"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.
By denying the reality who and what was the source of the 9-11 attacks and other terror actions, we are further away from understanding the root causes of terror. Old joke: "A wife walks into the living room and sees her husband crawling around on the floor. She asks him what he is doing and he says he is looking for something he dropped on the floor in the bedroom. When she asks why isn't he looking for it in the bedroom he says the light is better for searching in the living room."
By denying and suppressing the root causes of many terror attacks and perverting the description from "Islamic" to a more generic description, we end up looking for root causes of terrorism in the living room when we really should be looking in the place where the problem is, the bedroom. Why the President elected to search in the living room, especially after how much terrorism suffering the country has lived through, is beyond me.
4) The all time great lie and perversion of language has to be the "Social Security Trust Fund." This name implies that we give up some of our wealth every pay check to the government who holds in "trust,", i.e. keeps it save for us until we need it back when we retire.
However, that "trust" is severely misplaced. That money that the political class and Federal government was supposed to hold in trust for us is long gone. It has been paid out over the years to current retirees during those years. There is no pot of money or wealth, with our name on it, sitting somewhere for use to use in our golden years. The only pile waiting for is a set of IOUs that track how much of our payments have been made to other Americans. It is quite simply a giant Ponzi scheme where those that gave their money to the scheme first are most likely to get the highest return back over time.
Now, some people, like Harry Reid, would declare that there is indeed $2.6 TRILLION sitting somewhere in the Social Security Administration building or elsewhere for all of us. What he is too ignorant too understand is that there is $2.6 TRILLION of accounting entries sitting somewhere in the Social Security Administration. Accounting entries are not wealth and they are not money. You cannot take an accounting entry to the store and buy something with it.
When you retire, the Social Security Administration will have to take some of those IOUs over to the Treasury Department for redemption. Since the Treasury Department is currently running an annual deficit of over a TRILLION dollars, it does not have any money laying around and will have to go out and tax existing workers to cover your retirement check.
Don't believe me still? Think back to last month when it was possible that the debt ceiling would not be raised. What was the first scare tactic out of Obama's bag of demagoguery? Social Security recipients might not get their checks if the debt ceiling was not raised. Why would he say that if there was $2.6 TRILLION sitting in the Social Security"trust" fund? Why couldn't he just take some of that money out to cover the short term shortfall?
Because it is not money, it is accounting ledger entries. Social Security is now a negative cash flow operation, money coming in from workers is not enough to cover the money that has been promised to be paid out to retirees. Your trust that the political class would hold your Social Security pay check deductions in trust could not be trusted.
[Note: We will do a lot on Social Security next week since it will be a hot topic up until the November, 2012 elections.]
5) I am not a bankruptcy expert but I am pretty sure I know what happens when a company goes bankrupt but still wants to continue on as a business after cleaning up its financials via a court supervised bankruptcy proceeding:
- The company gets to get all or much of its debt forgiven.
- The company gets to break distribution contracts with existing dealers of its products if needed to get solvent again.
- The company gets to break contracts with its unions and workers if needed to get solvent again.
- The company gets to make changes to its arrangements with its stock holders and debt holders including turning their investments into junk if needed to get solvent.
Until Obama bailed out two of the big three domestic auto makers. We are constantly told the big lie that Obama "saved the auto industry." Which is totally a lie being told so many times. If General Motors and Chrysler had been forced into bankruptcy proceedings without any government involvement, all of the above bankruptcy steps would have still been executed but without the loss of billions of taxpayer dollars.
Both companies would have shed debt, broke contracts with dealers they did not want to deal with any more, reworked their union contracts to a more favorable pay scale, and probably greatly diminished the wealth that stock holders and debt holders had given the company. The end result might have looked different but there were enough valuable assets in both companies that they would have emerged out of bankruptcy as smaller, but stronger competitors. They did not need Obama's or our politicians' intervention.
But Obama wanted to intervene in order to leverage a political goal: protect as many union jobs and union voters as possible. He did not intervene to save the auto industry, he intervened, using taxpayer money as collateral, to protect his political interests.
To prove this, let's look at an extreme case. The American car market sells about 16 million cars a year. General Motors has about a 25% share of that market. Let's assume that General Motors never emerged from bankruptcy, i.e. Obama had not intervened to "save" the car industry in America.
What would be the size of the car market if that had happened? No, not 12 million, it would still be about 16 million. The market did not change, that market demand would still have been there, for the most part, with or without General Motors being a competitor. About 16 million buyers of cars would still have needed cars, the absence of General Motors would have forced them to buy Fords or American made Hondas, or American made Toyotas or foreign cars.
The auto industry would still have been intact, with many of those 16 million cars still being made in American factories, some of them owned by America companies and some of them not. But the Obama administration wants you to believe the lie that it saved the American car industry. It did not, the American car industry would have survived nicely, with a revamped General Motors and Chrysler and without billions of dollars wasted.
So what do we know for sure:
- There is no "Federal family," there are only Federal government agencies, run by an incompetent and wasteful political class, that should be seen and not heard until they are needed. Much like we do want Big Brother at our dinner table, we do not need or want this Federal family around our family dinner table either.
- The government does not generate revenue like viable businesses do, the collect taxes. By the way, did you ever notice that when you put the words, "The IRS" together, it spells THEIRS? That is confiscating taxes, not generating revenue.
- There truly are Islamic terrorists in the world.
- It is too late now but we never should have trusted the government and political class to put our wealth in a Social Security Trust fund.
- The political class and Obama did not save the auto industry, it would have been fine without taxpayer bailouts.
Never forget the warning from the past: "The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." And, if I may add, the State is usually the mortal enemy of freedom.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available, at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.loathemygovernment.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment.com/
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