As Thomas Sowell once put it, when people use the word “social” as a modifier, it actually negates what it modifies. “Social justice” is injustice, and a “highly competitive social market economy” is, as you suggest, governmental cronyism. A larger issue is that the term “society” generally has been hijacked, and the effort to do so not only is not new, it was already recognizable in 1776:
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil . . . - Thomas Paine, Common Sense
I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read, the burden of which is that not only does the government not provide society with pencils, no company and certainly no individual can do it, either. For that, society wants people to mine graphite - using machinery which society wanted someone else to design and construct - and so on for the wood, the enamel, the ferule which hold the eraser, the eraser. Not only so, but the people who do all those jobs require food, water, clothing, shelter, and so forth. The bottom line is that society makes the pencil. It is the grossest of distortions to conflate “society” with government. “Society,” as I have shown, is a perfectly serviceable word for “conservatives” - but it is coopted by people who actually despise the individual components of society and desire to rule them. So, “conservatives” never use the word as they should - and we check our wallets when anyone else uses it.
To make an even larger point, the example of “society” vs. “government” is not the only such case. “Liberal” is another classic. If you read The Road to Serfdom (Reader’’s Digest Condensed Version here), you will see that FA Hayek used the term “liberal” to denote people who today would be called “conservatives” in America. That is because Hayek, an Austrian, learned English in America before the meaning of “liberal” was essentially inverted, according to Safire's New Political Dictionary, in the 1920s. And the meaning of “liberal” was not changed in Britain, where Hayek wrote Serfdom during WWII.
The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us.
And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation - we know that just as surely as we know that every American marketer loves to boldly proclaim that whatever product he is flogging is NEW! A belief in progress is the planted axiom of the American “Great Experiment;” in the Constitution it is explicit in the explicit grant of authority to Congress
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
There is a systematic thrust of our publicity Establishment toward a Newspeak version of English in which all good words are pro-socialist, and all bad words are anti-socialist.
