Entropy drags the universe relentless towards chaos and debts always come due. This is a truth for politics as it is for anything else and no matter of hand-waving, wishful thinking, and verbal evasion can indefinitely forestall the bill.

It was many years ago when I started constructing a fiction setting where the USA had become a third rate power, trapped by its political passions and blindness into an interstellar power barely worthy of that title and here in 2018, though the reasons have changed the prospect has only grown.

Civilization grows from the bottom up. Billionaires, political leaders, and other elites rarely think of trail blaze radical new systems or methods. That which unsettles the status quo is that which endangers the current top of the pyramid and so the revolutionary change comes, most often, from those with great gains ahead of them and not from those with great losses on their minds.

To grow in ways that benefits society and not destroy or hinder it requires that the gains come from a desire to expand our horizons and not from a place of fear, rage, or hate. If you construct a system to traps people, robs them of hope, leaves them with only burning resentment and no hope for themselves or their children, then you reap a whirlwind of destruction when the system can no longer contain their passions.

If you leave people with only bad choices do not be shocked when the choices they selected are the ones that cause you the most pain, the most suffering, the one that fulfill rage.

You can protect your own, you can steal the food and the medicine, and the wealth, but eventually the bill comes due. Unless people feel that they have a fair chance they will eventually lash out and when that time arrives it will be too late to salvage society.