The Problem with Chomsky: Ron Paul Edition

Noam Chomsky embodies the problem with progressivism: He confuses the symptoms of state power with the disease. Government power is the problem, after all, because there is no such thing as corporate power without state power. Without the state's favor, you have to be responsible to an army of customers. With a large, powerful state, it's always possible to buy favors. That's a tough thing to swallow if you're worldview is pegged to loathing corporations. But Chomsky has built his own intellectual empire on a notion that gets the causal story precisely backwards. 

Chomsky finds the idea of healthcare charity an absurd position. But he fails to appreciate the problem of government's crowding out the charity sector. Chomsky finds the idea of bottom-up social entrepreneurship problematic and yet he purports to be an "anarcho-syndicalist." What is "anarcho" about the centralization of state power for the sake of radical redistribution? Is it for the sake of a social safety net? Okay. But let's not put any fancy titles on it. Let's call it what it is: welfare statism.

The problem of progressivism is that it's proponents want reflexively to grow the state. It's linear thinking. Anywhere there is a percieved social problem, the paladins of right and good should be entrusted with your money (whether you like it or not) to rush in and save the day based on their idea of the good. You might have different, local solutions and local resources. But you don't have power. (Nevermind what other good ends you might have had for your resources.)

This idea grows the state. And as the state grows and grows, it gets captured -- by a dependent poverty class and by special interests. Then the progressives bitch about special interests. You know what they do? They grow the state some more! Then the whole thing starts all over again.

Poor old Chomsky has been sitting in his ivory tower too long. He is no longer capable of seeing the world as it is. But he continues to see the world as he thinks it ought to be. He is a philosopher king in a grand tradition of philosopher kings starting with Plato. And that makes him an enemy of freedom. 

Comments

[Dwight Johnson]

Progressives confuse government with society. Government is the part of society where force is a necessary aspect. All other parts are based on voluntary cooperation. If the role of government takes over too much of human society, violence increases. If government were limited to the proportionate reaction to violence against people and their property (non-aggression principle), it would be correctly sized. When progressives go on about how people need to help one another, they only see government, because they, in their hubris, are convinced of their own rightness, and so the use of force is appropriate. Given the benefit of the doubt, progressives are well-intentioned dogmatists in the Church of Self.