Entropy Always Wins


People do bad things to each other: they kill, steal from, and deprive others of liberty. Although we have an elaborate criminal justice system to prevent such things, there's a fundamental irony behind such a system. After all, what do we do to criminals? We execute, fine, or imprison them--in other words, we kill, steal from, and deprive them of liberty.

In the presence of distorting concentrations of power markets undergo systematic, predictable failures. In the face of such failures, there is a place for well-chosen governmental interventions to improve overall efficiencies. But very concentration of power a government needs to intervene successfully in markets is itself a distorting factor and a potential source of economic inefficiency.

Employees of the federal bureacracy are only human: they make mistakes in judgment and face constant temptation to cut legal corners to simplify their jobs. For this reason, we allow appeals of agency action to be heard by courts outside of those agencies. But the judges of those courts are only human: they make mistakes in judgment and face constant temptation to cut legal corners.

The overall entropy of a thermodynamically closed system can never decrease. It is possible to do work to remove entropy from a system and bring it to a state of greater order. But the energy to carry out that work had to come from somewhere. The overall entropy of the thermodynamically closed system containing also that energy source can only increase.