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20250323 – American Leviathan
MAIN IDEA:
Ned Ryun’s American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism explores the historical and ideological roots of what Ryun terms the “Administrative State”—a sprawling, unelected bureaucracy that he argues has come to dominate American governance, fundamentally altering the nation’s founding principles. The central thesis of the book is that this shift represents a quiet but profound regime change, moving away from the constitutional republic designed by the Founding Fathers toward a form of progressive authoritarianism. Ryun asserts that this transformation, driven by a self-anointed class of intellectual elites and technocrats, has eroded representative democracy and individual liberties, replacing them with a centralized, unaccountable system of control.
The book traces the origins of this “Leviathan” back to the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, when influential thinkers and politicians began advocating for a more active federal government staffed by experts to address societal challenges. Ryun highlights pivotal moments in this evolution, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, which massively expanded federal agencies and their reach, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s, which further entrenched bureaucratic power. These developments, he argues, shifted authority away from elected officials accountable to the people and into the hands of a permanent administrative class, insulated from democratic oversight. Ryun frames this as a betrayal of the Founders’ vision, where sovereignty was meant to reside with citizens through their chosen representatives.
Ryun’s critique is not merely historical; he presents the Administrative State as an ongoing threat to American liberty, describing it as a self-perpetuating entity that prioritizes its own power over the public good. He warns that this system has grown so pervasive that it now touches nearly every aspect of daily life, from regulations on business to personal freedoms, often without the consent of the governed. The book poses a stark choice for modern Americans: either reclaim the republic by dismantling this bureaucratic behemoth or resign themselves to its expanding dominance, which he sees as a form of soft tyranny masked as benevolent governance.
In terms of solutions, Ryun suggests that the path forward lies in bold executive action. He posits that a reform-minded president, wielding constitutional authority, could take decisive steps to dismantle the Administrative State, restoring power to elected bodies and the people. This call to action reflects his belief that the original framework of limited government and self-governance remains viable, but only if citizens and leaders actively resist the progressive authoritarianism embedded in the current system. American Leviathan thus serves as both a historical analysis and a rallying cry, urging a return to the principles of liberty and accountability that Ryun sees as the bedrock of the American experiment.
MY TAKE ON IT:
It is one of those rare books that was published just in time for the massive reforms that began with Donald Trump’s second presidency. I fully agree with the author’s assessment of the current state of American society and completely support the impending massive change.
However, I think that the majority of people, probably even the author, are missing the global scale of this development. The American administrative state established as a result of the revolution of 1932 (FDR) was just a part of an intellectual and popular movement that resulted in the establishment of societies based on a bureaucratic hierarchical power that substituted previously dominant aristocratic hierarchical power. In different countries, it came in various forms: fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, communism in Russia and China, the New Deal in America, and a variety of socialism implementations in countries all over the world. The extreme forms of Bureaucracy, which demonstrated their inefficiency and ineffectiveness everywhere, were somewhat softened by the end of the 20th century, but they remain dominant.
An interesting part of the development of Bureaucracy was that it seemed to be a perfect fit with the computerization of society. Initially, it was believed to allow perfect planning and management of production processes and all other necessary activities, such as education, science, healthcare, and so on. However, the processes in all these areas are too complex to be centrally controlled. After initial improvements, when regulations limited the extremes of the unlimited free market corrupted by limited government interference when various externalities and monopolies caused harm to a significant part of the population, the Bureaucracy moved into the area of diminishing returns. Currently, excessive regulation is restricting productivity improvements and even reducing productivity. Indeed, as with Aristocracy, which outlived its usefulness as protectors and conquerors with the development of mass armies, Bureaucrats and their regulations are becoming redundant with the development of mass data processing. This brings us to the necessity of using revolutionary measures to drastically reduce it before completely substituting it with AI-controlled, minimalist regulations. It is this revolutionary movement that we are observing now in the USA and will continue to observe further all over the world.
20250209 – Oligarchy
MAIN IDEA:
The main idea of Jeffrey A. Winters’ book “Oligarchy” is that throughout history, oligarchs have been defined, empowered, and threatened by their wealth. Winters explores the core concept that the primary motive of all oligarchs is wealth defense.
Winters argues that oligarchs respond to threats in various ways, which leads to different manifestations of oligarchy. He categorizes these into four types:
- Warring Oligarchy: Oligarchs are personally armed and directly involved in the coercion that protects their wealth, often acting in a fragmented and individualistic manner.
- Ruling Oligarchy: Oligarchs are more institutionalized, accept some form of disarmament, and engage in the political process to maintain their wealth.
- Sultanistic Oligarchy: A single oligarch or a very small group dominates, often through control of the state apparatus, blending personal wealth with state power.
- Civil Oligarchy: Wealthy elites operate within a legal and democratic framework but still use their economic power to influence politics and protect their wealth.
Winters posits that oligarchy isn’t necessarily displaced by democracy but rather can coexist or even be fused with it. He uses various historical and contemporary examples from the United States, ancient Athens and Rome, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and medieval Venice and Siena to illustrate these concepts. A significant argument he makes is that the rule of law in many societies is essentially about taming these oligarchs, ensuring that their wealth does not lead to unchecked power.
The book suggests that understanding oligarchy requires looking beyond traditional political theories to see how economic power translates into political influence, often under the guise of democratic processes. Winters’ analysis challenges the notion that democracy inherently counters oligarchic power, instead proposing that democracy can serve as a mechanism for oligarchs to maintain and protect their wealth.
MY TAKE ON IT:
While providing an excellent analysis of the Oligarchy’s struggle to defend and retain its wealth in various circumstances of current and previously existing societies, the author, in my opinion, neglects an essential component: the driving force of the actions of different members of the Oligarchy. He just posits that this driving force is limited to wealth defense. I think that it depends on the manner in which this wealth was acquired. There is a massive difference between a contemporary Russian-type oligarch who acquired wealth by privatizing publicly owned oil production facilities and an American-type oligarch who created a new industry that had never existed before and produced previously unknown but currently hugely valuable goods and services. The defense of wealth is paramount for the former, but for the latter, it is not more than a secondary consideration. For an American-type oligarch, the ability to achieve some far-reaching dream, something like the planet Mars settlement, created with resources under his control, is much more important than the defense of this wealth. Interestingly enough, a significant share of oligarchs in America are Russian-type oligarchs whose wealth is either inherited or created by the transfer of public resources to themselves via some form of governmental corruption.
We now live through a very interesting moment in history. American-type oligarchs now recognize that achieving their dreams is not possible without fighting and winning a war inside American society against Russian-type oligarchs, of which there are plenty in this society. The outcome of this war will decide whether all Americans will live in a wealthy and prosperous society or fall into the misery of a quasi-socialist swamp.
20241103 – The Loom of Time
MAIN IDEA:
The main idea of this book is to examine history in an attempt to identify the causes of society’s development within one or another political framework, be it democracy, totalitarianism, or something else. The author first presents the contemporary Arab world that failed to move to democracy after the Arab Spring despite all the promises. Then, he looks at the recent history of this and the surrounding areas and provides a detailed narrative of events he observed as a high-level journalist covering these areas for most of the second half of the XXth and early XXI centuries. After that the author concludes:” Rather than pine exclusively for democracy in the Greater Middle East, we should desire instead consultative regimes in place of arbitrary ones: that is, regimes that canvass public opinion even if they do not hold elections. Monarchies, including the Gulf sheikhdoms, tend to consult more with various tribes, factions, and interest groups than do secular modernizing regimes, which have too often been arbitrary dictatorships, Ba‘athist or otherwise. In other words, aim for what is possible rather than what is merely just. … Thus, it is the middle path that should be sought. The middle path offers the only hope for a better world. Idealistic raptures in the service of change must be avoided.”
CONTENT:
MY TAKE ON IT:
Whether we want it or not, we live in a globalized, highly technological world in which people with cultural development at the level of the 7th century can obtain the technology of the 21st century. Consequently, instead of stoning neighbors at a distance of 100 meters, they can send ballistic missiles over thousands of miles.
However, societies are not thinking, feeling, and acting entities; only individuals are. Even societies under the control of savages, such as Islamic ayatollahs, have plenty of individuals who are culturally and intellectually at par with anybody else in contemporary civilized societies. Similarly, modern democratic societies produced quite a few savages of Islamist, socialist, or other varieties.
Consequently, to avoid a tragedy in which millions or even billions of people will perish, individuals in control of the civilized world, where contemporary technologies were developed due to individual freedoms and distributed resources, must deny savages access to technology.
The solution should be to find ways to sort people out: savages with limited access to technology on one side of the wall and civilized people on the other. Since individuals tend to change over time, it would be necessary to ensure constant movement of people and exchange of information so that the individuals who become civilized can move to a civilized world. Those who become less civilized due to religious or secular indoctrination move to a savage world.
20241006 – Our Ancient Faith
MAIN IDEA:
This book is about democracy, examined through the prism of American history, more specifically, through the words and actions of Abraham Lincoln—the man who managed to retain the democratic political system in the United States by fending off the challenge of the Southern slavery-based aristocratic republic to this system. The author meticulously goes through different aspects of democracy and how it was reflected in Lincoln’s attitudes, noting:” One more thing: a Lincolnian democracy is a democracy which embodies Lincoln’s own virtues—resilience, humility, persistence, work, and dignity. Through the example of Lincoln, democracy can claim to offer people, not only order, but decency, even a kind of quiet and unostentatious grandeur.”
The author also discusses what it looks like from a contemporary point of view when we know what happened over the next 160 years after Lincoln’s death.
MY TAKE ON IT:
I do not think that people have a choice in the political system under which they live. It is mainly defined by the system’s fitness to maintain the society it controls and protect it from challenges, both economic and violent, from external and internal enemies. Democracy in America is the result of a unique environment where a relatively small number of technologically advanced people obtained access to practically unlimited amounts of resources in the form of agricultural land, so nearly everyone could become self-sufficient, and nobody would have enough power to suppress others. This ability to survive on one’s own, albeit in cooperation with others, and the inability to suppress and exploit others forced people to seek peaceful accommodation with others. Only the Democratic political system could provide such accommodations. Correspondingly, the slave-owning aristocracy was incompatible with such Democracy and had to be aggressive against it to survive. The Civil War was not really a civil war between members of one society but rather a war between two societies for political dominance.
We are now in a similar situation when it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Democratic political system is incompatible with the Administrative state because top-down control of everything is incompatible with individual freedom based on arrangement when resources are distributed between people via private property. The Civil Conflict between these two systems is inevitable and is actually ongoing. One can only hope that this conflict will not grow into a war. The possible outcomes are clear: either diminishing the Administrative state or eliminating whatever is left of the Democratic political system. The diminishing of the Administrative state would lead to the expansion of prosperity and freedom because free people who own distributed resources are much more productive than people in any other economic arrangement. Alternatively, the triumph of the Administrative state would lead to misery, if not necessarily material, then definitely to psychological misery because the life of quasi-slaves of the administrative hierarchy working under the direction of bureaucrats whose main competency is the ability to move up within this hierarchy is always miserable.
Equal Rights Libertarian 