Wild Words

2005-11-22 18:10:00

Larry:

Let me summarize this very quickly.

Salary, vacation, insurance, dental plans, stock options, company parties, daycare centers, etc. are expenses that a company incurs in doing business. They offer these incentives to attract the best employees they can get and they expense them as part of the employees compensation package.

Larry, Do you not realize that I understand this and agree with you on it??? I do not see this point as even part the debate for everyone I know with any sense knows this. This has nothing to do with whether the points I made concerning social ingredients.

Let us just take one point and look at it for the argument is similar for them all:

The sharing of assets. Employees have equal access to health insurance. This is a very important social benefit within a company in the eyes of many.

I think you'll have to admit that there are a number of socialized ingredients here:

(1) All receive the same benefits no matter what their pay grade or job. Equality is a big ingredient in socialism.

(2) This makes the benefit an equally shared one that is taken from assets that would normally be given to the employees in cash.

(3) The employee cannot say "I will refuse the health benefit if you will pay me more money."

(4) This is a program in which all full employees participate.

(5) If you substitute the "State" for the "Company" and the extra money the employee doesn't receive because of the cost of health insurance as "taxes" then we see a strong similarity here to "socialized medicine.

No need here to list the differences between state socialized medicine and business socialized medicine because I am talking about similarities rather than differences.

My point here is that both have social ingredients and similarities. I realize there are differences also.

The bottom line is this. You are insisting I use your orthodox and rigid definition of socialism in my writings and do not want me to define my terms the way I have.

I have presented strong reasoning why my use of words is not out of line, but even if they are, so what? It's a free world and the ironical thing is "freedom" seems to be the point of friction here.

The second ironical thing is we both agree on all the principles involved. Why let the definition of a single word become such a bone of contention?

We may offend others because our speech is not politically correct you say? Then let them be offended if they are that over sensitive. After all I have gone through to clarify my position it seems that it would be difficult to take offense.

What matters most? A black and white definition of a word or the principles involved?

I accept all you say from your position of defining the word. All I ask is equal consideration in looking at how I feel I must define the word to communicate that which I desire to communicate.

Let me add this. Force socialism did not make inroads into public acceptance by preaching pure socialism. That would have scared the dickens out of the people. Instead they used language embracing ideas accepted by the public.

Today we are in an opposite situation. Words like big business, privatization, budget cuts, corporations, greed are all words that scare people about free thought and enterprise. They fear losing social benefits.

If we tell the people today we are going to "privatize" your benefits it will scare them as much today as telling them we "are going to socialize America" would have 100 years ago.

Free enterprise people must fight fire with fire and also use words which are accepted by the deceived masses. If the people are presented with the concepts of "free socialism" vs "forced socialism" they are forced to weight the one against the other instead of just ignoring a libertarian teacher as a crackpot.

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking. John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)