How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!

"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!"
---Samuel Adams---

If ever we needed to be reminded of the foresight of those who founded this country, it is now.

The liberal/progressive movement has been perverting the meaning of words for many years now, nay, decades. And we have either knowingly and unknowingly allowed it to happen…and have perhaps even taken part in the destruction of meanings by simply accepting the new and discarding the old.

While this has been going on for decades, it has reached a tipping point during this administration. Words are now actively used to actually hide the meaning of the discussion, to phrase the discussion in terms much more acceptable to the masses, and to manipulate the listener as desired by the speaker.

The worst part of all of this is that it is not hard to do. All it takes is for a politician to use a simple term, and the media will pick it up and spread that term widely by using it in all the time. Soon enough, that term will be used in every hair salon, every bar and every school when referring to that specific topic.

And when bartenders, hairdressers and teachers start using the new term, you know it is not long before it becomes part of the American language.

I have written about this before, but I am going to give some specific examples today and look at the impact that has had on the way we think.

1. Affirmative Action

The first, and possibly the most egregious example for today, is this thing called “affirmative action”. Now we all know what is meant by affirmative action. It is designed to give advantages to a certain part of the population, advantages that people who do not fall into that particular ethnic category do not have.

This is racism.

Pure and simple.

It bestows rights and privileges onto a part of the population that others do not have, simply because of the race of that person. When hidden behind the politically correct term of affirmative action, it sounds like a good thing.

Reality is, it is government sponsored racism, hidden behind words that imply a positive action.

2. Reverse racism

This is used when some people contend that black Americans use race against white Americans. It is reverse racism…which somehow is not considered to be as bad as the standard form of racism…and is totally understandable since the black American racists have been downtrodden by whites for so long.

Fact: racism is racism….it makes no difference what direction it flows.

3. Minimum Wage

This is a doosie. The concept of minimum wage is so that bad corrupt corporations cannot enslave people and pay slave wages. So let’s control the impact of free market forces and create a minimum wage. No longer is there competition between corporations for a pool of labor….everybody can pay the “minimum wage” and nobody has to pay more to secure a worker. So the minimum wage is not a floor on wages…it is a ceiling!!

It is in fact a maximum wage. Sure some companies will pay more, but this minimum wage thing is the baseline….it, more than any other government stupidity has prevented serious and significant wage growth.

In a free market, employees sell their labor for the most they can get, and employers purchase that labor for the least they have pay. The minimum wage totally destroys the worker’s ability to negotiate for the highest wage he can get, and provides the employer with an excuse to pay significantly less than the free market would demand.

The minimum wage could actually be called the maximum wage.

4. Government revenue

No government has revenue of its own. Governments get funds from two sources:-

-         fees for using government services

-         taxation

In most cases fees are simply taxes under a different name.

In recent weeks we have been hearing about a balanced approach to cutting spending. The spin is largely trying to connect spending cuts with tax increases. Ie. if we can get people to believe that a taxation increase is actually a spending cut, we will get support for spending cuts that include tax increases.

The first step to getting support for this is to stop people from thinking in terms of taxation, hence the change of name to revenue.

The second step is to start getting people to believe that the tax cuts of the past (the Bush tax cuts) are actually a spending increase. How many times have you heard recently that the government spent “XX billions of dollars on the Bush tax cuts”? This is simply the government and the media fools trying to get you to believe that a tax cut is actually an increase in spending by the government.

Since when has a reduction in receipts from taxation ever been considered an increase in spending?

Simply government nonsense double-speak that the media laps up.

A tax increase is exactly that…a tax increases. It is NOT a reduction in spending or a cut in spending as Obama wants you to believe.

A tax cut is a tax cut. Not an increase in spending.

Do not let the fools in government get away with this spin.

5. Investment

The government would have you believe that they are investing in technology when they waste money on some study or another. They want you to believe they are investing when they waste money on shovel ready projects that are not so shovel ready. They are investing in people when they extend the unemployment benefits.

BS!

What they are doing is SPENDING. Not investing. DO not believe the crap that they and the media try to ram down your throat. Governments do not invest, they spend (most usually wastefully). They want you to believe they are investing because then the criteria for measuring the impact of the spending changes. If the impact is not felt for 2, 3 or 10 years, they can say that investments sometimes take time to fully mature. If a spending program fails or shows no results in a short period, we all know it was a waste. The government does not want you to know that.

I can go a long way further with this, but I know you get the idea.

This problem is not restricted to the liberals/progressives. Republicans and some conservatives have been equally to blame.

However, the current administration has been blatant in what it is doing to language. It is clear that they believe the ordinary man in the street does not have sufficient brain-power to understand what is going on.

They could be right….after all Obama did get elected!

SO, it is up to us to stop the rot. It is up to us to challenge the lies and to not allow the government or the media to do this.

Be courageous and speak out whenever you see the use of spin, lies and deception. Demand that the administration and the media use words with meanings that we all know are true.

Oh…and vote Obama out in 2012!

…..devereaux