What Chomsky and Sowell attempt to do is to close the gap, i.e., tackle some of the issues, centuries old, between a “Rousseau/Hobbes, Descartes/Locke, Voltaire/Burke, Marx/Mises and Keynes/Hayek debate–all completely impossible of course—and it in itself a lifetime’s work but nonetheless that is what they endeavour, and as you will see, not since the Plato/Democritus divide (with Chomsky on the Left side and Sowell on the Right) has such an important intellectual debate about what arrangement is the better for the human species occurred in this modern era of ours. The Left call Chomsky the smartest man alive exactly as do the Right about Sowell; in historical terms it’s like the debate between Russell and Copleston about the existence of God. There, the Left certainly had it over the Right, although if you've read either of these writers, you would come to see the outstanding width and breath of their intellects. Both these gents are exceedingly brilliant.
In an article such as this, especially if we don’t want to weary the reader with endless quotes, we must accurately portray, as honestly as we can, the gist of each man’s worldview. So, the very first thing I must do is reveal my bias as a free-market libertarian, who Chomsky calls an “extreme advocate of total tyranny” while calling himself a libertarian socialist via anarcho-syndicalism. (I assume a socialist labor quasi-government with unlimited freedom of speech but with no or little individual property rights or at least where a syndicate holds the property rights in behest of the people or the unions, or both). At any rate, Chomsky is one of the most principled defenders of freedom of speech the West has ever produced and should be commended on his courage in this regard. On the other hand, Sowell has said, “Libertarians seem to have this atomistic view of the world, which I think is completely unrealistic, because not only in my life, but in the lives of people around me, the surroundings make a huge difference.”
Despite this, I think I can to an extent, work around my biases and give Chomsky and Sowell a fair evaluation from my viewpoint. I have followed both these intellectuals my whole adult life, sometimes with antagonism, often with sympathy. Chomsky's insight that grammatic-syntactical structure is in part hard-wired (innate) in humans has exploded the old idea that there is no instinctual make-up to our linguistic abilities and for this a debt of graditude is owed even if his theory has yet to be fully teased out. He caused a huge shift in our focus on nature and nurture and is one of the most cited living thinkers in the world.
In his movie/book, Requiem, (2017) Chomsky says that today inequality is really unprecedented. “If you look at total inequality it’s like the worst period of American History.”
Sowell says in regards to poverty that if you are in the bottom 20 percent of poverty and are looking up with disdain at the top 20 percent of the wealthy, that you are hating yourself five or six decades into the future. The young are poor by default. “What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.”
I have a menu from a Toronto Diner, The Canadian Statesman dated November 12, 1927 “Please do not smoke”. “Profane Language Prohibited”. Soups and Omelettes . . . 40 cents, Porter House steak . . . 80 cents, coffee 5, veggies 15, liver 35, sandwiches 15, salads 30 . . . and many other choices at incredibly low prices. With ninety years of the growth of the state and soaring inflation, it is hard to lay that charge on the marketplace even if it was true that the inequality we now see is worse than then. If you are on the Left and see inequality everywhere—as most liberals do—you almost never see, as Sowell would say, that the state “is not the personification of the national interest. They have their own interests”. However, if Chomsky is right and it is as bad now as in all of American history then surely the alarming growth of the state in the last 90 years must bear some causal cost for it?
Chomsky remarks further on in the book that the sins of American Society such as slavery, genocide of the Native population, the lack of democratic power and exploited labor to name a few, had a payday component. These “sins” (his biblical metaphysics) are often spoken of as though they’re special to America, and at that, for only the wealthy. It is hinted that accumulated wealth in the West was produced by ‘victims’ and stolen by ‘oppressors’; however, Sowell contradicts this in book after book. Slavery is many thousands of years old, pre-antiquity surely, and perhaps based in most hunter gatherer tribes before even our common ascent around the globe to become the number one conquerors of any weaker fellow humans, animals, and indeed, probably all other hominoid species we came across. Slavery ended on the cusp of the climb of modern empiricism with the rise of democracy, science, the market economy and what today is called the industrial revolution; in fact, the Imperial British eventually led a worldwide campaign to stop it even though opposed by many groups and nations. Some of the poorest countries in the world had slavery the longest and the poorest part of America in the South fought furiously to permanently entrench slavery. Mauritania a Muslim country, and one of the poorest in the world, didn’t abolish slavery until the 1980s; that’s less than fifty years ago, and although perhaps an alarming amount of slaves still exist there, for a devoutly religious country, that's still progress. With conquest of the Native American indigenous population; one has to put the genocide, enslavement and exploitation in historical terms. Their utter defencelessness to the conquerors’ germs was ill-fated, caused most of the casualties and cannot be a moral factor any more than the spread of syphilis from the indigenous North Americans or malaria from Africa which killed many Europeans. The early American settlers for the most part certainly didn’t spread disease on purpose. The indigenous peoples’ defeat, demise and mistreatment was outright exploitation and plunder that accompanies almost all conquests, but to romanticize the way of life of the indigenous any more than demonize the Christian pioneers, is to deny the historical evidence of humanity’s brutal past through the whole of our evolutionary history. Hardly a group of human beings on the planet exists today whose forbearers were not at some point in time both conquerors and at another era conquered. Conquest is a simple fact of history, as is slavery.
Undeniably the overarching principles of Western culture which embodied these developments in a progress toward universal human rights needs to be set against horrible times gone by, but nonetheless, a history of human beings which is filled with slavery, exploitation, conquest and misogyny since the birth of civilization and which only recently—like a split second in our cultural evolution—has thrown off some of those shackles, needs on some level to be defended against other less desirable modern and not so modern alternatives. Autocracy and democracy do not walk hand in hand. They have many fundamental differences: human rights, press freedom, the vote (i.e., the ability to fire the boss without a civil war), property rights and other improvements on closed societies with doctrines such as totalitarian, Fascism and American rightwing anti-communistic puppet regimes during the Cold War, etcetera. One of the best things the West does is protecting the Noam Chomsky’s of the world, as well as Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens and Karl Marx to name a few. So before we have the gnawing constant socialist revolution in participatory democracy against market economies which have produced the massive creation of wealth in the 21st Century and which is feeding eight billion souls which couldn’t feed six billion in the socialist sixties, we should understand what has happened in the last four hundred years; after all, as Steven Pinker has noted in Better Angels, revolutions almost always turn out to be bad for humankind, and overall good things, (like law and order, peace, less crime, human rights, low democide rates) in the western democracies rate far better than the autocracies or anocracies all around the world. Gross empirical statistics count. Remember, Stalin even had poor defenceless Isaac Babel murdered along with millions of others (to say nothing of Osip Mandelstam). Stalin: “Beat, beat and beat again.” Mao: “We have so many people. We can afford to lose a few. What difference does it make?” Lenin: (In response to Bertrand Russell’s question in a live interview, “Why it was thought necessary to murder hundreds of thousands of Kulaks?”) “They are a nuisance that stand in the way of my agricultural plan.” Marx: “At all events, I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day. What swine they are!”
In The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Chomsky says that intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of the state and to try to reveal their hidden motives, that indeed, they are a privileged minority with deeper responsibility than the people. I like this definition, and I think Sowell would as well. When Lenin set up the dictatorship within the dictatorship of the Soviet Union, and all but handed it to Stalin after falling ill, the surrounding cadre of intellectuals such as Kamenev, Trotsky, Kalinin, Bukharin, Tomsky, Lashevich, Preobrazhensky, Serebryakov, Rykov, Enukidze and others could have for years after Lenin’s death done all of these things, banded together and even stopped Stalin outright, but they did little to prevent the train that was coming down the track. The reason for this is historically clear: someone had to crack all those eggs open to make the utopian omelette and he was the “rude” chef to do it; indeed, he is the St. Paul of Marxism.
All the Teutonic intellectuals Left or Right in the Weimar Republic lathered themselves into a worthwhile fanatical frenzy: “Nothing could be worse than this!” emotion; however, there was something much worse as they were soon to find out. Remember both Hitler and Mussolini had read Marx before becoming socialists with their own nationalistic flare. This is what Marx wrote of Edmund Burke who had so often warned of the downside of revolutions: “The sycophant—who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti” [praising the years] “against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy—was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois.”
He was no such thing. He was a fine man and probably the best known and respected conservative in history and predicted the French Reign of Terror. Marx, on the other hand, was certainly a vulgar and aggrieved intellectual, at least by any modern standard; to read his private letters is to know the singular preoccupation of this arrogant insular man: Resentment.
As far as it goes though, American conservative intellectuals and neo-cons lying to the people in crude Machiavellian fashion to increase the American empire’s domain is not unlike Churchill’s lies to the Americans to save the British Empire during WWII, not to put the great man down, but when were the politicians ever NOT lying: liberals, socialists, monarchists, Marxists, Libertarians or conservatives? No such time in history ever existed.
When Chomsky suggests that the press is Manufacturing Consent in the West, which we see certainly in Powell’s speech to the UN about WMDs in Iraq under the Bush Jr. administration’s direction while ignoring the US’s alliance with one of the most corrupt and largest human rights abusers in the world, Saudi Arabia, we can clearly see an overt effort. Again, in Reagan’s anti-Sandinista campaign to fund the Contra against the wishes of the Congress while supporting other Somoza-like Central American dictatorships, or Kissinger’s China doctrine for Nixon which led to supplication to Indonesia and so much tragedy and democide in East Timor, or sadistic abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib and Obama’s drone democide against Islamists and so forth. For instance, if you follow the anti-war press during the Vietnam war, you would be inundated with news of the five hundred innocent people massacred in My Lai by American soldiers and never in your life read about the mass murder of four thousand unarmed civilians by the Viet Cong communists at Hue during the Tet Offensive many burned alive, or you might even be sung several Spanish tunes about the Cuban people’s love of their nation and not know how many gay people and business leaders they murdered (200 thousand) and exiled (125 thousand).
This is only to say that the theory that third party intellectuals or even the press will give unbiased information to the people or that they will defy their democratic, autocratic or even totalitarian cultures, and moreover, that they ever have actual Skin in the Game for their favourite political solutions, is perhaps hoping for too much. Putin is regarded by his many biographers as extremely dangerous; he has already had 40 journalists killed and many investigators believe him to be the second or third richest person in the world. If you expose the lies of the empire welfare state of USA such as Edward Snowden has and are an “extreme advocate of total tyranny”, what are you to do, ask for Chomsky’s cover?
If you hold anti-Platonic, anti-utilitarian views such as Ayn Rand did, (Gore Vidal called her theories “nearly perfect in its immorality” {stated here as a taste of how beholden to altruism the Left and Right are}), who will protect you if not Chomsky? If the state on the Red or Blue side would like to kill you, and you can’t turn to the intellectuals for protection (you certainly wouldn’t want to be a whistle-blower in any single of the dozens of Marxist motivated states that have existed nor the anti-communist ones), then how does socialism incorporate non-violent free-market libertarians and their miserably-foolish ilk like me?
Hayek explains how un-designed spontaneous order works in both evolutionary and economic events to get ordered outcomes: unregulated competition maximizes economic and social benefits by creating human capital which helps in producing goods/services at the lowest cost and that’s why private ownership is essential; it is the efficient way to utilize scarce resources and directly ties to human nature. We are motivated to help ourselves first and then we should help others when we are in a position to do so.
The Left are prejudiced against consenting adults constructing economic arrangements among themselves without the state’s interference; millions have died for the label of bourgeoisie, whose lives, I assume matter to Chomsky as do Blacks, Indigenous and other minorities, ah, identity politics. If you study the motives of intellectuals such as Sowell has, Chomsky is certainly the most famous intellectual on the planet, like a messianic rock star of the collectivists; not that I am questioning his motives but in Failed States and Hegemony or Survival, he questions everyone else’s. Does he know of this vital empirical fact: almost all genocides were committed against Middlemen Trader Minorities who had economically outperformed the majority who discriminated against them and who were almost always whipped up by the resentful intellectuals in their societies?
In Profit over People there is an accusation that the free-traders, who Chomsky sometimes calls neo-liberals never offer empirical evidence for their beliefs. He dismisses the East’s rise to wealth (Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and other neighbours) to Japanese colonization, asking: “Which countries developed, . . . The answer . . . is fairly clear. Outside Western Europe, two major regions developed: the United States and Japan.” We will leave this interesting sleight of hand, although if you include Australia and Canada, this is well over 25 percent of the world’s landmass to shrug off with a quick witticism. Many problems arise with such an analysis: the British Colonies other than Canada, Australia and the USA, the rise of China, the more recent revival of market-economy activity in India and the absolute failure of Russia, since, before, after and during the time of the USSR in spite of having the world’s largest landmass, the best arable land in the world and some of the richest resources. Ethiopia, Liberia, Nepal and Tibet were never colonized by the West, but are some of the poorest nations on the planet. So leaving all this aside, the literature from free traders gives not dozens of examples of the creation of wealth, the rise and fall of human capital all through the world and history, but many hundreds of instances, maybe in fact thousands, in different areas all around the planet, hundreds of subgroups, many middlemen minority traders, nation after nation, now, and in the past going back thousands of years. Empirical facts exist galore for anyone not hoodwinked by the modern fairy tale religion of the socialists.
Sowell’s, like Hayek’s (and many other Classical Liberals—yes that’s what they are actually called), premise or starting point economically is poverty. A hunter-gatherer tribe living—as an illustration let’s say in the Amazon Rain Forest—are ‘dirt poor’. If they walked out of the forest like they did on Netflix and met with a famous French Canadian anthropologist and later they take him on a journey back to their latest bivouac, we see the very literal meaning of ‘dirt poor’. That is where the human condition started, from want and scarcity. In the Amazon Rain Forest there are enough resources for Elon Musk to build a space shuttle, yet there is only the human capital inside the tribe on how to survive day to day. Their major dangers are spiders, jaguars and snakes. They’ve no written language, they can’t count past ten and don’t even know how old they are; no Occupy Wall Street with a tent, cell phone and innutritious fast-food a block away which people with human capital supplied . . . they were not born free and everywhere put into chains, they were born in chains of scarcity and will never be free of those bonds.
It turns out (according to Sowell), that the crucial question for humanity is NOT, “Why is there poverty?” but “Why is there wealth?”
I want to return to Failed States though; I am not sure what Sowell would say about the book, perhaps that it was anti-American, (he served in Korea), but I have to say, I agree with Chomsky’s charge about the world’s current super power. I am a Canadian and couldn’t be happier to have the longest undefended border in the world voluntarily defended by the globe’s singular super power which is often (but not always) a force for good in the world. We know that they are tough negotiators and we approach them with caution, but we are their largest trading partner and for the most part they trade fair. We like them and they like us—we share values. However, the hypocrisy of American politics is undeniable as I have mentioned in The Trouble with American Capitalism, The CIA and other articles. With a certain irony, Chomsky makes a grand argument for my (the American Libertarian’s) case for military isolationism: firstly, he easily proves that it is a worldwide empire pretending that it is not, secondly, he successfully shows that it really has no business in other nation’s business, and thirdly, that the Democrats and Republicans are preposterous hypocrites when it comes to foreign policy and practicing, “Do what we preach not what we practice.”
Sowell might disagree with this form of military policy, I am not 100 percent sure, but in many of my articles, I reference the dire costs of American military adventurism and the end of Western Civilization as a possible economic outcome. Some part of Rome’s collapse was due to this; even if it was combined with a plague, Christian intellectuals' lurch toward intolerance and bad timing for the empire in regards to their northern borders. They hit a point of no return and it was a 1000 year devolution for Western Europe promoted in part by theological intellectuals.
Was the wilful destruction by fire of Dresden in WWII an obscenity? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Dragging Cambodia into the conflict in Vietnam? What about going to Vietnam in the first place? What of the invasion of Iraq? Is the West to be judged with expediency? I agree with Chomsky. We shouldn’t be doing any of these actions. Neither should Germans be killing Jews, nor Americans Indigenous peoples nor Russians Kulaks or Ukraine, Japanese Chinese, Turks Armenians or Marxists bourgeoisie. It’s all a damn mess and if you read the voluminous Cultural Trilogy you would see just how much of a mess it is and why Sowell is so pessimistic about the future of the West and the world. Anyone who thinks we can’t devolve or collapse has not been paying attention to our history.
In some of Chomsky’s remarks about the institutional connection from politics into business lobbies, I think he believes two fundamental things about the constitution of America, that it has a Madison fault tracing back to Aristotle, ipso facto it gives way to the rule of a rich oligarchy, boxes out the poor and prevents participatory democracy which would lead to democratic socialism. I think he believes also that the separation of the state from the economy is impossible. Whatever the facts, he states that the people banning together democratically into a pre-socialist welfare state is better than letting the poor suffer, although Sowell might ask, “Even if they have cell phones, air-conditioning, cars, CD players and microwaves?”
Another thing Chomsky does is a kind of sixties radical-chic thing: he accuses his opposition of being duped by the relentless exceedingly deceptive, yet eminently clever, capitalist intellectuals and the gullible ignorant mass of well-tamed middleclass Americans who are in their deep pockets. This sort of thing, I am sorry to say, in a ninety something year old intellectual is a bit hard to fathom, not to in any manner discredit the brilliant work, Manufacturing Consent. The demonstrative economic principle of why this is so, is this singular empirical fact: welfare dampens human capital and that less human capital leads to both, less creative destruction and market innovation. Why this is exceedingly important is that the technological progress of this most difficult counter-intuitive process among humankind leads to much cheaper food, appliances and everything else called consumer goods for the mass of people around the world, (i.e., creates wealth); albeit, at a high cost paid in hard work to many humans (i.e., especially hard labour for low wages as I have personnally done (and still do) for over 50 years).
I think that Chomsky doesn’t want to be the intellectual who started the blacksmith union to stop the production of the automobile anymore than Sowell wants to be the one who denies global warming. Well, after reading so many of their books, it is hard to tell with certainty; moreover, Chomsky seems committed to the political, (and religious), movement of environmentalism and Sowell seems to believe that the current weather cycles has little to do with long-term climate change. At any rate, these matters are out of the field of both their expertise; that is to say, it is reasonable to ask that if the earth is facing a global climate crisis, we should leave it to the scientific-experts and not politicize it like the over-sized, over-priced, and over-celebrated Al Gore did?
Understanding the free market today is to people—due to the acceptance of a planned economy as a fact of life in the mass-media and the compulsory public school system which has taught a statist’s version of modern history for the last century—considered reactionary to many liberals (who to be frank just want the best for the democratic West). These are my sisters and brothers, my friends and neighbours and multifaceted Canadians, I get it. I think Chomsky has not considered it in totality. I sense he doubts that we could create with completely free markets, a viable global human community dedicated to stopping unreflective utilitarian human sacrifice by modern governments.
Welfare has this dampening effect on human capital because human excellence and the 10 thousand hour rule is difficult work, it takes constant sacrifice and much concentrated effort to achieve a skill for which someone will pay you to have. If you allow people access to redistributed funds (other people’s money), they may turn away from their own best interests and not do the hard thing to guarantee their future employment when they are younger, and instead of becoming eminently employable, they collect welfare and do just “fun things” instead of the genuine thing. That so many oil-wealthy countries have little human capital, import professionals for the hard jobs and are poor and mismanaged despite their natural wealth has been noted by many researchers: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Russia are modern examples, Spain with its silver and gold run from the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans in the 14th and 15th centuries is an older one but there are many others.
This modern counter-intuitive knowledge produced by Sowell and many others seems a perplexity to economists such as Paul Krugman (or Kahneman, living prove that economists should NOT received Noble prizes). Krugman's fear of bank runs, which is his essential and singular defense to justify the current planned economy and fiat paper money regime in the first place, is not empirically founded. Maynard Keynes was no socialist but that is where we are ending up whether we are voting for it or not. The Western states all over the world are bloating and most have an unsustainable debt. Here too, credit for the mass of poor people would be incredibly cheaper without regulation in any form of the banks. The money supply and credit, i.e., unregulated banking as Hayek, Mises and other economists suggest, would be in the hands of bankers—who after all, and again, are the experts—not the politicians.
As I stated elsewhere, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the Somoza family, the Shah and many others of the worst sort are made in America by an indefensible foreign policy mishmashed from both sides of the aisle over the last century. This is the right moral question to ask: was this anti-communism policy worth these many human rights violations? I believe most of them were unnecessary to outperform the USSR, China and any of the poor nations who bought into this violent socialist vision. Having stated that, let there be no doubt that Marxism is an imperialistic force for bad in the world and that everywhere it has spread, it’s under-minded human rights, a sense of decency, democracy, private property rights, perpetrated democide and increased civil conflict. Look currently at all the African nations that have turned toward a market economy recently but which started in the fifties and sixties from a socialist or welfare one because their leaders received a Western education which included popular Marxist’s historical interpretation of dividing people into classes; in America, in the soft subjective sciences today (i.e., the easy subjects), 20 percent of professors still call themselves Marxists.
I think one of the things that so bothers Chomsky about capitalist markets is the commodification of human labor, but it can be argued that though it is very sad that we all die, everybody does understand that they will get their turn. A person’s labor if he doesn’t have human capital is low wages but perhaps not for their whole life, nor for their children’s, if they work hard, get schooling and are encouraged to learn employable skills: that is indeed how most human progress has come to humankind. It is work, hard work, and everybody who is not an academic intellectual knows it. The worst thing to happen to people in Sowell’s view is isolation whether it is an island, mountain plateau, cut off by deserts, lack of waterways, self-inflicted or even an ivory tower; cultural diffusion over time turns out to be also important for human ascendency, wealth and liberty.
In Hegemony & Survival and Failed States both, Chomsky mentions Bertrand Russell’s view on violence and peace. I love the man, and The History of Western Philosophy is one of the best books ever, but there is a simple idiocy to the position of international pacifism. He was a pacifist during WWI and then Hitler came along and he switched positions; after the atomic bomb was used in Japan and WWII ended, he reverted again. What changed? Hitler was a one off? Imperial Japan was an anomaly? No, Hitler and the Empire of the Sun are our long collective history and we have been living it practically forever. While it is true that Hitler was the only one who wanted to fight in Europe, it only takes one then doesn’t it? So it makes a brilliant person like Russell dumb, and as Sowell often laments, many brilliant people believe in foolish ideas without empirical data to support their basic tenets.
Bernie Sanders goes to Cuba and sees Aruba. Cuba has “free” healthcare and “excellent” public schools. Forty years after the Cuban refugees arrived in a wave of voluntary flight with only the shirts on their backs to the Florida shore to start at the bottom again, the total revenue of Cuban American businesses was greater than the revenue of the entire nation of Cuba. Many nations in the world have had a high literacy rate, mass education for free for everyone and remained poor, for, as Sowell points out in Visions of the Anointed, and elsewhere, without a whole host of events and situations, (weather, location, peace, law and order, navigatable waterways and many other variables), with incoming human capital and the cultural diffusion to make the most of it, an understanding, (or even a mass desire to understand), the market economy doesn’t transpire among the people, who, after all, must do the drudging day to day hard work of creating it. The endogenous factors like a cultural heritage of business turn out to be as important as the exogenous ones such as living on a mountainside and having little contact with traders for the centuries.
Instead, the belief of race, discrimination and exploitation causing poverty grows as a modern myth among resentful intellectuals: ones like wealth is a stagnant zero-sum event and that in fairness and justice, it should be managed by the state and divided equally among all the suffering people. Even with immense empirical data to show that wealth is created with human capital, is NOT zero-sum in any sense, that human choices make all the difference in the world and that wealth is growing exponentially all around the globe with the increase of human capital, there are still in the year 2023 the anti-capitalist true believers.
Welfare and socialism are apt examples of Einstein’s definition of insanity (as the Chinese have learned with Mao’s recent history’s hard knocks) “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”— I refer here to Mao’s ever reoccurring repeatedly failed five year plans. Eric Hoffer noted many decades ago, “A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of actions.” This is an expression that exactly describes the precise track from Marx to the Bolsheviks and then on to Stalin who was in the beginning at least, a fundamentalist true believer in Marxist-Leninism and worked tirelessly to make it a triumph, as Kotkin so painstakingly shows.
Of Chomsky’s noble attempts for peace and justice for one and all around the world, his singular successes are his untarnished portraits of America as a burgeoning singular world power and the limits of morality when they claim the moral high ground, as Churchill preached about the British Empire, yet glossed over many unforgivable crimes over their brutal history. The Great Man would surely argue that the cost was worth the result for the world, but that could certainly be challenged. He was against the Indian-Pakistan partition, for instance. He believed a blood bath would ensue; however; he was out of power then; yet the point is that one to two million in fact were killed during its execution.
In this playing field, Chomsky is undefeatable and unstoppable, even if he doesn’t do a comparative analysis. American citizens need to know what men like Henry Kissinger and Oliver North are doing at the behest of their leaders, whether they think they are justified or not. I don’t know if Allende should have been overthrown, but he was as arrogant as the Sandinistas, and like them, divorced his allies, broke his promises, planned major nationalization without consensus or compensation and unnecessarily alarmed the property-owners of Chile (and America), until like in Nicaragua, they aroused resistance, and in the one case welcomed Pinochet, and in the other, the nation dissolved into civil strife and duly received Reagan’s support. How much more or less misery would there have been in the Western Hemisphere without American interference? Little American interference occurred with Russia during the rise of Stalin’s empire before the end of WWII—indeed they were allied for five years and the British and Americans transferred much western technical knowledge to them—yet still, many millions were murdered, indeed a significant percentage were Jews, communists and property owners; almost sounds like Nazi Germany.
One of the things I much like about Chomsky’s books, like On Miseducation is that he again makes the American Libertarian argument against state-run and regulated schools in as much as they are a propaganda tool to the power structure. Public education was enacted by the state to make conforming citizens and instead produced a dumb-down herd. Chomsky: “The educated class becomes indispensable in the mind-control endeavour, and schools play an important role in this process” I couldn’t agree more. The second most powerful union in the world, The American Federation of Teachers—the student always come first, yeah sure—is an un-fledgling instrument of the collectivist and statist’s policy of the government—solid members of the political class.
Chomsky: “Other institutions work in tandem to reinforce the indoctrination process. Let’s take what we are fed by television.”
Again, it is one of the most regulated sectors of the economy. The economic force in the marketplace is one thing driving propaganda but in America 25 million people directly work for the government, over 30 million get subsidies from the government, 60 million receive welfare and 20 million work indirectly for the state, at all levels. This is not including teachers, doctors and other state-licensed professionals. The percentage is rapidly nearing 40 percent of voting citizens and as Sowell regularly remarks, it’s near a point of no return: the vote is skewered to the left by the state-sympathy numbers alone. The deep state is vast and to actually make a real change is probably too late but we must try or another worldwide devolution could occur with perhaps a new Jesus-Marx messiah.
Chomsky talks like this sometimes, Understanding Power: “And they [the people in power {my addition}] don’t like the fact that you can get the text of the G.A.T.T. [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade {their addition}] treaty, and the latest news that doesn’t appear in the U.S. newspapers, and so on—in fact, if you look around on the Internet, you can find virtually everything I talk about somewhere in there. And on some issues, like say, East Timor, it’s also been an invaluable political organizing tool—because most of the information about what happened there was simply silenced by the U.S. press for years and years. Well, those are all bad things from the perspective of private power, and they surely would like to stop that side of it.”
Sowell treats modern technological progress like old technological advantages, i.e., as nothing new, and with neither a positive or negative aspect for human beings except depending what private and public forces do with it. We see the autocracies are nervous about this resource and have moved like in China to control and interfere with this libertarian device the best they can do given the difficulties. But it is complicated, as the Arab Spring shows: we are not going to save the world with cell phones no matter how much goodwill is out there among the ethereal activists. That fact the big media talking heads, calling themselves journalists, have now openly joined with the American security state to endorse censorship on the internet and to suppress criticism of the government, it absolutely frightening.
Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism: “History teaches terrible lessons about how easy it is to descend to unimaginable horror. Germany was the pinnacle of civilization, science, and high culture in the years when Hitler came to power. Famous as a “great communicator,” [Chomsky is sarcastically criticizing Reagan in this section,{my addition}] he became perhaps the most popular political figure in the history of Germany as long as he was winning cheap victories abroad and carrying out the “Hitler revolution” at home: reinstating “traditional values” of family and devotion, revitalizing the economy through military production, stimulating pride in the nation’s glory and faith in its mission. Nevertheless, despite Hitler’s personal appeal, direct support for his genocidal projects was never high. In an important study of this matter, Norman Cohn observes that even among Nazi party members, in 1938 over 60% “expressed downright indignation at the outrages” carried out against Jews, while 5 percent considered that “physical violence against Jews was justified because ‘terror must be met with terror’”. In the Fall of 1942, when the genocide was fully under way, some 5% of Nazi Party members approved the shipment of Jews to “labor camps,” while 70% registered indifference and the rest “showed signs of concern for the Jews.” Among the general population, support for the Holocaust would have surely been still less.”
Sowell who follows German culture around the world through history, also says something like, “If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere,” but it is exceedingly important to understand that Hitler read Marx before Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and replaced class for race in his socialist version and to also know that as a whole (with some exceptions) the progressives at first supported Nazism, and indeed, many young comrades joined the Nazi Party which was advertised, at least, as a socialist organization.
Chomsky, On Anarchism, “The period of the freest press in the United States was probably around the 1850s.”
Yes, indeed before the emergent modern expanded government and the bloating of the welfare state after the 1929 crash—the Fed was created in 1913. In this book he throws the mother of American Libertarianism, Ayn Rand, under the bus with an effortless shove calling her “an ultra-conservative” a label which she repeatedly repudiated, as did Hayek. Adam Smith gave Marx much ammunition and radicals ever since, use it as he did, as a weapon against the marketplace. Smith’s opinion about business is extremely constricted and Rothbard was right about him. Therein The Wealth of Nations lay many errors about how the free market actually works and Smith’s disdain of business people over the intellectuals is ludicrous. Leftist intellectuals are singlehandedly destroying Western Civilization and have aroused much animosity and violence against entrepreneurs all around the world for the last two centuries—millions lost their lives to this resentment. Chomsky is frequently called the Left's conscience.
“The shocking record of Western intellectuals glorifying Stalinism in the 1930s was no isolated aberration.” As many thinkers have noticed, including Sowell and Pinker: “An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand sceptical scrutiny. Let these ingredients brew in the mind of a narcissist with a lack of empathy, a need for admiration, and fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, and goodness, and the result can be a drive to implement a belief system that results in the deaths of millions.” Better Angels.
And as far as anarchy goes, as if anybody but teenagers and the intellectually immature would pick it over some form of Leviathan. American Libertarians’ compromise with the Night Watchman State is the best you will ever do given human frailties and propensity to violence, and it is a goal worthy of every anarchists’ effort to achieve: maximal personal liberty while protecting your physical safety, your property rights, your nation’s defence with independent courts, police and army, that and nothing else, including schools, roads, medicine and many other things the government does now and does so horribly.
In youth, Chomsky found Marx as did Sowell but Sowell got over it, because of many thousands—hundreds of thousands—of empirical facts that refute it, but Chomsky has gone the way of a radical Leftist whose adoring following I think he cannot be without. On Anarchism is all collectivism 24/7, with a little artificial sweetener thrown in with the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
Don’t be fooled by any of Marxist's (socialist's, collectivist's, Bolshevik's, Mensheviks, Leftist-anarchist's, Maoist's and so forth), denials about totalitarianism, the whole lot of them back then in Moscow knew there was a crematory in the basement at the Kremlin being fed thousands of their kind (many of them Bolsheviks and almost all them communists) around the clock for many years before Stalin consumed them all. Every one of those socialist intellectuals had blood on their hands, including, and especially Trotsky and Lenin; collectivism is always one step away from human sacrifice.
After having read all of Chomsky’s political works, I can’t for certain know why no caution comes out of his mouth on the liberties granted radicalism by the West (in the East the radicals are murdered and jailed by the state) or the possible demise of constitutionalism, republicanism or indeed representative democracy itself. His disdain for the market place, America and liberty is inexplicable; well I guess his adoring followers give him all he needs. Like Al Sharpton, he makes good coin turning these kinds of tricks; it all seems like intellectual prostitution to me.
Keep in mind, safely back in England; Marx was a warmonger pressing for the uprising in Germany to prove his cockamamie theory true. Chomsky is relentlessly critical of the West and its achievements. If he was a Leftist autocrat, I believe there might be a blood bath. All through his works, he appears as resentful as Marx (although much more careful to be politically correct) and hates everything to do with the marketplace.
I don’t even know how you do that. Sure there’s a downside and a trade off to capitalism, but people vote with their feet and like the Vietnamese boat people who risked everything—hundreds of thousands died— to get out when the politically-injured Americans (wounded by the likes of Chomsky himself) abandoned them, we see hundreds if not thousands of examples beyond the Berlin Wall, mainland China, Cuba, Cambodia and the massive brain drain out of all socialist dystopias.
His haughtiness knows no limits; perhaps he thinks he’s smarter than Ridley, Diamond, Sowell, Dyson, Feynman, Hitchens, Churchill, Solzhenitsyn, Mises, Popper, Szasz, Blanshard, Santayana, Hayek and all the intellectuals in the world on the other side of his extremely narrow divide. He is certainly not well-rounded like Bertrand Russell.
As for Sowell, he may call American Libertarianism atomistic, indeed much conservative thought hinges on Plato’s student of 22 years, Aristotle, bubbling up through the years to Aquinas and Burke, but who can blame American Libertarians for cheering on Democritus, science and the atomic theory of all things including evolution and Palaeolithic imitation lifestyles. It is not a foregone conclusion as Sowell says that humans get heavier as we get older; that’s lack of exercise and diet; besides, I have an irrefutable, almost irresistible retort for this superfluous charge against the singular and stellar defenders of free markets and free minds.
Even if we would like a divorce from societal and religious restrictions, as well as much state regulation as is humanly possible, all of which can be defended in ethics and in law, we still might renege on the part of our radical objectives to give a pound of flesh to the Christian Conservatives, if and only if, they were all like Walter E Williams; however, the likelihood of that as Sowell well knows is a problem confuted by the fact that the ethics of Christianity are counter to capitalism, i.e., they are Platonic, i.e., altruistic, like Marxists and socialists themselves. Human sacrifice is their only true moral ideal.
Modern romantic libertarians have decided that John Stuart Mills and all the utilitarian’s, plus the collectivist types of all stripes, but especially the blood thirsty Marxists, are utterly immoral. Conservatives have had their 200 year chance to tackle the growth of the socialist welfare state, to refute them and take on the liberal intelligentsia. They have miserably failed and they have ended up with Trump as their moral guide. The state grew on Reagan’s dime, on Newt Gingrich’s nickel and the foolish conservative’s dull brown penny, decade upon decade; where ten or twenty of them can stand on a public stage in front of cameras and deny evolution. How pathetic. They have done enough damage and it’s time for them to rip off the conservative bumper sticker: “Everything Liberals hate!” to: “Everything Libertarians love!” Sowell divides the intellectuals up into Tragic or Utopian, (the Profane and the Sacred), and thus captures the centuries old conflict between those who believe humans are endlessly malleable which revolution can perfect and those who believe in a definitive human nature in which upheaval should be avoided at almost any cost; however, there is a third alternative; see, Six Reasonable Men. It is libertarianism, those who believe that what revolutionary change can be born into Humankind, it must be done voluntarily, without human sacrifice, with reason and science cooperating in tandem, without the force of the state or in any institution at the government’s behest, (i.e., especially robber barons and special interest groups), that it must use only The Night-watchman State apparatus to achieve it, and lastly, must not ever scapegoat any group, even the fool-hearty intellectuals of the Right and Left.
As for the brave Liberals, they have brought us many courageous bold benefits (that they call rights) that must be paid for by their children, their children’s children and the next generation’s children too. It is called soft cuddly slavery and is offensive and shame on the democratic societies over the entire globe for creating all this wealth and throwing it away on government which wastes it all on unproductive middleclass jobs inside the bloated anti-productive bureaucracy and on welfare which detracts an individual’s ability to learn real human capital and live a happy modern life as I have shown in many of my articles. It’s a hard life but it is the only one worth living. All the rest is total nonsense—fat and lazy on the couch, whining about immigrants—and I say to Sowell, that libertarians' moderate peaceful, democratic and economic goals will never be carried out by conservatives, most, if not all, who have no ideals whatsoever, little moral bearing and may themselves hate and fear free markets: they certainly seem to hate reason.
As for Chomsky, we thank him sincerely for making our arguments for us on foreign policy, education and hypocrisy, and like all armchair Marxists and socialists everywhere, it demonstrates that they know little (if not nothing at all) about actual on the ground economics and how wealth is really created around the world. Leftists hate the middleclass (even if they no longer use the greetings like ‘comrade’ and labels such as ‘bourgeoisie’). The billions of women and men around the world willingly working, indeed working hard, lifting themselves and their families out of poverty for the first time ever because of the market economies is met with their cynical sneers. Every job is a sweat shop except the universities’ tenured professorships, the only life they have ever known. From their state-protected feudal estates, they insult with utter contempt every middleclass family, hard working labourer or business person who doesn’t agree with their resentful political prescription. The Left almost makes an atheist want to become a Christian, and like Plato was in his lifetime in ancient Greece, they are immoral pariahs.
The view that lack of love and esteem, the presence of racism and discrimination, the amount of poverty and alienation solely cause performance deficits in people is quite easily refuted by actual evidential facts, yet despite that, Leftist intellectuals ignore the verifiable data. This is yet another example of the lack of empirical and scientific foundation to cement a Cartesian view of life which can supply the vision but not the observed facts to support it. Rene Descartes, like Plato was simply incorrect about innate knowledge, of which there is, an exceedingly small trace amount in our DNA. However, instead, ignoring complex causation altogether with a desire to see only social processes and not individual economic legal cultural and historical ones, they seldom, if ever, reconsider their positions, despite the light of ongoing and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They can ignore facts with greater swiftness than a drunk or drug-addict. More scientists are alive today than have ever lived; and many of them are studying the fields of human psychology history economics law and culture and writing books such as, The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong, It’s Getting Better All the Time, The Good Old Days—They Were Terrible!, The Case for Rational Optimism, The Improving State of the World, The Progress Paradox, The Flynn Effect, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, Factfulness, Getting Better and The Better Angels of Our Nature.
None of these books can verify the intellectuals’ claims of: 1) people hate the market place, 2) that the West is bad, 3) that welfare produces wealth, 4) that criminals should not be punished, and 5) that all outcomes for people everywhere should be the same. One example of how silly Leftist intellectuals can be is Africa. African nations who were poor before colonization, during the brutal process and remained poor after all interference was severed, are axiomatically explained by the intellectuals as ongoing imperial exploitation. If you noticed the above reference to Russia that it was poor long, long before the bloody red reality of 1917, during the whole period of the evil banality of the USSR, after the USSR dissolved and up until this very day while they war with the USA over the Ukraine, they would still blame it on capitalism: they are purveyors of the modern myth; “Socialism is Eternally Superior to Private Enterprise”. Laughable, as McCloskey’s brilliant Bourgeois Dignity so adequately explains; wherever middleclass virtues are celebrated, (education, acquiring human capital, a work ethic, property rights of some manner, a market economy of some merit, economic freedom in choice to a greater degree, honest competitiveness, an independent judicial system and so forth) a kind of miracle takes place, or as she calls it: The Fact. It being what is happening all over the world presently and what from the 1800’s has been an undeniable phenomena of the massive creation of wealth far and wide where resentment against the bourgeoisies sharply declines and creative destruction, (innovation), is tolerated, (and even welcomed).
In the end, let me just finish by remarking in an overall way in regards to Chom versus Tom that Chomsky makes, I think, an undeniable assertion that our evolutionary biology has bequeathed us with certain innate linguistic hardware; however, when it comes to the matter of human behaviour, he flips it all on its head and concludes that socially and culturally, we are actually soft-wired like a Michael Foucault fantastic social neo-structuralism; however, he has also said more recently (2022), "We just can't abandon believing it [free will]; it's our most immediate phenomenologically obvious impression, but we can't explain it." Politically though, he has a more nuanced Critical Marxist view in the social science sense, which in elitist Western universities is currently a virus to the body-politic, a fundy’s belief that only language, society and culture, (i.e., software) is responsible for human behaviour and that human beings have no actual hardware at all from the millions of years of our brutal biological evolution. On the other hand, one doesn’t have to read but a few pages of any of Sowell’s many books to realize he is insisting that our human nature is hard-wired in many ways. Sowell’s view on race and culture is that while he doesn’t completely dismiss a genetic component to our behaviour, that whatever amount that might be, that where we live (geography), our collective attitude to middle class virtue (bourgeois dignity), our heritage & history (i.e., were we conquered in the past or have we lived in isolation through the millenniums?), our collective vision (i.e., did we possess certain hard won traits or not?), etcetera, or in other words, that our phenotypical response was more important and outweighs our genotype.
Let me give you an example of a hard-wired problem. American born blacks are 12.5 percent of the population, and they commit somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of all homicides in the USA, yet these murderous perpetrators don’t include immigrant blacks, or females or children, or very many seniors, or for that matter many boys raised in two parent families; the vast majority of these crimes are committed by black men between 15 and 35 years old, 80 to 90 percent who have no fathers or father figure in their lives. The 12.5 percent of the population figure comes down to maybe five to seven percent or lower even. Exacerbating this problem are three phenomena: the war on drugs, single mother state subsidies, and welfare in general which has destroyed in sixty years, the American black pre-civil rights movement’s triple package, where indeed, American Blacks had a low divorce rates, low unemployment, and certainly most boys had fathers who helped raised them, (i.e., the fathers weren't in prisons). Why this is a hard-wire problem, (the crisis of fatherless homes in Black America), (and boys without fathers generally), is the bare knuckles of being male, (the cock and balls of it if you will): these are; the reckless abandon of male youth, being prone to violence to solve conflicts, the genetically programmed ‘us - them’ phenomena not found in females, the raging hormones - testosterone in adolescent boys, a developing brain slower to learn than a female brain, and evolved essentially, not to nurture, but for war and hunting, and overall in modern times, (i.e., 2024), a being in great risk without the firm guidance of a father or father-figure, (i.e., metaphorically: law and order). Genetically, the Y chromosome inherited from male to male, is an inborn event females don't get, and conversely, the mitochondrial DNA which is inherited from female to female is an inborn event males do get but can't pass along to offspring. This is hardware and no social science course is going to change these rudimentary facts.
Some of the books I have read for this article:
Chomsky: Requiem for the American Dream, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Profit Over People, Failed States, Hegemony or Survival, Manufacturing Consent, Rebel Without a Pause, American Power and the New Mandarins, Miseducation, 9-11, Whatever We Say Goes, Masters of Mankind, Chomsky on Anarchism, and, Syntactic Structures.
Sowell: The Cultural Trilogy, Intellectuals and Society, Visions of the Anointed, Discrimination and Disparities, Marxism, Basic Economics, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Conflict of Visions, Wealth, Poverty and Politics, Knowledge and Decisions, and, Economic Facts and Fallacies.
