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.
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.
