Liberty Challenge - A Gap in the Language

Over the last few days I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember the last time I heard or read a New Zealand politician, from any party, utter or use either of the words, ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’. Including in their electioneering.

And I can’t. I can’t recall a single instance. Anybody else?

What does it mean that those two words have disappeared completely from the political lexicon? Our politicians don’t even bother anymore to pay lip-service to that ethic the West was supposed to be based on?

Now what about use of these words in a single MSM editorial or op-ed? I still draw a blank. In fact I draw blanks in every media outside blogs. And even then, as I said in this post, to bring up freedom as a goal in any blog, is normally to earn either half-witted sneers, or that annoying, cloying, assumed Lefty superior type of intellectual (though it’s the opposite), paternal opprobrium (which in fact is merely cynicism).

I’m wondering if we even got close to either of those words here, in our history, ever, or from inception did we get side-tracked by the word ‘egalitarian’? And hasn’t that word had its meaning shamelessly subverted to being, ironically, now turned against ‘freedom’ in 2012? Part of the post-modern apocalypse brought down on us by the collectivists, first hoodwinking the well-meaning liberal heart of academia that language is slippery, then using that to insert their agenda against the identity of the individual, and thus the possibility of their freedom from the minds of their brothers.

What of overseas? In the US, take out the singing of the national anthem, which Obama couldn’t sing with a straight face, as he believes in a secular theocracy, where the State trumps an individual’s freedom, and if he gets replaced this year it’ll be with a Mormon for whom God trumps an individual’s freedom, so do those words have both use in their lexicon, and their original meaning anymore?  Worse, Obama is the first American president I can think of who openly repudiates the word freedom, as in:

“The market will take care of everything,” they tell us…. But here’s the problem: it doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.

—President Barack Obama, Osawatomie, Kansas, December 6, 2011

That statement is wrong on every level, including the facts, and represents the complete capitulation of the Revolution that cleared the way for America’s first black president. There is one important secular holy trinity: philosophy, economics and politick, and if you do not believe in markets, then your philosophy cannot be one that will nurture or promote the meaning in two of the best words in our language: liberty and freedom.