The power of words

If I took a week in the Caribbean sitting on white shingle beaches and bathing in blue tropical water, I believe I would come back in much better shape.  I would be more productive and I would earn more.  The money used for the trip could therefore be called an ‘investment,’ rather than mere spending.

I can say the same about virtually any expenditure.  That chocolate bar will restore my energy and increase my output.  That jacket will make me feel so cool and self-assured that my earning power will go up.  In the same way governments talk of ‘investing’ more in education, health, or pensions. 

A Chancellor might say that a decent, humane society should be spending part of its wealth on education and health.  Unfortunately, ‘spending’ is a bad word so it’s called ‘investment,’ and in the process, it loses the distinction between two different ideas. Investment involves the postponement of gratification in order to seek greater future rewards, whereas spending involves using the funds for gratification instead. Gordon Brown was the master of this rhetorical deceit. He spoke of all government spending as ‘investment,’ and I imagine would occasionally ‘invest’ in a Mars Bar or a doughnut.

Freedom has had a good press, so good that everyone wants to be counted in favour. Some think it a good thing that people should have jobs, even if it involves a modest sacrifice of freedom to facilitate this.  Instead of pointing to the trade-off, however, they prefer to pretend that having a job is part of some greater freedom, the freedom to work. 

People talk in a similar way of the ‘freedom’ to have decent housing, food, pensions, or whatever else is deemed an ingredient of a decent life.  The reason some fail to achieve these things is not that they are thwarted by the arbitrary will of others, but that they lack the resources to obtain them.  It could be argued that people have an obligation to empower them, despite the loss of freedom this will entail.  Because freedom is such a good word, however, they prefer to call this empowerment ‘true freedom’ rather than what it is, and they rob freedom of its meaning.

It is said that the poor ‘lack the freedom’ to charter a helicopter ride over the Thames, but their inability to do so is not constrained by the arbitrary will of others, but by their own lack of power. If they could raise the money, no-one would stop them from doing it.

One can be in favour of investment and of freedom, and one might similarly in favour of spending and empowerment, but these are four things, not two.

Madsen Pirie