Suppose some people come to your home and tell you that, since you have too much money, and they don’t have enough, you have to give them some of yours; and if you don’t, they’ll hurt you. If they do this regularly, they don’t even need to continue with the threats, since the ongoing threat is implied.
Related:
They just send you a bill each month, or each quarter, for what they need, and you hand it over.
Now suppose you band together with some friends, or just upgrade your ability to defend yourself, so you’re able to stop paying them. Question: Would it make any sense at all to say that, by stopping these payments, you are taking something from these people?
It doesn’t, does it? But there is an underlying assumption about government benefits — from the Affordable Care Act to Medicare and Medicaid, to Social Security, to public schools and other forms of welfare spending — that no longer gives is a synonym for takes. Some recent examples:
Amy Barrett could take that choice [to have other people pay for your medical procedures] away.
(USA Today)
Donald Trump and Senate Republicans have focused on one thing: pushing through a supreme court nominee who wants to take away healthcare for millions.
(The Guardian)
Senate Republicans just pushed through a Supreme Court justice who will help them take away Americans’ health care in the middle of a pandemic
(Hillary Clinton, quoted in the New York Times)
This idea — that if I stop letting you take something from me, I’m actually taking something from you — is so pervasive that most people don’t even notice it.
In a similar way, politicians often treat slowing the growth of as a synonym for cutting or shrinking — as in, if we cut the growth of government spending from 4% to 3%, we’re cutting spending.
This is what allows Republicans to claim that they favor smaller government, when in fact they just favor slower growth of government.
It’s the kind of thing that Orwell was talking about when he created Newspeak in 1984:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.
Imagine that you’re pouring a glass of wine for someone, and he tells you ‘That’s too much’. So you keep pouring, but more slowly, and you tell him that you’re reducing the amount of wine in the glass. Or imagine that a friend has been borrowing your chainsaw, and you tell him you need it back, but he complains that you’re taking his saw away.
In any area of life outside of politics, we would notice abuses of language like these and point them out immediately. But for some reason, in politics we regard them as normal.
Until we start noticing and pointing them out in politics, we’re going to remain stuck in a world where spending programs will only be able to grow larger — because we literally won’t have the language to talk about making them smaller.
