It's a Penalty... It's a Tax... No! It's Shared Responsibility!

It’s a penalty… it’s a tax… No!  It’s Shared Responsibility!

Once a particular brand has become tainted, liberals will use a different term as a means to make their initiatives more palatable.  Obamacare is getting a makeover.  The Daily Caller reports:

The Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) final rule on Obamacare’s individual mandate, released this week, uses the term “Shared Responsibility Payment” more than 50 times to describe the mandate’s non-compliance penalty, which the Supreme Court in 2012 defined as a tax.

The IRS also used the term “shared responsibility penalty” in the rule, which does not identify the individual mandate as a tax.

The 75-page rule published by the IRS, which is tasked with enforcing Obamacare as the law is fully implemented in 2014, is entitled “Shared Responsibility Payment for Not Maintaining Minimum Essential Coverage.”

F.A. Hayek wrote about the bastardization of the language.  Here is a foreward to his The Road to Serfdom:

FOREWARD TO THE 1956 AMERICAN PAPERBACK EDITION:

The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensible term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.

He also wrote:

If one has not one’s self experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion which it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates. It has to be seen to be understood how, if one of two brothers embraces the new faith, after a short while he appears to speak a different language which makes any real communication between them impossible. And the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of the words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people. Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, and words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.

Source: http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/28/new-obamacare-rule-uses-term-shared-responsibility-payments-63-times-instead-of-tax/#ixzz2dPTgHsAs

Keynesian Economics and World War II

This video pretty much says it all.  No matter how many times the Keynesians have been proven wrong the press always ignores the end results of this flawed theory.

Whenever you get into a debate with these statist, they always point to WWII and how the military machine and the heavy handed policies of FDR brought us out of the Great Depression.  That argument is being refuted.  Economist Robert Higgs points out the fallacy of this theory in his piece World War II and the Triumph of Keynesianism.  Here is an excerpt:

So, government policies created sustained high unemployment, and Keynesians blamed the market. The Keynesians then credited the government's wartime deficits for pulling the economy out of the Great Depression and continued to credit defense spending for preventing another economic collapse. In this way, sound economics was replaced by economic ideas congenial to spendthrift politicians, defense contractors, labor unions, and left-liberal economists.

How much better it would have been if the wisdom of Ludwig von Mises had been taken to heart. In Nation, State, and Economy (1919), Mises said, "War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings." The analogy was apt in World War I, in World War II, and during the Cold War. It is still apt today.

To read the whole article click on the link below:

http://www.fff.org/freedom/0395d.asp

Congressman John Hall: A Product of our Educational System

Democrats are in denial as to why they had their asses handed to them this past election. Rep. John Hall is a perfect example, demonstrated in a recent interview:


In a wide-ranging interview before he prepares to leave the House of Representatives, Hudson Valley Congressman John Hall warned that the nation could quickly descend into Fascism if more is not done to curb the influence of corporate money in politics.


Speaking about the Citizen's United decision, which allowed unregulated flow of cash into campaign coffers, Hall said, "I learned when I was in social studies class in school that corporate ownership or corporate control of government is called Fascism. So that's really the question— is that the destination if this court decision goes unchecked?"


Hall said that the flow of corporate dollars is why he and the Democrats lost control of Congress.


Well, Mr. Hall just gave a testament as to how dysfunctional our educational system is. Not only did he get fascism completely backwards; he doesn’t understand the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…

Congress violated the First Amendment under McCain/Feingold. If you really wanted to get the influence of corporate money out of politics; you can start by repealing the Seventeenth Amendment. But Mr. Hall doesn’t have a basic understanding of the freedom of speech. I seriously doubt he would understand the principles our founding fathers had on the electoral process of senators.

Mr. Hall reminds me of what F.A. Hayek warned in his book The Road to Serfdom; that words would be hijacked and history will be distorted by the left:

FOREWARD TO THE 1956 AMERICAN PAPERBACK EDITION:


The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensible term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.

He also wrote:

If one has not one’s self experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion which it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates. It has to be seen to be understood how, if one of two brothers embraces the new faith, after a short while he appears to speak a different language which makes any real communication between them impossible. And the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of the words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people. Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, and words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.



This technique is currently being employed by the Global Warming crowd. I hope the leftist aren’t as successful distorting the phraseology of that hoax as they were with fascism and liberalism.

Source:  http://www.observer.com/2010/politics/soon-be-ex-congressman-john-hall-warns-against-creeping-fascism