The Noam Chomsky Thread

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
21

[quote]orion wrote:

[quote]florelius wrote:

[quote]orion wrote:

[quote]Dustin wrote:

[quote]tom63 wrote:
Thank you Orion. Why anyone would want to quote Chomsky is beyond me.[/quote]

Depends on the topic. Chomsky’s critique of the American government, or centers of power in general, are 100% accurate. One could learn much from him in that regard.

Economics…not so much and I would agree with you.[/quote]

And yet at the same time he wants “more equality” which makes the government grow even more.

So now you have an even bigger government that will necessarily be bought by interest groups.

He wants two things at the same time that are completely irreconcilable.[/quote]

chomsky is not in favor of a big goverment, but he is even more against privat power over the public.
[/quote]

Yeah well, how would he like a more egalitarian society without the government?

Also, no private person holds any power over the pubic, you can always walk away from a deal.

Government however does not ask you nicely, they send men with guns that make you do whatever they want you to.

[/quote]

the state of today is the state of the capitalistclass. If you form a union they fire youre ass and the state or goverment just look at it aplaud.

a society where bureacrats or capitalists or both rule the people is not a egaliterian society. In a egaliterian society the people rule themself. I am maybe crazy but I actually think that people dont need any form of a ruling class.

22

[quote]tom63 wrote:
Call it what you want, self interest, greed etc., but it is good. The desire to make a bazillion creates jobs and services which improve our lives. But a euro weenie socialist who sits while he pees would not understand that.[/quote]

Who told you that?

See, there is a point where Smith’s basic ideas about economics fall apart, and markets, driven by greed cease to work. And we’ve reached that point. Because if my company is “too big to fail”, my greed doesn’t drive me to make a better product, or create more jobs, it drives me to give me and my buddies big bonuses.

Because when you have corporations that can subsidize losses in one sector with profits from another, there’s not drive to innovate or make the world better: just drive your competitors out of business, and then enjoy total, or near total control of an industry.

This is not blacksmith Willy inventing a new horse shoe, and now everyone in the village buys his, until backsmith Mort is forced to come up with a better one.

We are at a point where greed is an end in itself, and it doesn’t need to invent or better anything to get there. Money no longer represents real labor, or a piece of gold… wealth no longer = work as it did to Adam Smith (i.e. you improve something/work it and it becomes valuable: you create wealth), instead large amounts of “wealth” are created by the manipulation of paper and accounts, by asking for subsidies, and convincing your congressman your industry needs tax breaks.

You need a positive drive to want to create something worthwhile to do good, and that’s different than greed.

23
24

@Spartiates: on the money, my friend.
Humanity needs a way to escape the money ratrace.

@florelius:
Dude, the SU was a joke at that time. Except the funny part. It wasn’t funny at all to live there, rather the opposite.
Yes, there was nominal growth, but it was ham handedly implemented and definitely not “for the people”.
Leftists in the western world were in awe because of :
a) propaganda. They really didn’t know how bad it was. Left students in Germany were massively cheering Mao until the late 70s. Even the rightwingers constantly overestimated the SU industrial capacity.
b) the right, kinda rotten themselves did pressure everything that looked remotely red, effecitvely ensuring tht intellectuals were drawn to communistic ideas like moths to a candle.

The SU was anything but effective when it came to economy, and refused to provide the citizens the frolicking means to persue individual happyness.

We’re talking about being deep in debt while being supereffective in burning time and money.
ALL(!!!) of the socialist/communistic systems fell flat onto their ugly mugs because of that.

An anecdote to illustrate this:
70s SU “planned” and deployed a prestigeous squadron of helicopter busses to unite remote villages in Siberia.
A splendid idea! Again, the SU showed how their modern and futuristic organization skills shaped the life of earth’s most advanced society!.. except for the part that it’s not a good idea to let senile apparatschiks decide how to burn your cash:
In the 80s, the whole concept proved to be soooo costly and pointless, that today these villages today are practically decaying. Without “free air taxis” not only the whole concept crashed. People suddently found out they don’t live in space age, but in stone age, because there were hardly any roads (why build them, when mighty russia decided it’s citizens should fly rather then drive?) and no money to build any?

I hope you see the point-

Florelius, we’re both no friend to naked capitalism. But communism isn’t the answer, nor an alternative.
It’s so much worse.

25

[quote]Schwarzfahrer wrote:
Er, but the distinction is important, is it not?

[/quote]

No. It isn’t. That’s called arguing semantics, and it is generally considered being a douchebag to continue doing so once you’ve realized you’re just arguing about words instead of ideas.

26

[quote]Spartiates wrote:
See, there is a point where Smith’s basic ideas about economics fall apart, and markets, driven by greed cease to work. And we’ve reached that point. Because if my company is “too big to fail”, my greed doesn’t drive me to make a better product, or create more jobs, it drives me to give me and my buddies big bonuses.[/quote]

…You are retarded.

Moral hazard. Go search that on Wikipedia please. Then think hard for like three hours, and it might come to you.

27

[quote]Beowolf wrote:

[quote]Spartiates wrote:
See, there is a point where Smith’s basic ideas about economics fall apart, and markets, driven by greed cease to work. And we’ve reached that point. Because if my company is “too big to fail”, my greed doesn’t drive me to make a better product, or create more jobs, it drives me to give me and my buddies big bonuses.[/quote]

…You are retarded.

Moral hazard. Go search that on Wikipedia please. Then think hard for like three hours, and it might come to you.[/quote]

instead of making personal insult, why not make some arguments against his.

28

[quote]Schwarzfahrer wrote:
@Spartiates: on the money, my friend.
Humanity needs a way to escape the money ratrace.

@florelius:
Dude, the SU was a joke at that time. Except the funny part. It wasn’t funny at all to live there, rather the opposite.
Yes, there was nominal growth, but it was ham handedly implemented and definitely not “for the people”.
Leftists in the western world were in awe because of :
a) propaganda. They really didn’t know how bad it was. Left students in Germany were massively cheering Mao until the late 70s. Even the rightwingers constantly overestimated the SU industrial capacity.
b) the right, kinda rotten themselves did pressure everything that looked remotely red, effecitvely ensuring tht intellectuals were drawn to communistic ideas like moths to a candle.

The SU was anything but effective when it came to economy, and refused to provide the citizens the frolicking means to persue individual happyness.

We’re talking about being deep in debt while being supereffective in burning time and money.
ALL(!!!) of the socialist/communistic systems fell flat onto their ugly mugs because of that.

An anecdote to illustrate this:
70s SU “planned” and deployed a prestigeous squadron of helicopter busses to unite remote villages in Siberia.
A splendid idea! Again, the SU showed how their modern and futuristic organization skills shaped the life of earth’s most advanced society!.. except for the part that it’s not a good idea to let senile apparatschiks decide how to burn your cash:
In the 80s, the whole concept proved to be soooo costly and pointless, that today these villages today are practically decaying. Without “free air taxis” not only the whole concept crashed. People suddently found out they don’t live in space age, but in stone age, because there were hardly any roads (why build them, when mighty russia decided it’s citizens should fly rather then drive?) and no money to build any?

I hope you see the point-

Florelius, we’re both no friend to naked capitalism. But communism isn’t the answer, nor an alternative.
It’s so much worse.[/quote]

its allways hard on the people when the society change from feudalisme to a modern capitalist or a statecapitalist as in the case of the sovjets. do you think the english workers had a good time in the 1850`s. My point was that it is possible to make economic growth without freemarced capitalisme.

as an example of the differnces between us and ussr in regard to money spending: Under the spacerace, both the us and the ussr found out that there pens was useless in space. the us spent millions of dollars to create a new type of pen. while the ussr just switced to old fashion wooden pens. ( they joke about the astronaut pen in seinfeld ).

I am not a moscow socialist or what most people call communist. I am a real communist, I follow the teachings of marx, bakunin etc. The ussr developed from early on away from socialism. The sovjets lost its power to the paryelite and to a policestate, mostly because of to factors. 1: tzar russia where a feudal society and without almost any democratic tradition. If you read marx he says that socialisme is only possible in societys with democracy and capitalist industry. 2: the democratic experimenting under the revolution with the sovjets was killed in the cradle because of the civilwar, and where britain and the us supported the whitearmy against the redarmy. So socialist russia did not become a militaryregime because of the ideas of socialisme but because of reel events in its early history.

29

[quote]orion wrote:
Here are some truths from another great professor, with the added benefit that he speaks about his area of expertise:

[/quote]

How embarrassing for Milton, then, that Chomsky is a far better economist.

30

[quote]orion wrote:And yet at the same time he wants “more equality” which makes the government grow even more.

So now you have an even bigger government that will necessarily be bought by interest groups.

He wants two things at the same time that are completely irreconcilable.[/quote]

It can make the government grow more, but it need not necessarily. Growth of government is furthermore not necessarily correlated with the diminution of freedoms. Unfortunately for you, history is replete with instances of greater equality and freedom being provided by government action.

So in short, your claim that “he wants two things at the same time that are completely irreconcilable” is simply not accurate.

31

[quote]orion wrote:Did you look at the video?

In order to escape the “tyranny” of corporations, of which there are many, with the very real tyranny of a government that controls nearly everything and has a standing army.

You would not make it better, you would make it far, far worse.

[/quote]

The corporations being many in no way prevents them from combining to produce effects beneficial to them all. Furthermore, the government actually is accountable to the people, to a certain extent. Yes, it takes overwhelming popular pressure to effect any real change, but it has been done before. Again, history is a problem for this argument.

32

[quote]Spartiates wrote:

We are at a point where greed is an end in itself, and it doesn’t need to invent or better anything to get there. Money no longer represents real labor, or a piece of gold… wealth no longer = work as it did to Adam Smith (i.e. you improve something/work it and it becomes valuable: you create wealth), instead large amounts of “wealth” are created by the manipulation of paper and accounts, by asking for subsidies, and convincing your congressman your industry needs tax breaks.
[/quote]

So you donr understand finance.

Thats ok.

It is just that just because you do not understand how something creates “wealth” that does not mean that it is not created. You might destroy quite a lot of wealth by regulating the financial industry.

Also, without the cheap money provided by the central banks those companies would not have anything to speculkate with in the first place.

It is a bit like the situation in Greece. It is not the Greek government that fucked up, oh no, it is those rotten speculators that get slightly nervous about the whole situation and try to sell Greek government debt short.

It shifts the blame away from those really responsible and puts it on those investment bankers that do stuff that nobody understands and get extremely wealthy doing it, but in the end you can outlaw “speculation” but even governments cannot escape the consequences of their fiscal irresponsibility.

33

[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:

[quote]orion wrote:
Here are some truths from another great professor, with the added benefit that he speaks about his area of expertise:

[/quote]

How embarrassing for Milton, then, that Chomsky is a far better economist.
[/quote]

How would you know?

Besides, not even Chomsky would make that claim.

34

[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:

[quote]orion wrote:Did you look at the video?

In order to escape the “tyranny” of corporations, of which there are many, with the very real tyranny of a government that controls nearly everything and has a standing army.

You would not make it better, you would make it far, far worse.

[/quote]

The corporations being many in no way prevents them from combining to produce effects beneficial to them all. Furthermore, the government actually is accountable to the people, to a certain extent. Yes, it takes overwhelming popular pressure to effect any real change, but it has been done before. Again, history is a problem for this argument.[/quote]

But I do not want to wait until the last dolt is on board and sees the light.

If I know better I want to do better. If I can choose who I can do business with I can do that. If there is only the collective I cannot do that. Also, modern life is so somplex that there is no way that any collective could come up with a decision making process that would not be heavily manipulated. With literally billions of products out there there is no chance that anyone could have an informed decision on how to allocate resources.

I think you need to read at leadt a primer in public choice theory.

Also, you can decry the materialism of capitalism all you want but would that total politication of every aspect of your life really be better? Would you really want people to vote on how much money you make, how long you work, where you live, what car you drive, what doctors you visit and what profession you work in?

Unfortunately that would be inevitable when all the means of production belkong to a collective whereas you can always carve a niche for yourself in capitalism and be it as a publisher of anti capitalist pamphlets.

35

[quote]florelius wrote:

[quote]Beowolf wrote:

[quote]Spartiates wrote:
See, there is a point where Smith’s basic ideas about economics fall apart, and markets, driven by greed cease to work. And we’ve reached that point. Because if my company is “too big to fail”, my greed doesn’t drive me to make a better product, or create more jobs, it drives me to give me and my buddies big bonuses.[/quote]

…You are retarded.

Moral hazard. Go search that on Wikipedia please. Then think hard for like three hours, and it might come to you.[/quote]

instead of making personal insult, why not make some arguments against his.
[/quote]

Excuse me, but you are able to pack so many economic fallacies into one paragraph that it would take pages to adress them and then he could maybe tell you why you are wrong on this one.

Be that as it may:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj29n1/cj29n1-12.pdf

36

[quote]florelius wrote:
how is chomsky wrong, not one have made contraarguments against chomskys arguments in this thread. people have just stated that he is wrong without giving any arguments to why.

He says that the economy is the real thing and that the goverment is just a shadow of the economy. In other terms the people who controls the economy do also control the goverment. [/quote]
Why argue with something you already know? It’s like me arguing with someone about HIT. I don’t debate something I’ve already debated many times before. I’ll just call you retarded and yet you wallow in your own silliness.

This debating stuff rankles me. If someone out quotes some source compared to another guy, you didn’t become right.It’s like math, there is a right answer to a problem. I don’t cut and paste and post links and declare myself the winner or loser. I’ve read, lived, learned and will call you a retard like a 46 year old guy should.

It’s like polishing a turd, I don’t waste my time.

37

[quote]tom63 wrote:

[quote]florelius wrote:
how is chomsky wrong, not one have made contraarguments against chomskys arguments in this thread. people have just stated that he is wrong without giving any arguments to why.

He says that the economy is the real thing and that the goverment is just a shadow of the economy. In other terms the people who controls the economy do also control the goverment. [/quote]
Why argue with something you already know? It’s like me arguing with someone about HIT. I don’t debate something I’ve already debated many times before. I’ll just call you retarded and yet you wallow in your own silliness.

This debating stuff rankles me. If someone out quotes some source compared to another guy, you didn’t become right.It’s like math, there is a right answer to a problem. I don’t cut and paste and post links and declare myself the winner or loser. I’ve read, lived, learned and will call you a retard like a 46 year old guy should.

It’s like polishing a turd, I don’t waste my time.[/quote]

first I made this thread to get some different thougts out in this forum because it is very conservative, political pluralisme never hurts.

second I chare chomskys wiew on most things, I he present them better than me, why not use clips of him.

third you still just argue by calling me a retard and claiming that he is wrong without arguements. I search chomsky, and it was almost nothing, so he is not very debatet in here.

38

Yes, I’ve heard this popular refrain before, but it has nothing at all to do with the subject. Take working conditions, for instance. There is no “market” for better working conditions. You can’t go and buy them. And if no employer offers significantly better conditions than any other, you can’t escape them by going to work at another place. The unemployment generated by capitalism is effective at driving down wages and working conditions. I’m sorry, I meant to say it is effective at promoting “wage flexibility.”

To stay with the example of working conditions, in real world history, the “collective” (another dishonest red herring, but I digress) has been the only way to solve the problem, whether it was done through the ballot box or petitioning government, or by direct action on the part of unions. The market was unhelpful, and even hurtful.

I knew we had to fit in at least a little classic Austrian mysticism before we were finished.

How are products allocated now if people don’t do it? Through the magic of the market? It “just happens?”

True, but that doesn’t mean I’m in error here.

Well first of all, notice that I didn’t decry the materialism of capitalism. But you fail to make a convincing case that politicization of every aspect of life would be worse than the current commodification of every aspect of life.

No, but good news! That’s not what anybody is proposing.

This did not occur even in most of the parodical “socialism” of the 20th century. Why would the “collective” oppress itself? They wouldn’t, of course. The only way that would happen is if you had an elite controlling class, in which case you don’t have socialism. If you can tell me, with a straight face, that the US is not a capitalist country, then I am allowed to disown anything you talk about that I don’t like.

Besides, what if I said, “Why would you support capitalism? Do you like slavery? Do you like horribly destructive global war? Do you like to be owned as a commodity by a man who tells you when to wake up, when to go to work, how long to work, when you can stop for the day, who pays you (if you’re lucky) every six months, and who owns the shop you patronize and the room you retire to in the evening? Well, all this is inevitable when you allow private individuals to control society’s productive resoures for the purposes of personal gain.”

If I said that, you would immediately throw a fit, even though all of this actually happened, unlike your hackneyed attack.

39

[quote]orion wrote:

[quote]florelius wrote:

[quote]Beowolf wrote:

[quote]Spartiates wrote:
See, there is a point where Smith’s basic ideas about economics fall apart, and markets, driven by greed cease to work. And we’ve reached that point. Because if my company is “too big to fail”, my greed doesn’t drive me to make a better product, or create more jobs, it drives me to give me and my buddies big bonuses.[/quote]

…You are retarded.

Moral hazard. Go search that on Wikipedia please. Then think hard for like three hours, and it might come to you.[/quote]

instead of making personal insult, why not make some arguments against his.
[/quote]

Excuse me, but you are able to pack so many economic fallacies into one paragraph that it would take pages to adress them and then he could maybe tell you why you are wrong on this one.

Be that as it may:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj29n1/cj29n1-12.pdf[/quote]

Since moral hazard is the last bastion for free marketers in response to this overwhelming failure of the free market, it’s not surprising to see it desperately thrown up as a shield here.

However, if there had been no moral hazard, and the banks had simply been allowed to fail, this would have negatively impacted millions of people. How does this look to Libertarians? That millions of people could, through no fault of their own, become unemployed and indigent?

Note: you’ll attempt to say that “without the implicit guarantee of government, they wouldn’t have engaged in risky specualtion.” Two things: one, you’d be wrong, as evidenced by the history of bank panics in the US, and two, these institutions thought they were managing risk. That had nothing whatsoever to do with the government.

40

No, he’s not, because Nim Chimpsky has better ideas, if one values liberty and personal freedom, than does Chompsky.