The national administrative state wasn't a tyranny forced upon the public - it was a response to the needs of an urban, industrialized country of strangers.
More specifically, it was a direct response to a massive increase in the complexity of daily life in the early part of the 20th century. In the span of about 2 decades, America went from a nation based on a disparate network of tightly knit rural communities to a highly concentrated network of impersonal urban ones. People couldn't rely on their personal connections to manage their daily lives anymore, so a new system - the administrative state - was developed to take its place. When the Great Depression painfully exposed how underdeveloped that state was, it was once again expanded, with the Social Security system being one of the most important and long-lasting results.
The administrative state was not something that was forced on us from some outside force. It was something we Americans chose to develop in response to dramatic new challenges and problems. Government may not always be the solution to our problems, but it isn't necessarily the problem either.


