Yeah the whole old empire thing was basically a giant socialism strawman (including equal distribution of sex from pretty women, lol) that he totally destroys by showing everyone by example how to pick yourself up by your bootstraps. And his author blurb says he a member of the Ayn Rand society or something like that. That shit didn't start creeping in in a big way until the later books though (correction: it started early, I didn't know he wrote 26 of the things). It was enough to put me off his follow-up series.

Edit: Shit, apparently he wrote 15 more after I stopped with book eleven, which really felt like a complete end to me, I was surprised way back then that there were any more. I don't know how he managed to milk it that much.