Neoliberal neologisms

This blog post on the Telegraph's site the other day caught my eye. It nicely explains some of the baffling terms financial experts and political economists use, and their self-serving reasons for doing so. We are left, as so often with political and bureaucratic language, with "a form of gibberish in which words are divorced from meaning".

We're already familar with the euphemisms 'quantitative easing' (printing money) and 'negative growth' (recession), but the central bankers create jargon almost as fast as they create money. Many of these new terms are of course abbreviations that demand prior knowledge of their full phrases: QE, ESFS, ZIRP, M1, etc. Orwell once wrote that he was "smothered under journalism"; perhaps today he'd instead feel smothered under acronyms (SUA).

Both sides of the political debate — which, at least in Britain, is increasingly little more than an economic debate — use these rhetorical tricks. 'Social justice' seems to be a clever rebranding of 'redistribution of wealth', and has replaced it in the leftist lexicon as 'tax and spend' has gone out of fashion (which is why it's even cleverer that they don't call it 'economic justice').

On the right, meanwhile, we often hear 'wealth creators' used to imply aspirational entrepreneurs but really to mean the already rich, many of whom collect rather more wealth than they create. Many commentators and even politicians also fail to show much understanding of the difference between deficit and debt, or between tax evasion and tax avoidance.

Perhaps we should always bear in mind HL Mencken's quote: "when somebody says it's not about the money, it's about the money".