It is human nature for us to at least occasionally attempt to deceive one another.  Clever use of language is a convenient method for this to occur.  For example, the word virtually is especially useful.  Although it semantically implies virtue, it really means not exactly.  A close runner-up is the phrase “as much as,” which is often used when announcing sale discounts, which are mostly less than the extreme example used to hook in potential customers.

In the political realm, we have the moldy old feeble brinkmanship of a threatened government shutdown.  Oh, dear!  My baby!  My baby!  Old people will starve when their Social Security checks don’t get mailed...except that nowadays the monthly distribution is often automatically wired directly into recipients’ checking accounts.  Since the federal government is the sole issuer of money, it can never run out of it.  It can only make it worth less...and less.

Most pernicious of this sort of deception would likely be climate hysteria.  “Scientific consensus” is often trotted out as proof of such a catastrophic prediction, completely ignoring that geology and paleontology have for a long time empirically documented oscillation between ice ages, when over 30% of the Earth’s surface was covered with ice, and warm periods, when gigantic reptiles thrived almost everywhere.  All this fuss is being made over the same gas that puts the fizz into soda pop and constitutes only about 0.04% of the atmosphere or only one out of every two thousand five hundred molecules of air.

The true objective of such deceit is tyranny and enforced control over just about everything.  Some wise skeptics have used the phrase “climate change industrial complex” to describe the artificial economy created by this deception, with electric vehicles and solar panels being the most common examples.

In other commercial deceptions, house-buyers of last resort are fairly prominent.  They offer “all cash,” which is really the normal way a seller is compensated at the close of escrow.  Also, they brag about the absence of other fees debited from the seller’s proceeds, including appraisal.  This means that there is no expert third party’s opinion as to the actual value of the property.  Hmmm.  Some also offer to add several thousand dollars to their offer if their response isn’t especially prompt, even though the amount of their offer isn’t known until after the “additional” funds are added.

But wait — there’s some good news in all of this.  First off, ordinary people continue to maintain at least some degree of skepticism, especially when a proposal seems to be too good to be true.  A current example involves recent revelations that members of Biden’s entourage deliberately concealed his damaged mental condition.  Gee, really?  Whatever they tried to do had little, if any, effect, since Biden’s feeble condition was obvious and even joked about.  When the June 28 Trump-Biden debate was first announced, there were some serious murmurings that the Democrat establishment was throwing Biden over the side.  Trump may have also known this and prepared his retort, “I have no idea what he just said...and I don’t think he does, either,” in advance, knowing that an opportunity to zing it was probably inevitable.

Perhaps the greatest of all deceptions has to do with the creeping centralization of government, away from the more intimate local forms.  Larry P. Arnn, writing in this November’s Imprimis, states that in 1930, more than 60% of public funds were controlled by cities, towns, and counties — with the federal government accounting for just 20%.  “Now those numbers are reversed.”  The major impetus behind this trend is the falsehood that redistribution of wealth is immensely beneficial to the population in general.  In the real world, the creation of new wealth is the true benefactor.

Image via Public Domain Pictures.