The Shirky Principle...

The Shirky Principle...  I had never heard this before:

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

That's a wonderful distillation of a characteristic of institutions.  In this post, the author uses unions as an example of this principle in action.  The first one that came to my mind, though, was political parties, and individual politicians.  The Shirky Principle is basically their organizing principle...