https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/decoding_the_tyranny_of_the_administrative_state_.html
Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom, by Philip Hamburger, 336 pp Hardcover $35 Kindle $33.25, ISBN-13 978-0674258235, Harvard University Press, 2021.
Professor of Law Philip Hamburger of Columbia University has been campaigning for years to measure, define and condemn the growth of a powerful administrative state in America.
The late, great Angelo Codevilla rang the alarm about the excesses of centralized oligarchic statism and an army of unelected bureaucrats eating away at liberty for citizens under the constitution in his essay, “Scientific Pretense and Democracy,” followed on by another wellreceived 2010 essay “The Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution,” about the growth of an unelected totalitarian ruling class, whose influence and power are derived from “expertise” that allowed them to exert power over and intimidate the citizenry as the self-anointed oligarchy.
Professor Hamburger, Friedman Professor of Constitutional Law at Columbia, caught my attention with a short monographic book, The Administrative Threat, that summarized the points of his erudite 650-page 2014 book, Is the Administrative State Unlawful? The short book is a great summary but the long book is magisterial and explains why the political geniuses of the American Founding wrote a Constitution that intentionally hobbled the power of the executive branch and created competing branches to distribute power and prevent tyrannical grasping of power by any branch, along with a federal plan to distribute power to the states.
The Founders were well aware of the history of tyranny in England — crown edicts, Star Chamber prosecutions and other abuses that flourished in the first half of the 17th century — ending with a civil war and regicide of Charles I. These events were fresh in their 18th century minds and they were serious students of political theory.
Hamburger wrote his two books from the maw of the liberal political establishment, Columbia University in Upper West Side Manhattan, but he obviously has his legal head on straight. He writes about administrative state growth and abuses that had emanated from that growth of a regulatory state.
