English 
Español 
The State, the Leviathan beast
Peter Kopa, Prague, 1.4.2025
Jeffrey Tucker has recently published an article about how Trump’s opponents in the USA are trying to impede his constitutional powers as president. His piece appeared in the Brownstone Institute and in the Daily Declaration, both in Australia. Based on this, below I report and reflect on the problem of the gigantism of the state, which threatens to become the Leviathan monster, of which Thomas Hobbes tells us, who was an English philosopher who founded modern political philosophy. His best-known work is Leviathan (1651), the state monster that devours its people.
The risk of state gangsterism
A series of factors made the emergence of state gigantism possible from the beginning of the 20th century: the constant increase in economic productivity and the systemic proliferation of its functions. Its current gigantism and digital technology threaten to restrict the scope of individual freedom when the government falls into the hands of people of low moral standing (https://thinktanklatam.org/why-the-low-profile-of-politicians ) who do not seek the good of the people who elected them, but the enrichment of the economic elites.
The great state bureaucracy is not in itself bad, but it is very prone to exploiting and oppressing the citizen because its functionaries are not selected according to their character. This is the subject of the recent book by Prof. Rafael Alvira, who explains how democracy can degenerate into tyranny. The election of rulers by vote offers no guarantee whatsoever that those elected will all be people of firm ethical principles. Only a hundred years ago, education, the Christian atmosphere and the sense of honor in society made it more likely that rulers would not allow themselves to be corrupted.
But the current materialism is not capable of offering this support. We see this in the recent electoral victory of the right-wing Merz in Germany, which came about because he had promised to oppose indiscriminate immigration. However, once elected, he relativized his promise by allying himself with the socialist left. The electorate took it for granted that he would join forces with the AfD party, which came second with 21% of the vote, and which had specifically declared that it would cut immigration.
The public has never had sympathy for bureaucracies. In line with Max Weber’s concern, the excessive structuring of the state has caged society in a prison built on the basis of a ruthless rationalism that generates an impenetrable jungle of instances and regulations, which open the door to corruption. And this kind of great empire is not subject to prior referendums and is not limited by budgetary restrictions.
That is to say, the only power that creates it and can control, reduce or cut it is the highest authority of the executive branch, which is the president or head of government. Biden has done nothing during his term against the administrative orgy. In contrast, Trump has assumed his role with a chainsaw in both hands, Milei style in Argentina. In January 2025 the people had spoken in his favor and now they mostly approve of how he is pulling the weeds out of the wheat field, even if some useful minor things are inadvertently uprooted.
The deep state
I quote Jeffrey Tucker in italics:
The current full awareness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is quite new. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the entire political promise of the Enlightenment.
This incipient awareness is probably 100 years overdue. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “Deep State” — I have argued that there are deep, middle and surface layers — has been growing in the United States since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and has become fully entrenched through two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyZoUfNsUl8
The structure of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, let alone how many institutions and individuals work for them under contract, either directly or indirectly. And that’s just the public face; the underground branch is much more elusive.
The revolt against all this came with the COVID controls, when everyone found themselves surrounded by forces outside our sphere of action and about which politicians knew little (https://thinktanklatam.org/la-pandemia-preparada-desde-1990). The combination of this series of outrages — what Jefferson called in his Declaration “a long series of abuses and usurpations, all having the same object” — has given rise to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
The battle against parasitic bureaucracy
A distinctive feature of Trump’s second term has been his assumption of control of state power, more than any previous head of state. And in this attempt he faces a barrier of more than a hundred challenges in the courts. The judges in the first instance intend to deny his power to dismiss state employees, to redirect funds, to limit functions, etc.
The most high-profile cases are the exercise of functions of the DOGE Department, led by Elon Musk, and its first intervention, the closure of USAID. This process seems to indicate that there are hidden threads, that from behind the scenes they are moving – or corrupting – judges to avoid this purge. One judge has even dared to tell the Trump administration who he can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by without the New York Times, for example, making some defense of the ‘poor’ mistreated officials. The media, controlled from a single vertex, which always claims to be right, oppose Trump and his people’s attempts to control or eliminate them, and are abusively denounced as enemies of the public interest.
This type of subversion of the state’s function is sought to be paralyzed in order to favor only one group. To this end, we see that powerful means of wide-ranging impact are being employed. This is reminiscent of the pandemic. Today we know that it was prepared twenty years ago (https://thinktanklatam.org/la-pandemia-preparada-desde-1990, with viruses created as a biological weapon for the depopulation of the planet: https://thinktanklatam.org/agenda-30-drastica-despoblacion-mundial . Furthermore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHXxxWjT-z0&t=8s
All of this is strange. It is impossible to avoid this US government organization chart. All agencies, except for a few, belong to the executive branch. Article 2, section 1, states: “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Therefore, the president and his team have the highest executive powers based on the Constitution.
The big underlying problem: corruption
In the USA there are government ‘agencies’ or departments that regulate housing development, the production and sale of pharmaceutical products, agricultural and livestock activity, trade unions, oil production, air traffic, etc. If the officials in these official entities do not have ethical principles, which they are obliged to have by law, it is easy for them to be bought. In practice, cartels or secret price agreements, systems of covert corruption, influence peddling and clientelism are formed in each sector, and always at the expense of the taxpayer who feeds the beast that devours him.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections only seems reasonable if the people we elect really do have the authority to cut, clean up or reform. This requires the president to have the power to withdraw the executive mandate given to an agency, and its funding. Opponents of the deep state are trying by all means possible to block Trump’s executive orders through the courts, which are constitutionally completely separate from the executive branch. And in line with these shenanigans, they are fighting back in coordination with the media. The most relevant examples in this sense are Trump’s executive order regarding the Department of Education and USAID.
