This past week, the government announced that it would take Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the mortgage giants, under conservatorship, which is a nice way of saying that they will be nationalized.

We don't use the word nationalize any more. We can try an experiment and read the new term 'conservatorship' back into history. In fact, we might say that Stalin and Lenin put Russia's industries under a kind of conservatorship. Or we might say that Mao pushed a kind of land conservatorship, or that Hitler's policy was one of national conservatorship. Marx's little book could be re-titled: The Conservatorship Manifesto.

You see, the government keeps having to make up new names for these things because the old policies, which were not that different in content, failed so miserably. The old terms become discredited and new terms become necessary, in an effort to fool the public.