23A038 The Klepto Conspiracy by Jim Davies, 9/19/2023

Sounds like a good title for my next novel, but that cannot be. Not having written any novels yet, there can't be a "next" one. It would be my first. And because I'm very poor at writing fiction, don't hold your breath for its appearance.

You must have noticed that several important words in English have had their meanings changed, for the worse. "Liberal" means "free" from the Latin liber and in the 19th Century it was not an unfair name for the oft-elected UK Liberal Party, which pursued policies of free trade and few laws. In the USA, "Classical Liberal" is the rather cumbersome name for the economic system that those Liberals embraced, and its use did a power of good; it contrasts with modern liberalism, which is just a sneaky way of disguising socialism.

Orwell was a master of the twisted word. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” he wrote in 1984, and we see all around us how accurate is his prediction. War is right now being waged, but by proxies a long way away, yet it's the most dangerous of all wars the FedGov has yet funded. The stamp sold for first-class mail is now printed with "FREEDOM" across it, yet still the USPS jealously forbids competition - the very essence of commercial freedom. And ignorance - of what government actually is, and of what happened in history to bring this society to where it now is - is taught daily for 12 years to every child in the government school monopoly; it certainly is "strength" - but for the monopoly, not the students.

And last month I was surprised to encounter one that's new - to me, at least.

"Kleptocracy" is a good word to describe a government, for every red cent it uses to exercise its power is first stolen from people who earned the money by honest labor; it has no other resource. Hence, it means "rule by thieves." But for interest I looked up the word in that very convenient online resource, dictionary.com. They now say it's..

a government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal; rule by a thief or thieves.

However, when I checked in the same place last month, it then said the word referred only to "corruption in government". In truth the word has nothing to do with corruption (which implies that rulers are normally honorable) and everything to do with theft, or stealing. It derives directly from the Greek - and Merriam Webster is correct. The word even crossed the Adriatic to ancient Rome, and became a further source for us as the Latin clepta.

Rule by thieves is exactly what we have; 100% of all it does is funded by money taken by fraud, force or the threat of it. That's what the very widely-referenced and convenient dictionary.com ought to show, if it were honest; but it has clearly been influenced by government to soften that definition - initially (last month) by omitting all reference to robbery! and now, as in purple above presumably following some complaint, limiting that reference to a few, currupt outliers who "exploit natural resources and steal" rather than to the entire bunch of crooks whose sole resource is stolen loot.

The crooks may - or may not - varnish the theft by writing laws to say their theft is "legal", but that totally fails to change the fact that the property (money) is extracted from its owners by force, and is therefore theft. Hence, they are all kleptocrats.

So, by chance, I encountered an important word in the very process of having its meaning modified, to suit the ruling class. You read it here first. Watch out for another attempt, some months or years down the line, to convince the world that no, government has only a few rotten apples called kleptocrats. In reality, it consists of nobody else.