https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
The closest thing to an involved government wasn't really in favour of trading in immaterial goods at all. Something close to government intervention did happen in one of the two involved government systems after the bubble popped, but it was effectively unratified and useless (the local equivalent of a supreme court even ruled that the government couldn't interfere with the tulip trade).
The entire thing was just a club of a few hundred relatively rich people throwing themselves at a bubble. Most people didn't have the means or money to participate.
The "mania" name is an insult to those who partook as much as it described the trade bubble. It's not related to the modern psychological definition of "mania" that came much later.
I don't think a city of more than 100,000 would be possible without a substantial amount of civil management.
Deciding with bits are for streets and which bits are for buildings needs an arbiter of som sort for starters.
If a place had a sewer it probably had a government.
Sometimes I like to recall that somewhere in Tenochtitlan there must have been some Aztec administrator doing a job like making sure the road signs are repainted every few years.
In Ireland, for as long as it has existed with its own government, the two have been pretty heavily intertwined.
The fact that it's marketed as a story about psychology and mania rather than government policy gone awry is arguably itself a story about psychology and mania.
People have a need to feel like the forces that control them know what they're doing.
Libertarians cannot agree on anything between themselves, they are programmed to hate the government, the hate for each other and humanity as a whole is just a natural consequence of that.
> From the article in the comment above, it seems like lack of government involvement is a factor.
We now have a government that is unwilling to control market excess because the government and big business have merged into one. Actually, the government has resigned from that "core function".
No. It’s a story that has been repeated with beanie babies, baseball cards, and crypto crap
I expect the people involved cared a lot, but it looks like more of a cool curio than an event that could have had serious fallout. Paying $200k for a tulip looks quite tame compared to Blue Poles.
