What’s in a name?

Let us suppose that a bad, repressive political faction took office in this country and tried to impose a theocracy -- to impose its moral and religious views by force of law.

Let us suppose that they succeeded in criminalizing, at least temporarily, not only abortion, but even distribution of birth control information and devices. (This was actually the status quo in some states as late as 1965, when the Supreme Court's decision in the Griswold case threw out a law of that nature in Connecticut.)

Now: What do you suppose our bad, draconian, hypothetical future repressive government would call the agency placed in charge of prosecuting people who violated these laws?

Would the clever government wordsmiths call it the Department of Womb Slavery?

I don't think so.

Would they call it the Department of Violently Repressing Reproductive Choice?

No.

They'd call it the Department of Motherhood. Wouldn't they?

Then, if anyone ever said, "Times are tight, we've got to cut somewhere, let's pare back all these raids and undercover entrapment schemes, trying to catch and arrest people for practicing birth control. People were better off when they were free to make their own decisions on these matters, anyway," how would the statists respond?

They would say, "Now, of all times, with Americans undergoing such hardships, is the LAST time we should cut back on Motherhood!"

Can you see how allowing the statists to control the words that get adopted to describe and label their government programs and departments cripples later attempts to cut them back or get rid of them, when they prove overly expensive, overly destructive of our liberties, or just plain useless or counterproductive?

Back in 1977, as a payback for all the help he received from the teacher unions in his 1976 election campaign, one-term president Jimmy Carter and his Democratic congressional allies created a new federal department.

But they didn't call it "The Department of Diverting Billions of Tax Dollars to the Statist, Ultra-Left Teacher Unions." No, they called it the "Department of Education."

Now, with the nation awash in unbelievable levels of debt, public attention turns inevitably to this tawdry and pointless department, which has never "educated' anyone.

After all, the rising power of the unions and other educrat bureaucracies has paralleled almost exactly the collapse of test scores and other indicators of how well American children are being educated. It has paralleled nothing less than a massive swelling of de facto illiteracy and innumeracy.

Schools used to cost taxpayers far less per capita from the time of the founding up through the 1920s at least, and in most cases up through the mid-1960s. Yet today's high school graduates would fail in any academic competition based on reading, writing, history, geography and arithmetic with American eighth graders of 60, 90, or 140 years ago.

If the federal "Department of Education" has not only done no good, but demonstrably overseen the greatest and most precipitous decline of academic competence in the nation's history, and given that it additionally costs a lot and extends federal control over matters which the Founders guaranteed us would remain in perpetuity matters of state, local, or parental choice, why not get rid of it?

And how do the statists respond to this "radical, wacky, extreme" proposal?

"Now, of all times, would be a disastrous time to cut Education!"

They mean "The Department of Education." But it sounds like they mean "to cut learning and literacy," doesn't it? Even though the "Department of Education" has done nothing to advance learning and literacy, and a whole lot to degrade them.

There is an answer. Refuse to embrace their purposely misleading euphemisms. They're not "public schools"; they're "government schools." And it's not the "Department of Education," it's the "Department of Mandatory Government Youth Propaganda and Literacy Limitation Camps."

And why on earth wouldn't we want to get rid of THAT?