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.

I’ve noticed that most 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.

From a friend of squashed:

I think there’s one major argument against a public plan/option, and one minor argument for:

(1) The biggest objection to having a public option is that it is a stealth plan to drive out private insurers that will leave us with a government monopoly on insurance.

If the public plan isn’t subsidized by tax dollars (implicitly or explicitly), it is pointless— it’s like saying, hey the government should open up an insurance company. Things like transparency, fairness, etc cost money— insurers could provide more of them, but people aren’t willing to pay for them. So the government plan is either just like the existing plan, or is subsidized. But if it’s subsidized, it’s not really competition, and the danger is that it will succeed and drive out the private insurers (because you get a subsidy only of you buy the government plan). The “public option” for elementary school has pretty much driven all competition out the the market, not because it is better than private school, but because it is free.

(2) To me, the strongest argument for having a public option is the following: private insurers spend money and reduce benefits to screen out sick people. So let’s have the public option take care of the sickest people. Yes, the government plan will be more expensive, but we’ll subsidize it with tax dollars— and it won’t really be an extra subsidy, because we all would have paid for the sick people’s care (on average) when they were part of the private market.

To the extent we could get (2) without getting (1), I might be in favor of a government option. But I think, at least, a government monopoly on health insurance would be a tragedy with large welfare costs.

I’d actually prefer (voluntary) charity to take care of (2) rather than (coercive) taxation.

I am concerned that Forced Eugenics is going to make a come back here, as a “solution” to some “problems” inherent to socialism / fascism.