One of the few
things a couple of people remember about high school physics — apart from how
to build catapults to hurl frozen pumpkins into the air — is that neat stuff
like time travel and perpetual motion is impossible. They both violate the second law of
thermodynamics: for a
thermodynamically defined process to occur, the sum of the entropies of the
participating bodies must increase.
In English, that means when
something happens, entropy increases and you can’t get it back to make
something as if it never happened.
“Entropy” is the process of running down. In a closed system (meaning one that you’re
not adding anything to), entropy always increases until nothing can
happen. It never decreases.
Having said that, we now
qualify it. Time travel is possible, and you can have perpetual motion. How?
Time travel is actually
easy. We do it every day. Every single one of us is traveling to the
future at a rate of one hour per hour, one day per day, one year per year. Some of us aren’t happy with it, but we’re
kind of stuck with it.
What about perpetual motion?
Even easier! Politicians long ago figured out how to have
a perpetual motion political machine.
How does it work?
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| See? He does look like Errol Flynn. |
We call it “the
Robin Hood Effect.” Robin Hood, of
course, was the guy in the book you never read who looked just like Errol Flynn
and spoke perfect English instead of Norman French or Anglo-Saxon, and who stole
from the rich to give to the poor while carrying out spy operations for the
Nazis and staying at the Sherwood Schwartz Hilton on Gilligan’s Island with
Alan Hale, Sr.
Or something like
that.
Robin Hood,
however, did not invent the Robin Hood Effect.
It came in with Oog, Chief of the People on the Other Side of the Hill.
Oog saw that the
people on the other Other Side of the
Hill had mammoth meat, and his people didn’t have any, i.e., those others were rich, while his folks were poor. Realizing that his constituents would kill
him and eat him if he didn’t solve the mammoth meat shortage, Oog decided that
the people on the other Other Side of
the Hill had to share with (meaning give everything to) the people on the Other
Side of the Hill.
Of course, he
could have organized a mammoth hunt himself, but it didn’t occur to him that he
and his people should work when somebody else had done so and thus had plenty
of meat to go around without others having to work. That
would be wasteful.
 |
| Mammoth hunting for fun and profit. |
Being a leader
whose thoughts were instantly translated into action, Oog seized his club and
persuaded the people on the other
Other Side of the Hill to give their mammoth steaks and chops to the people on
the Other Side of the Hill. This made
the people on the Other Side of the Hill rich, and the people on the other Other Side of the Hill poor.
Making a long
story short, Noog, the Chief of the people on the other Other Side of the Hill, knew a good thing when he saw
it. Why organize another mammoth hunt if
those people on the Other Side of the Hill are just going to come over and take
away the mammoth meat again? Why produce anything, in fact, if you can
just take it from somebody else?
Being a
reasonable fellow, however (i.e.,
half the size of Oog), Noog wasn’t about to try and club his counterpart into
submission, so he went to Oog and explained to him that since his, that is,
Oog’s, people were now rich and his, Noog’s, people poor, social justice
demanded that Oog give everything he had taken back to the people on the other Other Side of the Hill.
After the
funeral, the late Noog’s people got organized and ganged up on Oog, took their
stuff back, and ate it before the late Oog’s people could get organized.
A few thousand
years later, a politician realized that taking from the rich to give to the
poor worked much better if he 1) didn’t take everything, and 2) was careful to
keep enough for himself, plus a little extra for encouragement. It also gave greater job security if, once
you turned rich people into poor people, you reversed it and turned the new
rich people back again into poor people, and the new poor people back again into
rich people, with (of course) a fee to compensate you for your trouble each
time. Then, you start all over again by
turning the old/new rich into new/old poor, and the old/new poor into new/old
rich, and so on, ad infinitum.
This is
“political perpetual motion,” and continues until people start to catch on and
realize that it’s much better to be productive by owning — and using — their
labor and capital to produce marketable goods and services for themselves than
simply taking what others have produced and that the others will want back as
soon as they are able to take it.
The problem, of
course, is where anybody gets the wherewithal to be able to employ one’s labor
and capital profitably — or even have capital in the first place.
We’ll look at
that tomorrow.
#30#
