JOSEPH SCHUMPETER, in his 1949 History of Economic Thought, famously said of the term “liberalism” that it was “a supreme, if unintended, compliment that the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label”.
This sort of language polution has far-reaching consequences, often obscuring the original concept. Those who still wish to reference the old meaning must either qualify the use of the hijacked term, or invent new terms to try to keep the old idea from being driven from the field of public discourse. The terms “libertarian” and “classical liberal” are examples of such artificial constructs. Neither quite captures the concept that would have been obvious to a reader in, say, America in the 1920’s. That the original term, or its cousins in other languages, lives on in less damaged form in other parts of the world only confuses matters further.
Catching up on the past week’s blog reading, one can find evidence of a similar assault on the word “peace”. Garnering the most attention, we have a Nobel “Peace” Prize winner fantasizing about killing a sitting US president. We also have “peaceniks” shooting Iraq vets, and symbols of Palestinian terrorism being marketed as “peace scarves”. (To be fair, the shooting incident may yet prove to simply have been the work of a random nutcase.) Next thing you know, organizers of “peace” rallies will be hawking t-shirts featuring bloodthirsty thugs. Oh, wait, nevermind. None of this is really new, of course, it just struck me as odd to see a string of examples within a short period of time.
Mahalanobis had a good post on the Nobel Prize winner’s outburst, and the pervasiveness of this world-view. Key point:
Evil isn’t Snidely Whiplash or the Legion of Doom who explicitly state an intention to hurt people (and are comic characters). It’s people with really good intentions operating under extreme confidence against other people’s will, creating a greater good such as the no-Bush world, or rule ‘by the people’.
It’s good to know what evil really is: good intentions, enthusiastically applied, on a bad theory.
Of course, this sort of analysis only works as long as concepts like “good”, “bad”, and “evil” can still be meaningfully expressed.
and Ludwig Lachmann’s 
) has explored issues with the non-rivalrous nature of information: The “supply” of a newspaper article, a paper in a scientific journal, a painting, or a sunset is not used up as more people “consume” it. This is unlike, say, a doughnut, a gallon of gas, or an hour of a surgeon’s time. I suspect that those whose occupations revolve around the production of non-rivalrous goods may simply have less firm of a grasp on the hard realities imposed the forces of supply and demand.