How do you have a critical political or economic discussion (with the non-educated) when so many people confuse the meanings of important words?
People really seem to confuse the words “Communism”, “Socialism”, and “Fascism”. What people are often calling “Communism” is actually “Socialism”. What people are often calling “Socialism” is actually “Fascism”. And people make it difficult to even use the word “Fascism” (even when it is correct to do so) because many people think it means racism and genocide, even though it has nothing to do with those things.
People think what we had prior to the economic collapse was a “free market”, and are damning “free markets” for the economic collapse. This is nonsense, because what we had prior to the economic collapse was NOT a free market. In fact, free markets fans have been complaining about the type of market we’ve had and were even warning that it would lead to an economic collapse!
And too many people think that entitlements are a type of freedom. Saying “freedom to” is as nonsensical as saying “entitled from”. It’s “freedom from” and “entitled to”; don’t conflate the two!
The whole situation is reminiscent of “Newspeak” from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. That the language has been “modified” so that critical discussion becomes extremely difficult if not impossible.
