Two of a half-dozen universal truths about systems are that they all suffer bureaucracy and all suffer entropy. The human system, for example, has evolved over time to having opposing thumbs and fingers which play different and various roles. A typical university early on had a dean, but now has a dozen or more assistant provosts atop a dozen or more deans. We used to have medical doctors. Now there are a hundred or more specialties.

Entropy is the systemic evolution of systems toward having its parts deteriorating and functioning randomly and not in sync with one another. Witness human aging or what happens to your car over time. Accountants recognize this with the term “depreciation”. Witness how departments in a company become less and less coordinated both intra- and inter-department.

Great organizational leaders understand this and reorganize, flattening their organizations, reducing redundancy, getting back to basics, re-tooling. They also work to create negative entropy. There’s repairs and maintenance. There are vacations for people, and training and development. Jack Welch, legendary ceo of an earlier iteration of General Electric Corporation had a policy of firing the least productive ten percent of employees annually and hiring replacements. You jog, go to the gym, improve your diet and nutrition, read nonfiction.

Governments get more and more bureaucratic, but have political leaders, not system leaders. Government bureaucracies add, never reorganize, focus on survival as individuals, departments, divisions, and the whole . . . exclusively, with absolutely no consideration of mission, role, effectiveness or efficiency. Governments employ negative entropy in the political realm, but never in the bureaucratic realm. There are periodic elections and term limits, but they don’t apply to the “civil servants”.

News flash!! Liberal-fascist statists are in control of the federal government. News note: Ditto vis-à-vis most of America’s large cities, northeastern and west-coast states. All have an abiding interest and motivation to grow government. But, that’s not what’s being discussed herein.

The United States federal government has become so large, so bureaucratic and so entropic, that it is unmanageable, unleadable, and uncontrollable. No U.S. president will be capable of reorganizing and shrinking the huge government bureaucracy. Picture an untethered barge, slowly floating downriver. The new prexy jumps aboard and tries to stop it. The hundreds of tons of barge have momentum. The river, which always flows downhill, is with the barge. The couple-hundred-pound super-conservative prexy has no chance.

The Founders created a federal government which was to be small, focused on its extremely-limited enumerated powers, and be less than one single percent of the U.S. economy, most of that the nation’s defense. Erosion of the rule of law commenced in 1789. Since the Wilson administration in the 19-teens, the Constitution has had the shelf-life of a New Year’s resolution. Three-quarters of the federal government is now unconstitutional and that government is now twenty-five times what was intended and designed.

Today’s federal government is, maybe, five-to-ten times a size which might be reformed, reorganized, and shrunk from within. Nothing can stop government’s bureaucratization and entropy, but a total overthrow from the outside. A Ronald Reagan president and with the Gingrich-led congress of 1995-96 couldn’t turn this barge of state around. We could hand-pick the entire Executive Branch, replacements for 435 congressmen, replacements for 100 senators, impeach judges and justices wholesale, and the barge would still continue to roll down the river.

I think that most politicians, once elected and sworn in (albeit with fingers crossed and having a Pinocchio moment), come to see and understand this. Then, elected officials do what’s best . . . for government and for their continuation as part of it. Explain Senator Lieberman, the Independent. Explain Arlen Specter. Explain McCain-Feingold. Explain recent rulings on eminent domain. Explain why and how defeated incumbents pop back up as lobbyists, political appointments or government bureaucrats.

Nothing can stop government’s bureaucratization and entropy, but a total overthrow from the outside. The United States of America has never had a civil war. Yes, every single one of the government-school history textbooks is wrong. Back almost 150 years ago, the Confederacy didn’t fight to oust the bums in power and take over the federal government. They fought to secede from the bums and get out . . . and lost. In this the 21st century, civil wars and coups happen in banana republics, but do you really see that happening in the USA? Really?

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."  (Norman Thomas [1938], six-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President)

"For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time."  (Justice George Sutherland [1938])

"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.  When the government fears the people, there is liberty."  (Thomas Jefferson)

Americans have and continue to adopt the fragments.  Most stretch forth a hand, but with palm up.  Even the most-conservative patriots have come now to fear the government.  Enlightened self-interest has made government partners of General Electric, most of Wall Street, even WalMart.  They're employing negative entropy, re-inventing themselves, adapting to the new reality.  JFK once said at one of those legendary Saturday touch football games at Hyannisport, "You know why we'll play by my rules?  Because it's my ball."  Big business knows who has the ball.