckage of the Consensus," collected in the book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

It is not publicly known who nowadays is running LewRockwell.com (LRC). But it is apparent that it is no longer Lew Rockwell himself. As ex-Mises Institute president Tom DiLorenzo pointed out, after seeing LRC “Publish[] a Communistic Screed about ‘The Need to End Capitalism,‘”: “I have no idea who is editing LewRockwell.com these days.”¹

Further evidence that no one is minding the ship, or at least that Rockwell is not: Jeffrey Tucker, whose name was quietly removed from LRC’s columnist page after his 2011 ouster from the Mises Institute, now gets favorable play on LRC, as I pointed out recently:²

Case in point, despite the obvious bad blood between Rockwell/Mises and Jeffrey Tucker, for some reason on Wednesday this week LRC ran a Tucker article. [Namely: Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Since Lockdowns, a 12% GDP Loss; Half of US Dollar Purchasing Power Stolen,” Brownstone Journal (June 2, 2026), reposted at LRC on June 10, 2026.] It is apparent the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing and Rockwell is not running LRC. I suppose the left hand did not realize Tucker’s LRC archives had been disappeared and memory-holed Orwell-style after he was ousted from MI in November 2011.³ [Update: Tucker’s articles apparently are still there, but the link on the Columnists page has been removed to make them harder to find.]

Not only are Tucker’s own Brownstone pieces reprinted there,⁴ but other LRC articles cite Tucker’s work approvingly.⁵

And the archives at LewRockwell.com still show literally thousands of articles and blog posts written by those now ousted from Mises Institute circles (and of course LRC and Mises.org/Mises Institute have always been connected at the hip except LRC was apparently for-profit (even though every LRC page has “Please Donate To Support LRC” buttons), explaining why LRC articles would link to Amazon books, even those published by the Mises Institute, and add the Amazon referral code for LRC to financially benefit LRC instead of the Mises Institute):⁶ Doug French, Jeff Deist, Tom DiLorenzo, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Stephan Kinsella (permalinked in case they, too, like Tucker’s, get disappeared). Three of these are former Presidents of the Mises Institute. Hans was its only ever Distinguished Senior Fellow. I was a Senior Fellow.

Hoppe’s LRC archives for articles alone contain dozens of articles spanning from April 1999 to June 2025. None since Hoppe was outrageously stripped of his Senior Distinguished Fellow designation by the Mises Institute.⁷

Related

• Kinsella, Lew Rockwell Festschrift in the Works—Sans Hoppe, French, Deist, DiLorenzo … (June 12, 2026)
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?,” Property and Freedom Journal (March 25, 2026)
• Hoppe, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?: Postscript,” Property and Freedom Journal (April 17, 2026)
• Kinsella, Hoppe Removed as Mises Institute Senior Distinguished Fellow (April 1, 2026)
• Fernando Chiocca, Hoppe Named Rothbard Brasil Distinguished Eternal Fellow (April 2026)
• Kinsella, No Cardboard for Hoppe (May 2026)
• Kinsella, Mises Institute Oral History Project: The Lost Rothbard History (2013) (April 17, 2026)
• Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 2, 2026)
• Tom DiLorenzo, LewRockwell.com Publishes a Communistic Screed about “The Need to End Capitalism” (June 11, 2026)
• KOL486 | Mark Edge Show: Kinsella on Hoppe and the Mises Institute (April 2026)

1. Tom DiLorenzo, “LewRockwell.com Publishes a Communistic Screed about “The Need to End Capitalism”,” Property and Freedom Society (June 11, 2026).
2. See Stephan Kinsella, “Lew Rockwell Festschrift in the Works—Sans Hoppe, French, Deist, DiLorenzo …,” Property and Freedom Society (June 12, 2026).
3. See Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 2, 2026). See also Kinsella, No Cardboard for Hoppe; Kinsella, Hoppe Removed as Mises Institute Senior Distinguished Fellow (April 1, 2026); Kinsella, Mises Institute Oral History Project: The Lost Rothbard History (2013) (April 17, 2026); Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?”, Property and Freedom Journal (March 25, 2026); Hoppe, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?: Postscript,” Property and Freedom Journal (April 17, 2026).
4. See also Jeffrey A. Tucker, “The Coup, the Calamity, and the Conspiracy,” LewRockwell.com (Oct. 7, 2025), reprinted from Brownstone Institute.
5. John Leake, “Lockdowns: Point Was to Delay Natural Immunity, Not To Protect the Vulnerable,” LewRockwell.com (Sept. 7, 2026), citing Tucker’s Brownstone report favorably.
6. See, e.g., Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Considerations and Reflections of a Veteran Reactionary Libertarian,” LewRockwell.com (March 29, 2025), reprinted from Mises.org, with Amazon links bearing LRC’s affiliate code to the Mises Institute editions of Hoppe’s Economy, Society, and History, Getting Libertarianism Right, and Economic Science and the Austrian Method; Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “The Greatness of Man, Economy, and State,” LewRockwell.com (June 4, 2025), linking with LRC’s affiliate code to the Mises Institute’s Scholar’s Editions of Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State and Mises’s Human Action.
7. Kinsella, Hoppe Removed as Mises Institute Senior Distinguished Fellow.

Guatemala’s Universidad Francisco Marroquín publishes a series called A Companion to… for notable free-market economists. A few months ago, they asked me to write a chapter for A Companion to Murray Rothbard, forthcoming next year. I’ve just finished my draft on “Repairing Rothbardian Monopoly Theory.” Here’s the intro, plus a few choice passages.

1. Rothbard’s Rejectionism

After leading with the theory of perfect competition, economics textbooks standardly add a “corrective” chapter on the evils of monopoly. While they occasionally mention government-created monopoly, the focus is almost always on the harm of free-market monopoly, and the necessity of antitrust laws to combat such monopoly. A free-market monopoly is a business that manages to control a whole industry, and uses its control to slash output and raise prices. Later textbook chapters move on to markets with varying degrees of “monopoly power” – and broadly conclude that as monopoly power goes up, market performance goes down. The moral: Free markets are only optimal in an extreme polar case. The further the real world strays from that case, the more suboptimal they become – and the more regulation improves the free-market outcome.

Murray Rothbard rejects this picture, using three different sets of arguments. (Rothbard 2009) First, he maintains that textbook monopoly theory is literal nonsense. On the free market, there is no coherent way to distinguish a monopoly price from a competitive price. Second, he argues that the size and number of firms is an optimal response to economies of scale and consumer demand. When economies of scale are low and consumer demand is high, you optimally get a lot of small firms; when economies of scale are high and consumer demand is low, you optimally get a few large firms. Finally, Rothbard maintains that when firms have tried to gain free-market monopolies via collusion or predation, economic history shows that they reliably failed. The best check on free-market monopoly is the free market itself. (Rothbard 1986a, 1986b, 1986c, 1986d)

In this essay, I critically assess Rothbard’s critique of the textbook account. His first and most fundamental argument – that textbook monopoly theory is literal nonsense – is not only false. It contradicts his third argument. How can history “show” that market forces prevent free-market monopoly if free-market monopoly is impossible by definition? His second and third arguments, however, are very strong. Free competition works far better than “perfect” competition. Market structure is indeed a functional response to costs and demand. The main way firms gain and maintain monopolies on the free market is by doing an exceptionally good job of controlling costs and pleasing consumers. When they try to gain and maintain monopoly by the alternate path of collusion and predation, they rarely succeed for long. So while Rothbard’s most original contribution to monopoly theory is wrong, bordering on crackpottish, his pro-market, anti-government vision is fundamentally sound and wise.

2. The “Illusion” of Monopoly Price

[…]

But it is Rothbard’s critique that is utterly fallacious. Horizontal demand curves are not only logically possible; we commonly observe them. Have you ever managed to sell additional hours of your time without cutting your price? Then you have personally experienced horizontal labor demand.

More fundamentally, even if horizontal demand were impossible, it is still perfectly coherent to claim that monopoly power decreases as demand gets closer to horizontal. Rothbard specifically denies this:

We cannot compare or classify the curves on the basis of degrees of elasticity… once the case of pure competition is rejected. For praxeology cannot establish quantitative laws, only qualitative ones. (Rothbard 2009: 722)

But “Markets work better as demand gets closer to horizontal” is a qualitative law! And the impossibility point would be irrelevant even if it were true. No human being has ever crafted a perfect sphere, yet many products become more useful as they get closer to spherical. Similarly, even if no demand curves are perfectly horizontal, one can coherently claim that markets work better as demand gets closer to horizontal.

[…]

4. Some Economic History of Monopoly and Competition

[…]

Crucially, it only makes sense to say “monopolies collapsed on the free market” if it is meaningful to speak about monopoly on the free market. In these lectures on American economic history, Rothbard at least temporarily forgets his misguided a priori theory that free-market monopoly is “illusory” by definition. This in turn enables him to review the facts and conclude “Monopoly on the free market is fragile” instead of “Monopoly on the free market is a contradiction in terms” – as well as “Firms get and stay big on the free market by keeping prices low and output high” rather than “Whatever firms on the free market do is by definition ideal.”

[…]

The key question is simply: Can we trust Rothbard’s economic history? While economic analysis of the period is surprisingly sparse, the existing literature strongly confirms his overall story. The broad reviews of large samples of industries during the Gilded Age agree that so-called “monopolies” increased production and cut prices much more than the rest of the U.S. economy. (DiLorenzo 1985; DeLorme et al. 1997) Mergers-to-monopoly (a) sometimes managed to raise prices in the short run, but they reliably failed to do so in the long run; (b) quickly attracted large-scale new entry; and (c) very rarely earned supernormal profits. (Dewing 1914, 1921; Lamoreaux 1985) Unlike Rothbard, mainstream researchers acknowledge a few exceptions to these rules, but there is still a strong consensus on the rules.

Just allowing anyone to do anything does indeed produce effects that some will not like. Fortunately we also know that capitalists are greedy little buggers. If there’s even a sniff of being able to make money out of what people do not like then there they’ll be:

Nelissa Moukoudi, 19, a university student in Canada, noticed a shift once she joined Instagram and TikTok.

“My social life completely plummeted and it felt like my life was only [using] social media and school,” she said.

Tired of fighting for self-control, Moukoudi downloaded Opal, an app that forces users to solve math problems before reopening distracting apps. It is one of a growing number of companies in the sprawling digital detox industry that is enticing users – ideally paying ones – by promising to keep them off their devices. The industry is valued at nearly $1bn and is estimated to grow to nearly $8bn by 2035.

Many of these companies are hoping to capitalize on gen Z’s growing weariness about the devices and social media platforms they grew up with.

Problem solved. Those who wish to scroll may do so, those who wish to be prevented from doing so may prevent themselves. There is no need for a bureaucracy to define the algorithms; the Lanyards do not get their foot in the door en route to censorship; everyone gets to enjoy life as they wish. Which is, you know, the aim and purpose of this civilisation thing.

Well, OK, perhaps the Lanyards will be a tad irate about not being able to censor but then there are pleasures to everything.

The problem is solved. Solved by just leaving unmitigated markets alone. For the solution to markets is markets.

Tim Worstall