Kevin Williamson explains for National Review Online readers why he’s wary of politicians who promise to preserve a program or benefit for “generations to come.”

[O]rdinarily, things in politics move with all the urgent speed that one might expect from a herd of turtles — a herd of very sleepy turtles — or a not especially ambitious glacier. Politicians, strangely, believe this to be a virtue: They announce that they have done something, or that they intend to do something, and that that will be that for — the inevitable phrase! — “generations to come.” Senator Bernie Sanders, who clings courageously to the cutting-edge ideas of October 1917, boasts that such-and-such a reform will protect Social Security “for generations to come.” President Obama promises that his net-neutrality scheme will protect the Internet for “generations to come,” that his actions have set a precedent for U.S.–China relations “for generations to come,” etc. Meanwhile, the president’s sycophants in California have passed a law requiring that history textbooks proceed with due awe when considering President Obama’s legacy for — surprise — “generations to come.”

All the most dysfunctional aspects of American life are organized on the “generations to come” timeline. All the best aspects — our technology, our best businesses, our scientific research — are organized on a very different timeline: We all assume that our shiny new Apple toys will be surpassed within a matter of months if not weeks; that no matter how well our businesses are doing today, our competitors are one quarter away, if that, from kicking our butts; that on the most interesting and lively issues, the science is never really “settled.”

Living things change — they mature and they evolve. That which remains the same for generations to come is dead.

I am in Houston at the moment, where the fantastical horizon — skyscrapers here, oil refineries there — encircles an urban sprawl that is almost biotic in its vitality: One gets the feeling that any given storefront or office park is no more than 72 hours away from being reconstituted as something else. The difference between lively, sprawling Houston — a city dedicated to the production of real resources for the rest of the world’s economy — and monumental, lapidary Washington — a city dedicated to the consumption of real resources produced by the rest of the world — could not be more striking. The proposition that ConocoPhillips or Sysco is going to be doing the same things a year from now — much less “for generations to come” — would be absurd.

What we need, what we want, and what we can do changes not from year to year but from minute to minute, and our market-based institutions by necessity move at the same pace. But for some inexplicable reason, we believe it not only tolerable but desirable to have schools stuck in the 19th century, retirement pensions that are as up-to-date as a Studebaker, and regulatory practices that would be familiar to Thomas Edison, who would be otherwise perplexed by the commonplace miracles of our time — innovations that, to a man who died a few years before the creation of Social Security, would be indistinguishable from magic.