Parasitic effect of maintenance costs

One thing you pick up as you work in the physical world: Orchards, Vineyards, Gardens, Factories, Vehicles...is that maintenance costs are not trivial.

Replacing trees and trellis posts is a fact of life. Machines need attention as weld tips wear, weld shanks crack, gun arms fracture, bushings wear. Vehicles need oil changes and tires and the Insurance company demands regular payments.

I think the lack of appreciation for secondary and tertiary costs is a major failing of people who live in their minds. As a class, that includes a disproportionate share of Progressives.

Progressives become strident and sometimes violent because "conservatives" will dismantle their programs. Honey, it will not be the conservatives who do that but entropy and lack of resources to maintain the over-reaching programs Progressives implement and somehow expect Divine intervention to stay the hand of time.

The irony of their position eludes them. Once implemented, they are EXTREMELY adverse averse to change, which is their operating definition of a conservative.

After a fire a forest will grow rapidly. The roots are still in the soil. Sprouts are not shaded by other trees. There is a very large ratio of leaves (net producers) to stems and fruiting structures (net consumers). As the canopy fills and the trunks grow, the ratio drops. At some point it reaches an equilibrium. The trees cannot grow any taller because there is no energy left over after the metabolic energy required to keep the trunk and roots alive are subtracted from the photosynthesis for the year.

Even though each tree in a climax forest is in intense competition with every other tree, they are also dependent upon their neighbors. If a couple of trees die, say to a disease or insect pest, there is a high likelihood that the nearby trees will topple like dominoes in the next strong windstorm. The roots are only large enough to support the swaying of the trees as long as the excursions are limited by close neighbors.

That analogy suggests that the entire Progressive movement is doomed. Their primary recruiting tool is that they are making changes and making things "better" while the whole enterprise is rapidly approaching an equilibrium that will lock the relative positions into place. Furthermore, the competing factions within the Progressives are in a very delicate balance of competition with the other factions while simultaneously being totally dependent upon them for their continued existence.

Women, Hispanics, Blacks, LGBQTIP, Furries, Druggies, Mentally Ill, Felons, Gamers, Single Moms, Fundamentalist Muslims, Recent Immigrants (categories are not mutually exclusive)...all competing ferociously for a diminishing pool of resources. Nearly all of them oblivious to the parasitic effects of secondary and tertiary costs of products and services and monuments that are not desirable enough to compete in the private sector.