Scrap TV license or public support for BBC will ‘fall off a cliff’ warns ex-Crimewatch host…

Daily Mail (UK) ^ | 15:09 EST, 3 February 2014 | Matt Chorley

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Public ownership ought to be done away with too.

”Liberals” - socialists - continually use euphemisms to pretty up their tyrannical scheme. This has a double effect - first the evasion of what they actually mean, and secondly to subvert the language in a newspeak sense. The use of the term “liberal” is a classic of the genre; in 1919 nobody would have understood you if you inveighed against “liberals” - they would have taken you to be against the very things you are for.

FA Hayek learned English as a teen in America before 1920, moved to Britain, and subsequently wrote his classic The Road to Serfdom in 1944. In his preface to the 1956 edition Hayek wrote:

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 leftist 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 indispensable 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.

It is true, of course, that in the struggle against the believers in the all-powerful state the true liberal must sometimes make common cause with the conservative, and in some circumstances, as in contemporary Britain, he has hardly any other way of actively working for his ideals. But true liberalism is still distinct from conservatism, and there is danger in the two being confused. Conservatism, through a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.

Safire’s New Political Dictionary dates the the inversion of the meaning of the term “liberal” - in America but not elsewhere - to the decade of the 1920s; that agrees with the fact that by 1933 FDR unselfconsciously referred to himself as a liberal.

All of this is to make the point that when socialists use the term “public” when they mean nothing other than government, we should reject that nomenclature. Were I the Speaker of the House of Representatives I would make it a House Rule that anyone could object to any speech with used the euphemism “public” or “society” when they mean nothing other than government. The phenomenon of which I complain here is hardly new:

Common Sense
by Thomas Paine

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; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

[Winniesboy]

Thanks for posting that Hayek quote, which I hadn’t seen before. The transatlantic confusion over the connotations of the term ‘liberal’ is as acute now as it was when he wrote it. In political debate across the pond between like-minded people it continues to cause fundamental mutual misunderstanding. But I’m grateful that here in Britain it’s still possible to use ‘liberal’ in its original, true, non-pejorative sense