Over at Zero Hedge today there is an interesting article entitled “Entropy – why the world as we know it is dying”.

The following extract could quite easily be applied to politics in the UK :

In the simplest of terms, every closed system will ultimately degrade toward a state of maximum entropy.

I’ll use the current political system of the U.S. as a convenient example. When American
democracy was first shoved out of the nest by the founding fathers, it was new, fresh, and
energetic. It took the world’s breath away at its boldness and unlimited promise, and set the
wheels turning on tangible change across much of the world.

Before the ink dried on the Constitution, however, the degradation began. From the beginning,
the country’s political operations fell into the hands of a strictly limited number of parties, which
quickly coalesced into just two. Since then, they have essentially shared power, with only minor
differences in policies between the two. Simply, absent a disruptive external force, the closed
political system quickly matured into an institutionalized “sameness” that all but assures no
serious challenges – leading, ultimately, to the certainty it will degrade to only a shell of its
former self.

It was, perhaps, because of his own understanding of natural law that Thomas Jefferson was
heard to remark, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of
patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

That doesn’t mean I am advocating revolution – just pointing out the fact that any closed system,
no matter how well constructed, will degrade. To expect the United States of America to avoid
this fate is to expect the impossible.

I can think of a few tyrants (and quite a few socialists too) who would make excellent liberty tree fertiliser.