Political language have been deliberately mangled to suit and promote the interests of political agents and their followers. I have given a few examples earlier.
More examples:
1. SOCIAL JUSTICE
Once again here is the brilliant Thomas Sowell on “Social Justice”
If there were a Hall of Fame for political rhetoric, the phrase "social justice" would deserve a prominent place there. It has the prime virtue of political catchwords: It means many different things to many different people.
In other words, if you are a politician, you can get lots of people, with different concrete ideas, to agree with you when you come out boldly for the vague generality of "social justice."
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catchword can stop thought for 50 years. The phrase "social justice" has stopped many people from thinking, for at least a century -- and counting.
If someone told you that Country A had more "social justice" than Country B, and you had all the statistics in the world available to you, how would you go about determining whether Country A or Country B had more "social justice"? In short, what does the phrase mean in practice -- if it has any concrete meaning?
In political and ideological discussions, the issue is usually whether there is some social injustice. Even if we can agree that there is some injustice, what makes it social?
Surely most of us are repelled by the thought that some people are born into dire poverty, while others are born into extravagant luxury -- each through no fault of their own and no virtue of their own. If this is an injustice, does that make it social?
The baby born into dire poverty might belong to a family in Bangladesh, and the one born to extravagant luxury might belong to a family in America. Whose fault is this disparity or injustice? Is there some specific society that caused this? Or is it just one of those things in the world that we wish was very different?
If it is an injustice, it is unjust from some cosmic perspective, an unjust fate, rather than necessarily an unjust policy, institution or society.
Investing guru Doug Casey also shares more verbal twisting (Greece and Austerity)…
2. GREECE
it's not "Greece" we're talking about, but the Greek government. It's the Greek government that's made the laws that got people used to pensions for retirement at age 55. It's the Greek government that's built up a giant and highly paid bureaucracy that just sits around when it's not actively gumming up the economy. It's the Greek government that's saddled the country with onerous taxes and regulations that make most business more trouble than it's worth. It's the Greek government that borrowed billions that the citizens are arguably responsible for. It's the Greek government that's set the legal and moral tone for the pickle the place is in.
3. AUSTERITY
the term "austerity" is used very loosely by the talking heads on TV. It sounds bad, even though it just means living within one's means… or, for Europeans, not too insanely above them. But who knows what's actually included or excluded from what the EU leaders think of as austerity? Take the Greek pension funds, for example: exactly how are they funded? I'd expect that private companies make payments to a state fund, as Americans do via the Social Security program. I suspect there's no money in the coffers; it's all been frittered on high living and socialist boondoggles. Tough luck for pensioners. Maybe they can convince the Chinese to give them money to keep living high off the hog…
4. I would add INSURANCE as camouflage for the Welfare State
From Murray N. Rothbard,
The answer is the very existence of health-care insurance, which was established or subsidized or promoted by the government to help ease the previous burden of medical care. Medicare, Blue Cross, etc., are also very peculiar forms of "insurance."
If your house burns down and you have fire insurance, you receive (if you can pry the money loose from your friendly insurance company) a compensating fixed money benefit. For this privilege, you pay in advance a fixed annual premium. Only in our system of medical insurance, does the government or Blue Cross pay, not a fixed sum, but whatever the doctor or hospital chooses to charge.
In economic terms, this means that the demand curve for physicians and hospitals can rise without limit. In short, in a form grotesquely different from Say's Law, the suppliers can literally create their own demand through unlimited third-party payments to pick up the tab. If demand curves rise virtually without limit, so too do the prices of the service.
In order to stanch the flow of taxes or subsidies, in recent years the government and other third party insurers have felt obliged to restrict somewhat the flow of goodies: by increasing deductibles, or by putting caps on Medicare payments. All this has been met by howls of anguish from medical customers who have come to think of unlimited third-party payments as some sort of divine right, and from physicians and hospitals who charge the government with "socialistic price controls" — for trying to stem its own largesse to the health-care industry!
In addition to artificial raising of the demand curve, there is another deep flaw in the medical insurance concept. Theft is theft, and fire is fire, so that fire or theft insurance is fairly clear-cut the only problem being the "moral hazard" of insurees succumbing to the temptation of burning down their own unprofitable store or apartment house, or staging a fake theft, in order to collect the insurance.
In the world of politics,lies, distortions and equivocations are the norm.
Don't fall for them
No comments:
Post a Comment