A Recurring ThemeI've remarked on this
tendency of the Left often:
As I listen to the opinions and arguments expressed here, I am struck by the lack of interest in exactly how much (or should I say, how little?) the currently proposed policies are going to stave off any future warming trends. Instead, what seems to be the most important are the good intentions of the policy pushers-consequences be damned.Exactly. Although in this case, the topic is global warming, you can transfer this to almost any issue that the Left is pushing. Will a "living wage" end up making some people's skills uncompetitive? Will it tend to increase the number of youngsters dropping out of high school? That doesn't matter--the intent was to lift some families out of poverty.
Back in the days before neocon meant "Republicans who support the war in Iraq", this was the chief difference between neoconservatives and liberals. Neocons wanted to look at the effects of policies, not just their intentions. The guiding tenet of neoconservatism was the Principle of Unintended Consequences, which states that the unintended consequences of government programs are frequently equal to and opposite from the intended consequences. To take a simple example, welfare, intended to alleviate poverty, ended up trapping them in poverty.
