The Circus is back in town.\u00a0 Or maybe it never left.\u00a0 The names remain the same, the form of the cause evolves slightly, but the theme persists.\u00a0 Shut down growth.\u00a0 Keep the country in the county.\u00a0 Save us.<\/p>\n
Locally it started with the Preble\u2019s Meadow Jumping Mouse, a creature near and dear to our hearts that was uniquely threatened by evil developer bulldozers.\u00a0 We awoke to find one day that this rodent species owns a whole basket of usurped property rights.\u00a0 Based on this novel discovery, hundreds of green and left warriors combined with sympathetic government regulators to form the Circus and bring into existence, by mere presumption, thousands of pages of growth-stopping regulations.\u00a0 They empowered the federal Environmental Protection Agency and all subordinate levels of government to save that mouse, and by their curious chain of cause and effect, us too.\u00a0 The economic clout now wielded on behalf of that mouse makes it one of the most powerful rodents in the history of the universe, probably second only to Mickey.\u00a0 And we were not saved.<\/p>\n
The Circus rested for a bit and recharged its batteries.\u00a0 Then along came an evil developer intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for a super highway complete with utility corridors and railroad tracks.\u00a0 Imagine the environmental impacts–pretty much the worst things possible–the smog all that transportation would cause, the ancient trees to be felled, the noise, the light.\u00a0 Don\u2019t go toward the light!\u00a0 Imagine the poor mice that would have to be relocated and provided similar habitat\u2014if it could even be found\u2014outside of the right of way.\u00a0 The damages would surely be irreparable.\u00a0 The Circus shifted into high gear and put the pedal to the metal.\u00a0 They rented busses to carry occupants to the State capitol.\u00a0 They saturated planning and commissioner meetings.\u00a0 They filled the internet with a relentless onslaught of do or die hyperbolic predictions about the end of the world that this road would precipitate.\u00a0 The end of the world was serious stuff.\u00a0 No one wanted that.\u00a0 The laws were passed, the court cases came in.\u00a0 The Circus rested.\u00a0 And still we were not saved.<\/p>\n
One day an evil developer came along, intent on bringing water commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for long distance water transportation to quench the thirst of citizens in a sub-development in Colorado Springs.\u00a0 The Circus double clutched their well-oiled machine and slipped it into gear.\u00a0 Hundreds of loud clamorers filled auditoriums,\u00a0 government meetings and state house offices with a new flag of presumed entitlement, \u201cour water.\u201d\u00a0 The fact that not a drop of it actually belonged to them gave them no pause.\u00a0 \u201cOur water\u201d was not actually \u201ctheir water\u201d but the mob has never been one to quibble about details like legal property rights.\u00a0 They were all about momentum, sound bites and the persuasion of pure force.\u00a0 Demonstrators and occupyers don\u2019t wait for the subtleties of legal technicalities, unless of course a legal technicality can be found to put wind into their sails, that\u2019s another matter.\u00a0 The evil developer was persuaded to recede into the tapestry of the world, and the Circus rested once again.\u00a0 And still we were not saved.<\/p>\n
Then along came the evil energy developers, intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision of energy independence\u00a0from the\u00a0beneficial use of\u00a0dormant oil and gas supplies lying ten thousand feet down in the ground.\u00a0 The Circus kicked their machine into overdrive.\u00a0 To save us once again, the green and left warriors sallied forth and wrote hundreds of pages of zoning laws incorporating every growth stopping agency and device ever conceived by statist man.\u00a0 They employed lawyers to tune their language so those laws could only be challenged\u2014never repealed\u2014by endless years of impossibly expensive litigation.<\/p>\n
The Roman government gave bread and circuses to the people to distract them from the messy details of their oppressive governors.\u00a0 Today\u2019s Circus combines the clamoring class of green and leftist warriors with a sympathetic regulatory class of unelected bureaucrats, to form the government itself.\u00a0 Gone are those halcyon times when the mob could be placated by mere food and entertainment.\u00a0 Perhaps conditioned by reality TV, the mob now insists on being part of the action.\u00a0 They want a hand in actually creating the government fascism that will turn around and oppress them.\u00a0 So long as they can applaud a victory, it matters not that the beast they create intends to dine on them.<\/p>\n