Icarus's Wings

Leftist leaders and 'visionaries' love to take refuge in a future that’s too far off to accurately predict – slowing climate change and creating a new sustainable green economy conveniently will take decades and massive public investment before we'll even have a hint whether it's working. With the overwhelming majority of their ongoing projects it’s always too soon to tell with any accuracy how things are going plus their progress is always serendipitously too difficult to measure. How do we measure what a child is learning? Has the percentage of Americans living in poverty changed in 40 years? Are there fewer homeless per capita? Just how long will it take to achieve ‘social justice’? To succeed the Democratic agenda axiomatically seems to always require limitless money (aka 'public investment') and unspecified amounts of time. Similarly, there is no definable end nor identifiable line items that can ever be individually budgeted or checked off as ‘done’ within their agendas. Ponder just how absurd it is to ask, ’How long will it take to reduce greenhouse gases 25%, how are we going to do it ,what will it cost and can we afford it?’ Or, 'Just how much would it cost to eliminate povery once and for all and how would we do it?' Any idea how many global summits are required to achieve global nuclear disarmament? Meanwhile, all the prosaic, flat-earth, unintuitive, pragmatic (not infrequently Christian) selfish business people ( aka the mules pulling the cart ) are puting in overtime dealing with such pedestrian matters of the day as providing food to the grocery stores every morning by 6AM and gasoline that's cheaper than bottled water or developing a vaccine for the swine flu. (Though presumedly they could all do it cheaper and better if they had a little competition from the government - l.o.l.)

Is the idea of a conservative ‘visionary’ by definition an oxymoron simply due to the conservative’s inherent nature to feel compelled to supply actual constructive, measurable means to achievable ends? Wasn’t it John Kennedy that said some look at the world and say why, but I look and say why not? What if he had said, ‘But I look and say what, when and how much?' Nothing very inspiring about that now, is there! How many visionaries does it take to build a nuclear plant, a Las Vegas Casino or a new version of Windows? About the same amount as angels that can fit on the head of a pin.

Everyday necessity has a stubborn habit of consistently trimming Icarus's wings. It's a good thing too, lest the left's visionaries fly too high with our uninspired pocket books.

M.D.T.