This is one of the most important columns you may ever see. Read every last word. It is good to see the message I have preached for years get some backup – Editor.
It’s the concepts, stupid.
A wag in my high school said “Words are the tools of the English language.”
It was supposed to be a parody of deep-sounding but vacuous pronouncements. But the joke turns out to be on him: since words *are* the tools of language, they are the tools of thought. That means you must resist unto death using the terminology of your enemy. The side that controls language controls thought.
Anti-capitalists are onto this fact. Pro-capitalists need to catch up–especially since the mainstream media are dominated by anti-capitalists, who insinuate their distorted terms into what would otherwise seem to be open debate.
Notice I said “anti-capitalists.” That’s a case in point. I did not say “progressives”–that’s how they wish to be known. But capitalism, not government dictation, is the system of progress, replacing primordial collectivism with the radical concept of individual rights, including property rights. And embracing technology not environmentalism is required of anyone who favors actual progress. The self-styled “progressives” are regressives.
“Liberal” is another word that is booby-trapped. Joe Lieberman is the last living liberal–a museum piece, really. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Paul Krugman, and the rest are not liberals but Leftists, if you want a shorter term than “anti-capitalists.” Today’s Leftists have nothing of substance in common with those we used to know as “liberals”–JFK, Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson.
The word “liberal” derives from “liberty.” Liberty is the last thing on the mind of today’s Leftists. They seek to stamp out not only economic freedom but freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Just make a visit to your local university. The term “liberal” should never be used for people whose driving ideology is, to use a proper term, statism.
Words matter because words stand for concepts–abstract ideas that join certain things and separate others. Your ideological enemy is your ideological enemy in part because he divides the world up differently from you. He works with different concepts, different classifications. Where you see the opposition of freedom vs. government force, he sees the opposition of “exploitation” vs. “equality.” Where you see earning vs. freeloading, he sees “luck” vs. “compassion.”
Even little, innocuous concepts are game-changers. Take “access.” Is there some national, collective problem in the fact that some people don’t have “access” to quality medical care? What if we rephrase the question to be: do some people have the right to force other people to pay for their medical care? Sounds a little different, doesn’t it? I don’t have “access” to your car, your home, and your bank account. That’s a disgrace!
Politicians know, or at least sense, the power of language. President Obama speaks of government “investment,” a term properly applied only to the private sector, not to the government’s expropriation of capital from the private sector to finance boondoggles that men’s free financial decisions would not allow.
The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department defines “monopoly” in terms of earned market-share–i.e., success in competition–which it proceeds to penalize. The term “monopoly” should be applied to coercively imposed barriers to competition, and coercion is what is wielded by the government, not by business.
You see the theme running throughout the ideological distortion of language: evading the fundamental distinction: freedom vs. force. The free market is the scene of voluntary, uncoerced cooperation. Government is the agency with the exclusive power to compel obedience by law–i.e., at gunpoint.
It’s the dollar or the gun. As a hero in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged puts it:
When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns–or dollars. Take your choice–there is no other.
There is no other choice regarding the concepts we use, either. Our concepts either recognize or obliterate the distinction between freedom and force.
Harry Binswanger is a member of the Ayn Rand Institute’s Board of Directors and has taught philosophy at Hunter College (City University of New York), The New School for Social Research, and the University of Texas, Austin. His forthcoming book is “How We Know”.
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