Government is another word for Entropy

Governments bring us mostly waste and war (the ultimate waste). War can at least destroy some governments, unfortunately war can destroy everything else first. That is how ultimately wasteful government is.

Empire Games by Theodore Dalrymple - City Journal
AUGUST 7, 2012

THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Empire Games

Reading Gibbon with an eye on the Olympics

As London prepared for the Olympics, the most that my friends there hoped was that they would not suffer inconvenience, at least not beyond the increased taxation that will no doubt soon be exacted in order to pay for the games. The worst report I have heard so far about the games’ impact on daily life is of the severe overcrowding at the Underground station at Earls Court, frantically busy at the best of times. But in the matter of the games, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall has some lessons. Writing of the Emperor Philip, “the minister of a violent government, elected for the private benefit of the soldiers,” he observes: “On his return from the East to Rome, Philip, desirous of obliterating the memory of his crimes, and of captivating the affections of the people, solemnized the secular games with infinite pomp and magnificence.”

History does not repeat itself except by analogy—and here, it is hard not to see an analogy between Philip and former prime minister Anthony Blair. Of course, we live, as Gibbon might have put it, in a politer age, when crimes have to be muted, untruths disguised by rhetoric, and the ruination of states performed by stealth rather than by personal extravagance and outright defalcation. Still, Blair’s regime benefited only those who worked for it, and the Olympics, for which he lobbied hard, were his parting gift to the nation he had betrayed, a fitting memorial to a man with a soul of tinsel. In this connection, one cannot help but note Gibbon’s account of the Emperor Caracalla’s legacy: “The prodigality of Caracalla had left behind it a long train of ruin and disorder; and if that worthless tyrant had been capable of reflecting on the sure consequences of his own conduct, he would perhaps have enjoyed the dark prospect of the distress and calamities which he bequeathed to his successors.” Caracalla, of course, was killed; ours being an altogether gentler age, Blair is thinking of making a comeback.

Historical analogies do break down eventually. The barbarians were external to Rome, but they are internal to Britain.

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