asked: Consider two famous quotes, one from a famous author and one from a famous and heinous tyrant:
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” George Orwell, author of “1984″
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister.
Both of these quotes keep coming to mind as I watch the Obama administration try to control the country, and its freedoms, by controlling and distorting the language. Consider:
1) The latest language control initiative from the Obama administration was on display during the Hurricane Irene aftermath. The Federal government was not coming to the aid of those affected by the hurricane, raining, and resultant flooding. According to the Obama administration, the “Federal family” was mobilizing to help people.
I guess the Federal government thinks that “Federal family” will make us feel more warm and fuzzy about government functions if we consider them part of our “family.” I am assuming that the political class thinks if they tell this lie and phrase often enough and maybe we will actually want more of the “Federal family” in our lives.
Little does the “Federal family” know that many of us want less of our families in our lives many times so why would we want a bigger family of people we never met or heard of? Many times having more family in our lives results in less money in our lives and our wallets. “Federal family” really starts to sound very much like the Big Brother idea from Orwell’s “1984″ which was not a good concept from a freedom perspective. Eventually, Big Brother became the center of every citizen’s life at the expense of family, privacy, liberty and freedom.
2) Another recent perversion of language is this government and political class insistence that government has a “revenue” stream. Governments collect taxes and fees, they do not generate revenue streams. Consider the standard definition of revenue that exists in the real world outside of Washington:
“Revenue - income that comes into a business as a result of selling a product or service.”
Government does not sell a product or service. Theoretically, a democratic government only does certain things for citizens because it is more efficient for government to do it centrally than for citizens to do it for themselves (a whole other blog post could be done on how far we have drifted from this definition of democratic government). Comedian Chris Rock went one step further, once saying that we do not pay taxes, they (the political class) take taxes.
Revenue should be associated with individuals acting in their own best interests and giving some of their wealth voluntarily to a business in return for a product or service we desire. This could not be any further from what taxes are, the mandatory confiscation of our wealth by a central government for uses that we do not always agree with.
By trying to reposition the government tax process from a confiscation process to a voluntary process by renaming “taxes” as “revenue,” the political class hopes that we will be more likely to give up our personal wealth in the future in order to support the government’s revenue stream rather than its tax stream.
Abe Lincoln once said: “If you called a tail a leg, how many legs would a dog have? Answer: Four, just because you call it a leg does not make it a leg.” Same thing here, just because you call it government revenue does not change the fact that is confiscatory tax.
3) One of the earliest perversions of the language and reality from the Obama administration was its insistence that we not refer to “Islamic” terrorism. Whether it was in reference to the 9-11 attacks or the Ft Hood massacre, the Obama administration insisted that the word “Islamic” not be used to describe these and other Islamic terrorist attacks.
I assume that the reasoning was that by denying the obvious, Obama would endear himself to those in the Muslim world that were not terrorists. I really do not know what his motives were but the simple reality was that they were Islamic terrorists. If they were Christian terrorists, we should call them Christian terrorists. If they were Martian terrorists we should call them Martian terrorists.
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