Monday, February 15, 2010

The power of words

There's no faster way for a writer of any publications to lose a reader than to use some incendiary terms that have been proven wrong but are generally accepted by the masses. One such word is "isolationism", commonly used when describing the libertarian approach to the foreign policy.
Isolationism is the term defined by Merriam-Webster as follows:
"a policy of national isolation by abstention from alliances and other international political and economic relations" (Merriam-Webster Online. 15 February 2010
).
Libertarians of all creeds are the champions of free and unrestricted trade, whether on domestic or international front. There is absolutely no point in trying to prove this one more time. In our view there is a big difference between a free-trade and the quasi-free system set up by the state right now. But the term "isolationism" is not commonly used to describe the trade views, but rather the entangling alliances we've been warned against by the Founding Fathers, but which are so common today that the very thought of reversing them causes shudders in the state-oriented minds.