The ol‘ professa, Noam Chomsky, doesn’t really get the credit he deserves. Superficial encounters with his work, either sympathetic or critical, seem to dominate most perspectives of it, and I think there’s an unwarranted “Chomsky-fatigue” simply because they guy has been around so damned long. Regardless, I’ve watched this mean carry on debates in french, english, and dutch simultaneously and it’s hard to find a speaker more eloquent and sincere.

This interview is really quire excellent, and mercifully short for a Chomsky piece;

“I didn’t do any research at all on (Adam) Smith. I just read him. There’s no research. Just read it. He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.”

Cheers.