understanding power the indispensable chomsky

The whole thing's not even worth talking about, though. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it.

This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard -and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: 'No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax'-but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon.

I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The American version of 'libertarianism' is an aberration, though-nobody really takes it seriously. If your choice is, 'do what I tell you or starve,' that's not a choice-it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example. Now, you can say, 'they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract'-but that's a joke. If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist-because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority. The United Statesis off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called 'libertarianism' here is unbridled capitalism. “But you see, 'libertarian' has a special meaning in the United States.

Understanding power the indispensable chomsky