The free-market part of the equation referred to the putative benefit of unrestrained economic competition between individuals, and because corporations enjoyed the legal status of persons, they were assumed to be on an equal footing with other persons in a given locality. Thus, Wal-Mart was considered the theoretical equal of Bob the appliance store owner, and if Bob happened to lose in the retail competition because he couldn’t order 50,000 coffee-makers at a crack from a factory 12,000 miles away in Hangzhou, and receive a deep discount for being such an important customer, well, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t been given the chance. –James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (2005)
The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be either destroyed or created, only changed. Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, says that the change of state in any given amount of energy flows in one direction, from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused or dispersed and spread out; from being ordered to being disordered. A hot cup of coffee cools off sooner or later. Its heat is diffused until the temperature of the coffee stabilizes to equilibrium with the air around it. It never gets spontaneously hotter. A tire goes flat, it never spontaneously reinflates. Windup clocks wind down, they don’t wind up. Time goes in one direction. Entropy explains why logs burn, why iron rusts, why tornadoes happen, and why animals die.
The reason that everything in the real world does not fall apart at once is that the flow of entropy faces obstructions or constraints. The more complex the system, the more constraints. A given system will automatically select the path or drains that get the system to a final state—exhaust its potential—at the fastest possible rate given the constraints. Simple, ordered flows drain entropy at a faster rate than complexly disordered flows. Hence, the creation of every more efficient ordered flows in American society, the removal of constraints, has accelerated the winding down of American potential, which is exactly why a Wal-mart economy will bring us to grief more rapidly than a national agglomeration of diverse independent small-town economies. Efficiency is the straightest path to hell. –James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (2005)
