Chomsky on Ron Paul's libertarianism. How do I respond?

[tunk]

Chomsky is always making that ridiculous point, that much R&D is funded by the Pentagon ergo the free market fails, QED.

On the “WITHOUT THE STATE WE WOULDN’T HAVE INTERNETZ HURR” line, see this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbR4cjA-Few

Basically, the internet’s time had already arrived when the market developed the integrated circuit. Plenty of businesses have also developed private LANs. The only real contribution the government made was ARPANET, which used the TCP/IP protocol we’re still stuck with that provides no way to price packets, leading to a ‘tragedy of open access’ scenario: the overuse and abuse of the internet we see today.

On the myth of science as a public good, see Terrence Kealey:

The Myth of Science as a Public Good (by Terence Kealey)

As well, Chomsky praises Pentagon funding when it’s actually been responsible for subsidizing an extraordinary amount of waste, price-gouging, and, most ironically, the huge, tyrannical corporate structures which hedespises so much. On this, see Seymour Melman’s work on the cost-plus contract and Kevin Carson’s excellent study “The Great Domain of Cost-Plus”.

Suppose someone facing starvation accepts a contract with General Electric that requires him to work 12 hours a day locked into a factory with no health-safety regulations, no security, no benefits, etc. And the person accepts it because the alternative is that his children will starve. Fortunately, that form of savagery was overcome by democratic politics long ago.

Lol. The way “democratic politics” “overcomes” such “savage” contracts is simply by making them illegal, as if you could make a harsh reality go away by ignoring it. Apparently, it’s better for someone to starve than to suffer the indignity of being rid of starvation in a manner Chomsky disapproves of. No one should be allowed to make decisions on their own without Chomsky’s personal moral approval. I’m not sure what kind of worker wants such “rights.”

Honestly, all you have to do to rebut Chomsky is recall what happened when the US passed the Child Labour Deterrence Act in 1993, banning the import of Bangladeshi textiles made with child labour. Did these children suddenly go on to become doctors and engineers, as they would in left-wing fantasy land? Let’s take a look:

@UNICEF

[…] [G]arment employers [immediately] dismissed an estimated 50,000 children from their factories, approximately 75 per cent of all children in the industry.

The consequences for the dismissed children and their parents were not anticipated. The children may have been freed, but at the same time they were trapped in a harsh environment with no skills, little or no education, and precious few alternatives. Schools were either inaccessible, useless or costly. A series of follow-up visits by UNICEF, local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) discovered that children went looking for new sources of income, and found them in work such as stone-crushing, street hustling and prostitution — all of them more hazardous and exploitative than garment production. In several cases, the mothers of dismissed children had to leave their jobs in order to look after their children.

Lord praise democratic politics!