As Orwell warned, words can be twisted to make falsehoods sound truthful and murder respectable. Today the left uses them to subvert capitalism

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By Peter Shawn Taylor

“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic; they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.” That’s how Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who somehow survived Hitler’s reign of terror, described the Nazi regime’s manipulation of words and their meaning in his 1957 book The Language of the Third Reich. The endless public repetition of fascist idioms and phrases regarding race, duty and country, Klemperer argued, turned Germans into unthinking servants of the Nazi cause.

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Today, similar forces of linguistic control are wielded by propagandists embedded within our own democratic society. As Christopher Dummitt recently pointed out in this newspaper, the concept of personal responsibility is rapidly being excised from our language. Self-administered drug overdoses have become “accidental poisonings,” while vagrants are merely “experiencing homelessness.” Victims all.

The same process is also redefining once-benign notions of markets and entrepreneurship into malign forces and recasting socialist objectives as free-market values. Terms like renoviction, organizational elder abuse, stakeholder capitalism and environmental racism are now commonly (mis)used to describe economic and financial concepts in ways meant to create scorn and enmity. What follows are a few entries from this ever-expanding anti-capitalist dictionary, along with more accurate alternatives.

Any area habitually short on daycare spaces. Although the federal government’s heavily subsidized, $10-per-day child care program was meant to create a lush, green forest of new spaces at phenomenally low cost, Canada appears strangely bone-dry as parents everywhere complain about a worsening shortage of spaces. Ample evidence reveals this rampant desertification is a direct result of a federal plan that explicitly discriminates against for-profit daycare providers. If the goal is to boost the supply of practically anything, the private sector is nearly always nimbler and more cost-effective than the public or non-profit sectors. Saskatchewan is the Sahara of Canada’s child-care deserts; it also has the nation’s lowest share of for-profit child care. Suggesting Canada’s current shortage is some random force of nature deliberately ignores the importance of private-sector child care. More accurate alternative: “Absence of private-sector supply.”

A frequent slur against anyone who questions an established narrative, it has recently been applied to anyone who challenges claims Canada’s Indian Residential School system was a deliberate genocide. But it also serves numerous other ideological agendas. Ross McKitrick, a University of Guelph economist well-known for........

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