French, Douglas E. When Movements Become Rackets and Other Swindles: The PFS Trilogy. Papinian Press / Property and Freedom Society, 2025. 75 pp. ISBN: 979-8-9890306-9-9.

Douglas E. French has produced a short but merciless study of how ideals curdle into rackets. When Movements Become Rackets and Other Swindles: The PFS Trilogy, published on 18 September 2025, gathers three of his Bodrum lectures into a single text. French does not write as an outsider throwing stones. He is a former banker, once president of the Mises Institute, and a man who has seen first-hand how movements can slide from principle into self-preservation. This small book — seventy-five pages including preface, foreword, and supporting material — is both brisk and unsettling.

The foreword by Jeffrey A. Tucker, “The Nonprofit Racket” (p. xi), sets the tone. Tucker recalls Dante’s Inferno: “Dante Alighieri in his book Inferno places those who betray benefactors in the deepest circle of hell. If that is true, the place is likely overpopulated with the managers and executives of nonprofit organizations” (p. xi). It is a bleak image, but it captures something real. He notes how groups like the ASPCA live off their names long after their causes are won: “The ASPCA is a main beneficiary of the tendency for the racket to benefit forever just from a name” (p. xi). Tucker’s point is not that all nonprofits are corrupt, but that permanence itself tempts them into becoming rent-seekers. One reads this and recognises the pathology instantly in universities, charities, and political institutes alike.

French’s own preface (p. xxi) is a more personal account of how he came to the subject. He describes himself as “a naive guy of midwestern upbringing” who found his way to Hoppe’s Bodrum salon and discovered a world in which candour still mattered. He credits Rothbard’s memos as the spark for his racket trilogy and recalls his early years at the Mises Institute, where even treasures like Rothbard’s Strictly Confidential went unsold while donors funded fluffier projects (p. xxiii). His dedication — “To the racketeers of all movements—and their victims” (p. 7) — and his choice of Machiavelli for an epigraph (“Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions,” p. 9) leave little doubt that the book is both satire and warning.

The first chapter, “How Movements Turn Into Rackets” (p. 2), is the strongest. French begins with Rothbard’s 1961 warning: “When the latter happens, the gathering of money begins to become the end, not the means, and the organization begins to take on the dimension of a ‘racket’” (p. 10). His examples are carefully chosen. The Southern Poverty Law Center began with litigation for the poor, but French notes the obvious shift: “The very name Southern Poverty Law Center might lead one to think that its mission was to help poor people who are having trouble in the legal system. Dees and the SPLC soon realized that cause didn’t raise much money” (p. 3). Instead, the SPLC found that “hate” was lucrative, and it became a permanent hate-monitoring business. French then turns to Hillsdale College and the scandals of George Roche III, and to FEE under Leonard Read, who famously preferred cultivating “housewives” to developing serious scholars. The argument is not that such organisations do nothing good, but that their institutional survival comes first. It is a bleak but persuasive conclusion.

Chapter two, “The Financial Newsletter Racket” (p. 13), exposes a different world: investment newsletters and tip-sheets. French shows how easily they slip into fraud. He cites a 2002 case of an email pump-and-dump that promised: “DOUBLE YOUR MONEY ON MAY 22ND ON THIS SUPER INSIDER TIP” (p. 15). The perpetrators were eventually fined, but not before investors lost heavily. French links this to Mark Twain’s experience in Nevada’s mining boom: “Mine owners didn’t care what the paper reported, provided they just said something” (p. 16). The humour masks a serious point: words and hype can be monetised even when the underlying assets are worthless. French’s “Eight P’s” of resource stock valuation — promotion, people, property, place, politics, paper, promise, and price — miss out the essential “rock” itself (p. 17). It is a neat bit of banker’s wit, but also a devastating indictment of shallow financial analysis.

The third and final chapter, “Teaching the Unteachable: The Teaching Entrepreneurship Racket” (p. 27), targets academia. He opens with Ludwig von Mises’ blunt observation: “An entrepreneur cannot be trained” (p. 27). Yet universities across the world now offer “Social Entrepreneurship in Action” (p. 28) and dozens of similar courses. French’s argument is simple: entrepreneurship is not learned in a classroom. “A college degree is certification that the student has learned what was and is” (p. 29), not that he can bear risk or forecast uncertainty. He contrasts the authentic innovators — Jobs, Musk — with the frauds of recent years: Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, who flourished in academic and media ecosystems designed to promote hype (p. 35). If the entrepreneurial spirit can be channelled into lecture halls, French suggests, it is no longer the real thing.

The book concludes with a short bibliography (p. 37), citing Mises and Rothbard, an “About the Author” note (p. 43) detailing French’s own career, and an “About the Property and Freedom Society” section (p. 45) that contextualises the Bodrum lectures. These do not add new substance but help situate the work within its intellectual world.

The value of When Movements Become Rackets lies not in discovering something wholly new but in stating plainly what most people already suspect. Institutions — whether ideological, financial, or academic — can decay into rackets. Rothbard saw it. Tucker frames it sharply. French illustrates it with humour and a banker’s realism. In seventy-five pages he manages what many larger books do not: he makes the reader wary of every institution that claims permanence.

It is not an uplifting book. Nor does it aim to be. But it is sharp, unsparing, and worth reading. My copy also benefits from typo corrections, of which there are more than a few, in Stephan Kinsella’s own hand.

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