By Thiago V. S. Coelho

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 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........

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