One of my favourite essayist bloggers will be a guest on the Charles Adler show today, scheduled for about 12:30 Saskatchewan time. (You can listen live at the link.) If you’re unfamiliar with Bill’s work, head over to Eject! Eject! Eject! for a taste of his writing.
There’s no pretentiousness about Bill’s prose, no self-indulgent vocabulary revving. He simply walks the reader down a path, pointing things out in the language of the average man, as he delivers solid whacks upside the head employing a giant paddle some might call “common sense”.

To be Politically Correct these days, you must accept the collectivist belief that words are like weapons, endowed with their own internal, innate power, and this power, like that of a chambered bullet, cannot be trusted to be used responsibly and so must be outlawed and banished from the community.
PC advocates have strict rules for what they call Hate Speech, and using such speech essentially makes you a criminal.
So much for the First Amendment. But the Bill of Rights never meant much to these people; indeed, they see it as an impediment to human progress.
Implicit in this belief is that I have the power to harm you by my use of language. Notice that all the responsibility falls on the speaker; the listener, the subject, is completely powerless, and has achieved the highest status with the group: victim. Note also that this worshipping of the victim, is in essence, the elevation of the most powerless and the least responsible to divine status. It is a very basic sleight of hand, that allows the controlling elites to maintain that they are only trying to help the poor and downtrodden, when in reality their actions are clearly nothing more than a naked grab for power that would shame the most ruthless corporate CEO.
Who decides what is hate speech? The group decides. If one person in the group seriously finds something offensive, then that term or phrase or entire concept is added to the list or proscribed terms, and this is how we get to office memo’s being critical of the term “brainstorming” as being offensive to epileptic co-workers.
If we buy into this idea of Political Correctness, we do several things, all ruinous: we give other people the power to demean us, we remove any chance at reasoned debate on any issue, and most importantly, in a group of 300 million professionally offended people, we come to a vocabulary of perhaps twenty or thirty words that have been so bleached of potential offensiveness and meaning that language itself becomes worthless.
[…]
How much better, how much stronger and healthier are we, when we dare anyone to use whatever terms they choose, and rather than sitting as powerless victims, rise in angry and righteous indignation to fight the human filth that use words like nigger, spick, gook, mick, kike, dago, and all the rest? How much more secure, how much more inoculated, are we when we can hear these words knowing that those who use them are discredited and terrified infants so out of ideas and argument that they must resort to such childish tactics to reassure themselves? What words can hurt us when we refuse to be hurt by words? What simple and powerful wisdom is bound up in Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me?

It’s an uncommon gift
(h/t to reader Martin B. whose suggestion was noted in the comments. SDA gets results!)

Broadcast in New York City on WPIX, Channel 11
Sunday, December 7, 1975, 10:30 – 11:00 P.M.
Moderator/Host Richard D. Heffner
Guest: Milton Friedman, economist

FRIEDMAN: Let me give you a very simple example. Take the minimum wage law. Its well-meaning sponsors — there are always in these cases two groups of sponsors. There are the well-meaning sponsors and there are the special interests who are using the well-meaning sponsors as front men. You almost always when you have bad programs have an unholy coalition of the do-gooders on the one hand and the special interests on the other. The minimum wage law is as clear a case as you could want. The special interests are, of course, the trade unions, the monopolistic craft trade unions in particular. The do-gooders believe that by passing a law saying that nobody shall get less than $2 an hour or $2.50 an hour, or whatever the minimum wage is, you are helping poor people who need the money. You are doing nothing of the kind. What you are doing is to assure that people whose skills are not sufficient to justify that kind of a wage will be unemployed.

Transcript
Via Carpe Diem