ninefruits asked: Well, by not addressing the issue you are merely perpetuating the misuse of these terms. Surely there's some irony is you entrenching these instituationalised terms? Shouldn't you be against such a defence of inherent power? Maybe it's time to read Hayek's "Why I'm Not A Conservative" again?
It’s not a question of irony and it’s not a question of perpetuating misuse. I’m not in the dictionary-rewriting business. I’m in the business of getting libertarianism into the vernacular. To do that, I’m going to use the words of the vernacular. Sometimes I write pieces explaining the philosophical origins and current usages of words; sometimes I don’t.
I’m not saying words don’t matter and I’m not saying I don’t care how they’re used. I care very much. I pick my words carefully and often re-edit posts a dozen times before publishing (and even after publishing) to make sure they say exactly what I want them to say. For instance, you’ll find I typically stick to “left-wing” and “right-wing” rather than “liberal” or “conservative.” The reason is that I know the philosophical background of all four terms, even if not all of the people reading me do — and by using the words I do I can both make myself immediately understood and appease my own desire for terminological accuracy.
I am saying that what I do here is designed to be intelligible to a broad audience — an audience that I don’t want to oblige to read half a dictionary to understand what I’ve written. It kind of slows the discussion down if at the beginning of every post I have to go through the whole “when I say ‘liberal,’ I mean the people you’d call ‘conservative,’ and when I say ‘progressive,’ I mean the people you’d call ‘liberal’” rigamarole.
Moreover, even if I were committed to using all philosophical terms in their original, historical connotations (with much confusion and few followers as the result), the change you proposed would be completely out of the question. As I said before, never has the term “progressive” been applied to a minimal government, free market approach. Though it has reentered the political mainstream fairly recently thanks to the likes of Glenn Beck, “progressive” has more than a century of history attached to it — and it’s all history of expansionary government. The switch you suggested is frankly preposterous coming from someone arguing for accurate word usage.
So once more: Rewriting the cultural dictionary of the country is not my mission here. whakahekeheke put it well when he dubbed me “a friendly libertarian diplomat to Tumblr users en masse.” A diplomat speaks the local language. And in the local language, wanting to strictly limit government spending and interference in the marketplace is “fiscal conservatism,” so that’s what I’m going to call it. End of discussion. You call things what you want on your blog; I’ll call them what I want on mine.
