understanding power the indispensable chomsky

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.

Is 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. ― Noam Chomsky, quote from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky Again, it's a very simple ethical point: you are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions, you're not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else's actions.” And that's based on a very simple ethical principle-namely, that the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated consequences for human beings: I think that's kind of like a fundamental moral truism. So even if the United States were causing only a tiny fraction of the repression and violence in the world-which obviously is very far from the truth-that tiny fraction would still be what I'm responsible for, and what I should focus my efforts against. But much more importantly than that, it's because American actions are the things that I can do something about. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the main component of international violence in the world. “See, I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons.

Understanding power the indispensable chomsky