Kerby Anderson
Ned Ryun begins his article with these questions: What if I told you that the President of the United States doesn’t really run our government? Or that most people in Washington, D.C., don’t really believe in representative democracy? Or that a government of, by, and for the people is just an illusion?
His article and his book, American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism, explains that we have moved from a republic to an un-American administrative state. He calls it a slow regime change or a gradual coup that is undermining our Constitution and our Constitutional Republic. It has undercut the original intent of the Constitution. It has eroded our freedoms. It has undermined our civil liberties.
Back to his original questions. The administrative state calls into question who is governing our country. We have seen this in the last few years of the Biden administration. So many of us wondered who was making the important decisions, since it seemed obvious to most of us that the president wasn’t up to the task mentally.
Ned Ryun provides the history that goes back to the Progressive movement led by Woodrow Wilson. The goal was to build a massive bureaucracy filled with unelected bureaucrats who were separated from political accountability. These elites would govern our country. They rejected the idea of a rights-based government because it was too limited in size and scope. That is why today we have a sprawling federal bureaucracy.
He argues that the president and Congress need to break apart the Administrative State and return legislative powers back to the Article I branch of government. To put it in simple terms, it is time to “drain the swamp.” If this is to happen, we need more than slogans. We need action.

Kerby Anderson
Elon Musk noted on X that giving more money to homelessness charities in California did not seem to reduce the number of homeless people. In response, Konstantin Kisin reminded him about the Cobra Effect and was surprised to discover how many people hadn’t heard of it.
The Cobra Effect is based on a story which may or may not have taken place during British colonial rule in India. According to the story, the British wanted to reduce the cobra population and offered a bounty for every dead cobra. But the cobra problem got worse because people realized they could profit from this bounty and began raising cobras in farms. When the government became aware of this practice, they discontinued the bounty program. The cobra breeders released their now worthless snakes into the wild making the problem worse.
In the past, I’ve talked about how the Cobra Effect surfaced in the attempt to combat racism. Anti-racist groups and organizations formed to combat racism. But they soon faced a problem. The demand to find racism was much larger than the supply. Soon we were hearing about microaggressions, and the charge of racism was thrown around indiscriminately.
The problem of homelessness in California, Kisin argues, came not only from the “attempts to deal with it failing, but was also the result of well-intentioned policies, the deinstitutionalization movement, whose goal was to free people of the tyranny of mental asylums.” The mentally ill people released into the streets fell through the cracks. Today cities are littered with tents and drug addicts on the streets.
These are just two examples of many others that remind us that good intentions don’t always solve social problems.