I don’t get the media’s willingness to accept the politician’s definition of “ask,” as in:<\/p>\n
“We’ll ask them to hand over their assets to government<\/a>”<\/p>\n “We should not be asking them to make sacrifices if we\u2019re not asking the most fortunate in our society to make some sacrifices as well<\/a>.”<\/p>\n The first quote comes from the Zimbabwean Minister of Economic Empowerment–an Orwellian title if ever one existed–with regards to foreign owners of mines.\u00a0 The second quote is U.S. President Obama discussing his hope for budget cuts and tax increases.\u00a0 Each of those phrases is more honest if “ask” is substituted for “force.”<\/p>\n Actually, that substitution doesn’t work as cleanly in Obama’s statement.\u00a0 In the first instance of “asking,” the government is taking benefits away that it currently provides; in the second instance of “asking,” the government is taking by force resources that are nominally owned by other people.\u00a0 Substituting “ask” for “force, or supplanting “ask” with “from behind a gun” reveals Obama’s linguistic trick in attempting to treat these very different activities as similar.<\/p>\n The lesson is simple:\u00a0 when I ask you to do something, or you ask me, it’s a request that either of us can refuse.\u00a0 When the government “asks” you to do something, you can’t.\u00a0 Of course, every mafia don will insist that a person could refuse their requests<\/a> when it comes down to it, but that insistence does as much violence to the language as it does to the person who refuses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t get the media’s willingness to accept the politician’s definition of “ask,” as in: “We’ll ask them to hand over their assets to government” “We should not be asking them to make sacrifices if we\u2019re not asking the most fortunate in our society to make some sacrifices as well.” The first quote comes from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-practical-definitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2905"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2907,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions\/2907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}