Noam Chomsky - Markets

[PervySage]

Why are Chomsky videos always so quit? I can never hear what he is even saying :(

[Fahrenheit]

Long story short, everything has its externalities.

The market didn't take away your choice to ride the subway. It just never provided it, and that's an important difference. In a mixed economy, you can petition the government to stem some of the profits away from the firm and use them to build a subway. The company never would have spent money on it themselves, but it might make life easier for some of its workers and help them to be more productive. Profits increase, rinse and repeat.

And the self should always be a primary concern. Think about a road. If everybody always acquiesced to other drivers and worried primarily about what's best for the road as a whole, things would be slower and probably more dangerous to boot. Playing fair on the road isn't just due to our concern for others, but also because it's in our self-interest.

[garyjessop]

Noam Chomsky faults capitalism in isolation, ignoring the laws democratic governments enact to control, however imperfectly, capitalism's excesses. That is an ongoing process and democracy is our only hope.

Britain's and America's world ambitions are somewhat of a separate issue that go to the heart of who we are. We live with the resentments of past poltical systems and their blunders: slavery, land clearances, communism, imperialism and other adventurism by powerful countries. You can't fix rapacious human nature; all you can hope to do is delay the next Armageddon through NATO, the UN and other diplomacy.

So we need to know what is Chomsky's recipe for a better world; it's probably around somewhere.

[eggory]

Markets are trade. Trade is not force. Force is not a part of markets, by definition. When you try to show that historically force took place as a part of then existing markets, what you're saying is that in that instance,  they were not markets. Meanwhile those who advocate for markets, advocate for the elimination of force, and you who advocate for various forms of "socialism" (clearly a shallow euphemism for compulsive impressment into a working collective), you advocate for more introduction of force into the market. Continually, mealy mouthed politicians on the right wing are compromising with politicians and ideologues on the left wing by giving them what they ask for, more force and more market distortions. As a result, there is force and our ideologues' vision of markets does not come to fruition. Then you blame those pro-market ideologues and claim that markets are impossible. This is idiotic. No, it's disingenuous.