"Change": deliberate, disingenuous, dangerous deception

Any of the political parties in the UK that decides to try to ape Obama's "Change we need", "Change we can believe in" mantra from last year in their campaigns deserves to suffer the apparent fate in terms of popular disappointment their would be mentor is currently suffering.

Because people don't like liars.  And claiming you represent "change", or at least anything I would consider "change we need", whilst continuing to pursue those positions of power least capable, on incontrovertible historical evidence, of delivering anything like "change" will be lying.

There can be no "change" whilst the wheels of State rumble on.  Changing how the State is run for a few years does not alter the fundamentally evil reasons for which "State" was invented and which it continues to pursue, inevitably.

There are two fundamental laws of human survival:

First, there are two, and only two, means by which humanity collectively and humans as individuals can meet their needs for the stuff to maintain their lives.  The one is through working and trading with others the surplus of your own work to buy the additional things you don't produce for yourself.  This is called the economic means.  The other is to exploit the proceeds of others' work.  This is called the political means.  There can be no other way - you make it (or are given it voluntarily), or you take it (by force).

Second, human beings will always seek to meet their needs by the means that involves the least work, or disutility, to themselves.

Oh, and I'll add one for myself: if two wrongs do not make a right, three redoubles the evil, rather than redresses it.

The State was created in order to enable the political means of fulfilling the needs of one group by exploiting another.  It has always done this.  It continues to do this to this day.  There is no evidence in human history that it can do any other.  Against thousands of years of evidence, it is utterly futile to expect it to change, any time soon, or indeed ever.

If the first wrong was that of autocratic rulers and small groups of nobles exploiting everyone else in serfdom, and the second was that of the mercantilists and new industrialists able to exploit the workers the third is that of the so called "majority" to decide to take from one group to keep another.  It doesn't matter, for it to work it must all boil down to a simple formula - that the State believes that it has the right to all your produce and to decide in differing proportions at different times how much of it you may keep.  Whether that State claims its power by arms and status, by wealth and oligarchy, or by "democracy", the formula must be the same.

Lord Acton (he of "Power tends to corrupt") wrote that "It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason."

Nobody is promising, even remotely, "change" of that formula.