Our Ideologically Biased Language
by Jack Kerwick
From Barack Obama to Pope Francis, the subject of “income inequality” has been rolling off of the tongues of some of the planet’s most visible figures over the last couple of weeks. The former went so far as to describe as it as “the defining challenge of our time.”
In his book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, F.A. Hayek reminds us of this pearl of wisdom from Confucius: “‘When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty.’”
The words surrounding this topic of “income inequality” need to be meticulously reconsidered (if they’ve been considered at all).
“Capitalism,” for example, as Hayek notes, was invented by German academic and self-described “convinced Marxist,” Werner Sombart. Friedrich Engels commended Sombart on being the only German professor to have achieved a genuine understanding of Marx’s Das Kapital.
“Capitalism” conjures, and is meant to conjure, an image of a consciously designed system intended to serve the interests of a minority—the owners of capital—at the expense of the overwhelming majority of us—the laborers. Clearly, the word itself cooks the case against such a system.
“Free market economy” is also problematic in that it implies the existence of something that exists over and above the sum total of the countless transactions of the billions of individual human beings that comprise it. It is not“the market” that determines the price of a product. Rather, product prices are the function of patterns formed by untold numbers of people freely seeking the satisfaction of their needs and wants.
“Free enterprise system” is another common term not without its challenges. It is better than both “capitalism” and “free market economy,” it is true, but it still suggests a premeditated system designed to marshal all agents into the service of one grand enterprise, the realization of a “unitary hierarchy of ends,” as Hayek characterized it. Plus, with the word “enterprise” in its name, such a system sounds as if it is for the benefit of entrepreneurs—and most people don’t see themselves as entrepreneurs.
“Distribution,” as has been long remarked upon, is as misleading as any a term when it comes to describing the property arrangements of a free association of human beings (a “free society”). This nefarious word is meant to have us think that there is some agent or committee of agents responsible for divvying up shares of money from some preexistent pile and distributing them, arbitrarily,to the rest of us: some get more, some get less.
Of course, this is a gross, indeed, a childish, misunderstanding of how income comes about in the real world—even in societies whose governments aren’t self-divided like that under which Americans live. No government has one red penny that it hasn’t extracted from someone who first earned it.
There is one final term that liberty’s apostles must challenge. Interestingly, to my knowledge, no one has yet to mention this point, but there is none that is as crucial as this.
It is imperative that liberty lovers stop referring to “income inequality” as if there is any sense to it, for “inequalities” in income are nothing more or less than differences in income.
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