Redefining Recession: The White House Goes Orwellian
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
We have seen the definitions of many words change over the past few years for political and ideological reasons; some have even been lost altogether. We can now add recession to the list.
In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Phil Magness, director of Research and Education at AIER, aptly points out that “An economic downturn is a political problem, so the White House is playing semantics by redefining the term.”
Phil writes,
“Rather than tackling the underlying economic problems, the White House is playing word games.
Economists have long defined a recession as “a period in which real GDP declines for at least two consecutive quarters,” to quote the popular economics textbook by Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus. This definition isn’t perfect, but it describes almost every downturn since World War II.”
If you attempt to post your own opinion about the Whitehouse attempting to change the definition of a recession on Facebook, beware of the arbiters of reality know as Politifact, who will flag your post for misinformation, stating “No, the White House didn’t change the definition of “recession”.
Phil Magness fact-checked the fact checkers on Twitter:
He goes further, tweeting, “The entire media "fact checking" industry is an exercise in politically motivated fraud.”
“In a post-truth era the meanings of words are arbitrarily changed to suit the prevailing narrative, with fact checkers at the ready to enforce the ever-changing so-called “truths” of the anointed.”
In a post-truth era the meanings of words are arbitrarily changed to suit the prevailing narrative, with fact checkers at the ready to enforce the ever-changing so-called “truths” of the anointed.
In his book The Vision Of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell succinctly states:
“What does the vision offer that reality does not offer? What a vision may offer, and what the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer, is a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin. For those who have this vision of the world, the anointed and the benighted do not argue on the same moral plane or play by the same cold rules of logic and evidence.”
Or, as George Orwell simply wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
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