A couple of weeks ago, I wrote three letters on the Lexicon of Junior Mining. Today I go more general.
Progressives learned long ago that you don’t have to win an argument if you can redefine the words. Change the meaning of a term, and you can change the way people think about the subject.
Corrupt the term and you corrupt the thought.
Think about these terms.
Health Care
Hillary Clinton, and then Obama, with clear intention to manipulate, conflated the term Health Care with Health Insurance. And the media and hoi polloi adopted it like lemmings.
Here are my definitions. Health Care is what you do for yourself to maintain your own health. Your own choices in nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, sleep, perhaps avoiding toxic substances and activities that injure you. Medical Care, in contrast, is what you seek from other people when your health care efforts have failed to keep you healthy.
Health Insurance is a financial product that in the past provided financial protection in the event of an expensive calamity. Now it is a lousy pre-paid medical plan that fills the sector with moral hazard that leads to higher prices, long waits, and bureaucratic intrusion. Thank Hillary and Obama and all their minions for popularizing this particular linguistic gaslighting.
Liberal
Liberal once meant liberty. The tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson took the name in the nineteenth century, and in 1927 Mises published Liberalismus, a defense of free markets, free speech, and peace.
By the 1930s Roosevelt’s New Deal had claimed the word for the entirely opposite program: less freedom, more state, more control, more spending, more stealing the fruits of your labor. The enemies of private enterprise appropriated its label. Americans who still believe in liberty were left with libertarian. I expect the dictionary thieves will abscond with that term if libertarians ever make political headway.
Carbon
Progressives and environmental activists often say carbon when they mean carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a clean, odorless gas that plants need to grow. Carbon is dirty, black, and smudgy, like graphite. One sounds like plant food; the other sounds like pollution. Gaslighting is easier with carbon.
Inflation
Mises and the Austrian school use inflation to mean an increase in the supply of money and credit. To us, rising prices are one consequence of inflation. The Keynesian school, which is the economic school that underlies progressive statism (fascism, socialism and the like), uses inflation as a synonym for rising price levels.
The flip is useful to the progressive statists. If inflation means rising prices, the culprit must be the greedy grocer or the greedy oil company. If inflation were correctly considered currency creation, as we Austrians think, the culprits would be the central banks, the government, the big banks and the people who run them. The statists can’t have that. So they define the word to ensure the central bankers are seen as the solution instead of the cause.
Transitory
The central bankers’ term for an irreversible and permanent effect they want the average Joe to believe will be gone tomorrow.
Investment
A real investor puts his own capital at risk with the intent to create new wealth and absorbs the loss when he’s wrong. To a progressive, an investment means taking your money and spending it on their priorities. Have you ever seen a government report a loss on an investment?
Democracy
Article IV of the US Constitution guarantees every state a Republican Form of Government. The word democracy appears nowhere in the document. James Madison warned that pure democracies were incompatible with personal security or the rights of property. Politicians in both major parties now invoke “saving our democracy.” The progressive Democratic Socialists verbally promote protection of minorities while insisting that the majority has the right to totally control the minority through the voting booth. They are too self-assured to see their own internal contradiction.
Public Servant
Minister comes from the Latin for servant, which makes a prime minister the first servant. A servant takes orders from the master and the master is supposed to be the public. Try that with the IRS. The public servant is now the one who puts the public in prison when the public doesn’t obey.
Gun Safety
The four rules of firearm safety: treat every gun as loaded, never point it at anything you are unwilling to destroy, keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target, and know what is beyond it. The rules cost nothing and ban nothing. To a progressive, Gun Safety now means restrictions on who owns what kinds of guns. For many progressives, only the government should have guns. That would be their ideal gun safety.
My Understanding of Some Other Perverted Definitions
Plastic straw: Something to ban to show off your moral superiority.
Stimulus: Spending on all the stupid ideas that hadn’t passed Congress before the emergency came.
Austerity: Spending that grows more slowly than planned.
Quantitative easing: Counterfeiting the currency.
Sustainable: Whatever the government wants to continue funding.
Affordable: Something the government has made more expensive and now plans to subsidize.
Windfall profits: Profits politicians wish they had earned themselves, but because they didn’t, they’re going to tax them away.
Tax cuts: A government expense that progressives oppose in the name of fiscal restraint.
Essential: Something the government permits you to do.
Stakeholder: Someone who believes he is entitled to a say in how you spend your money.
Trust fund: IOUs the Treasury wrote to itself.
Fair Share: This just means more, or perhaps even more. Or whatever a self-satisfied progressive decides it means.
Woman: Undefinable. I am just a doctor. Apparently only a biologist has the requisite expertise.
Free: Someone else got outvoted so he has to pay for my free college, free health care, free phones. That’s democracy, right there.
Bipartisan: Both parties agree to screw you.
Common-sense: A prefix attached to legislation that has none whatsoever.
Price gouging: A free-market price that is too high, based on someone’s gut feeling. An empty shelf is preferred.
Public-private partnership: A partnership in which the public supplies the money and the politicians’ crony friends get paid. Also known as fascism.
Temporary: Permanent.
Reform: Replacing a known problem with a worse problem.
Summary
At Crisis Investing, we strive to use terms more accurately, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because words shape how we all think. Using them correctly helps others do the same. In a small way, we can help unpervert the perverted lexicon.
Please help me expand the New Revised Perverted Lexicon. Add your suggestions in the comments. The more words we reclaim, the better. And forward the letter on to people who might benefit from joining Crisis Investing. Or from learning what words should mean.
Sincerely,
John Hunt, MD
Editor, Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
‘Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t–till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”, Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things–that’s all.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master–that’s all’
“Through the Looking Glass”
Chapter 6
Lewis CarrollI’m
Nicely done, Dr. John, and penetrating of the progressive mind that strives to be “right” by making others wrong. There is a difference between being wrong and someone making you wrong. It is a form of immaturity seen in two year old’s (“No!”)’ teenagers (“what do you know about being young?”); sibling rivalry (“mom, he’s being unfair”); zealots (“I’m right, you’re wrong; now go to hell”), and schizophrenics (“I’m not crazy, you are!”). It is also the shortest distance to being right, so if intellectually lazy (or diseased), why not try it? Especially to win an argument.
My favorite is being accused of “racism” when trying to discuss “racialism”. I recently tried to encourage a young female Chinese medical intern to be skeptical of allopathic medicine, embrace her heritage and look into Classical Chinese Medicine for cures that work. Later I got a call from her supervisor demanding I apologize for bringing up race. My mentor from the last century advised that, “everyone needs encouragement”; he didn’t reckon with the hubris of today’s crop of entitled professionals. Hence, the modern truism, “no good deed goes unpunished”.