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Wat: This comes closer to providing specifics to buttress your point, but
I'm still confused. Are you suggesting the Chomsky's economics are
protectionist like Buchanan's and Perot's? That they rely on Marx without
acknowledging him, or that they DON'T rely on Marx and should? Either way,
what is the substantive problem with his approach?

Unlike the others who have sneered at you for daring to criticize The Great
One, I'm interested in hearing more from you.
--
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA

>
> I owe the list an explanation and it will be restricted to the one book
> _World Orders Old And New_ by Noam Chomsky. Without defining the terms
> 'politics' and 'economics', let's say that they describe areas of human
> activity and they may be completely separate or they may overlap either
> completely or partly. I'm saying that when Chomsky discusses 'economics'
> I'm led to believe that I'm listening to a bitter, angry and Puritanical
> old man who's had a cushy academic career and never been cold or hungry
> except for perhaps a trip to a ski lodge.
> More to the point, how should the book itself be taken? As a political
> tract that urges action against coercive state force, it's fine. It's one
> thing to 'Just say no' to state force but it may be quite another kind of
> thing to reduce world hunger. Chomsky's economic rant is disjointed and is
> remarkably similar to what Pat Buchannan or Ross Perot have to say. The
> writing itself lacks continuity and is unlike Chomsky's writing on
> political topics. It consists of fragments and the frequent repetition of
> naively frightening things -- Bretton Woods, speculative capital, exchange
> rates, national debt. I find myself asking 'so what?' Chomsky quotes Adam
> Smith out of context frequently and never mentions Karl Marx. The missing
> Marx is a remarkable piece of dishonesty and causes me to view the book as
> a quaint political tract.
>