IRS now referring to #Obamacare’s taxes as ….”Shared Responsibility Payments”??

—

Remember this?

From Obamacare, to record-setting debt, to racially divisive rhetoric, our President has certainly been true to his word: America has been (and continues to be) “transformed”. 

The method through which his Administration is primarily accomplishing this metamorphosis is words, or rather, by changing the meaning/use of words: 

• Acts of terrorism became “Man-Caused Disasters“.
• OUT: Unemployment.  —  IN: “FUNemployment“!
• Freedom-crushing Regulation is actually just “Encouragement“.
• Remember “Leading, from behind“? (…that sure worked out wonderfully)
• And don’t even get me started on what “Transparency” actually means to this bunch.

Feel free to add your own: it’s a lengthy list.

—

Regardless, we can now chalk up one more, courtesy of The Daily Caller:

The Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) final rule on Obamacare’s individual mandate, released this week, uses the term “Shared Responsibility Payment” more than 50 times to describe the mandate’s non-compliance penalty, which the Supreme Court in 2012 defined as a tax.

The IRS also used the term “shared responsibility penalty” in the rule, which does not identify the individual mandate as a tax.

Obviously, their motivation must be called into question, since it was only by having it termed a “tax” by the Supreme Court that Obamacare was allowed to stand in the first place. And since “tax” is decidedly shorter than their spankin’ new moniker, this isn’t an attempt at brevity, either.

No, it’s just another illustration of our descent into Orwell’s “Newspeak“, where words and their meanings are changed to fit the goals of the Totalitarian State. Of course, if you’re an F.A. Hayek fan, you’ve read all of this before in his groundbreaking The Road to Serfdom:

Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed.

… If one has not oneself experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates.

It has to be seen to be understood how, if one of two brothers embraces the new faith, after a short while he appears to speak a different language which makes any real communication between them impossible.

And the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people.

Gee, that doesn’t sound too ominous… 

—

There are some in this country who have totally embraced a life of servitude to the State, and are eager to be directed in this way. Still others long for a society based solely on “shared responsibility”, and everything that most likely entails. But for the rest of us, blatant manipulations like these are a threat to what individual freedom even means.

Make no mistake: if this is allowed to continue, unabated, Obama will not just have succeeded in “Fundamentally transforming America”. 

Because we will no longer BE America.