Is the puttering sound just before ignition your new piston pumps?

And one tiny nitpick: tell the publicity folk that some of us would like to see brennschluss.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/venezuela/10062640/Venezuela-running-out-of-toilet-paper.html

It is very important to use words accurately and according to established usage. Yes, languages do evolve and word-meanings change, yet there are in most cases very important reasons to resist the changes, in the hope at least of slowing them down. But it is a common strategy to hijack completely unrelated words in order to airbrush out certain facts about the facts, or certain connotations that generally accompany the correct word.

“He who controls the language controls the discourse”; “he who controls the language controls the past.”

I believe that Mr. Orwell (among others) inveighed strongly against this practice of substitution in order to detoxify a concept or fact and render it attractive.

We all know the theory that one who is defending a position must not concede the distortion of language to his opponent, and we constantly criticize “conservatives” for arguing their positions in their opponents’ language.

“Concede what it is safe to concede,” Paul quotes Bagehot as saying. Well, conceding that “gay” is the new word for “homosexual” is NOT “safe.”

For it literally robs us of the ability to express a certain old and useful concept expressed in the word “gay”: the concept of an attitude or affect of a person when he is feeling especially happy, cheerful, and carefree.

I once saw a televised performance by the aged Vladimir Horowitz, in which he looked so happy and delighted and, well, gay–it was heart-warming. I mentioned it to a fellow lover of classical piano music, and I said, “He seemed so gay.”

This girl was probably thirty years younger than I at the time (in her twenties) and her face fell. She said, “Oh, I never knew that.” So I had to explain to her the real meaning of the word “gay.”

Not to keep flogging the horse, but quite a few pundits large and small have by now observed that one tactic of the hard left is to take over words so as specifically to make it impossible to think, let alone express, certain thoughts….

Somewhere I read that the guy who came up with the substitution really did so for PR reasons: Homosexuality will be more publically acceptable if we use a different, positive-sounding word for it. (Sometimes the stories say that the guy was a leftist or Frankfurter Marxist; sometimes not.)

Couldn’t we please stop adopting ridiculous language aimed at obscuring the facts? As Paul has done in his comment above? Please!!!! –And this applies just as much to homosexuals as anybody else. It’s not really to the advantage of homosexuals to allow themselves to join with those who wish to subvert the culture by subverting the language.

. . .

And one other example of something we should all be honest and forthright about is this business of so-called “honor killing.” It is NOT honorable and hence it is not merely “killing”; it is MURDER.

In general, it would better be called HONOR MURDER, or, in the case where the perp thinks he’s serving the dictates of Mohammedanism, it’s SHARIAH MURDER.

It would help enormously in the fight against the encroachment of Shariah if we started using the correct term.

And the horror of murder done in the cause of anybody’s alleged “honor” should never be downplayed.

I’ll premise my answer by saying that I’m very much a layman on economic issues, so I’m sure I have this at least partly wrong, if not completely wrong. But, as I understand it, unless your savings is cash in a mattress, it is invested, in one way or another. Either you invest it yourself or you stick it in a bank, which loans or invests it. Either way, the capital is available for business expansion. And it’s the availability of capital that’s important for economic growth (as opposed to having it spent or tied up in depreciating assets).

I fail to see why Maximo should be criticised for his presumption, one cannot know another’s thoughts, however well you may know them, and he did not say that he knew the author’s thoughts, just that he presumed.

Quite, which is why I regard him as presumptuous.

To disparage his comments because he does not know the author is in effect, ad hominem.

So? His remark was clearly ad hominem so should I care?

If there is a national U.S. sales tax it will, necessarily, devolve into the VAT system (there being no way to predict, in advance, whether a purchase will be used as an item to be sold or in the making of such). It will also, you may count upon it, result in increased paperwork (it will become vitally important to be able to prove what you did with what you bought) and the building of a bureaucracy to handle the mesh of new laws that will inevitably be enacted to support the sales-tax/VAT system.

Furthermore, in a modern industrial nation the majority of citizens are not landholders (I think!). You’re going to tell Richard Epstein he can’t vote because he lives in an apartment??? –Well, probably it’s a “condo,” but it’s only a few years ago that Peter Schiff announced he’d finally broken down and bought instead of renting. Or how about Ayn Rand?

That’s the best case–assuming that all income and capital gains taxes were abolished at the same time.

Only property-owners get to vote? Watch how people collude even more than they do now to buy up land for the purpose of influencing government.

The best method that I can see is to fund government through user fees (to the extent possible–most services are not compatible with libertarianism’s understanding of the proper role of government anyway) and, more importantly, by paying for the right to vote.

If you wish to vote, you pay a flat charge–the same for all. If you don’t have the money, find a second job, borrow it, or save till the next election.

In order to vote in any given election, you pay for the purpose. You may not purchase more than one vote. Votes are non-transferable. You must pass an exam on your country’s constitution (if it has one) and its political history before every national vote (yes, in America that would be every four years), and if I had my way the States would require the same for State elections.

It is not unlibertarian to require completed military service of voters.

Voting may be done electronically, by the way, for purposes of easy tallying–but printouts will be generated at the time of the vote, one to be kept for the election commission and one by the individual voter.

I really believe this would be by far the best system. Not that it’s completely corruption-proof: Nothing is; in this case the obvious flaw is that there’s no way to prevent a candidate from going around the neighborhood and giving people the money to vote, in return for the promise that they’ll vote for him.

NO political system will work unless everyone involved is committed to the principle of honesty.