Excerpt from an old interview of Noam Chomsky conducted by former Ca. gov. Jerry Brown...

... originally in Spin Magazine Aug., 1993...
JB: But now, the economics profession is arrayed against local power because it puts the greatest value on increasing the size of markets--the larger the market, the more efficient the enterprise.
NC: Yeah, look: The economics profession is basically a tool of private power. They have a doctorate, which is kind of a theology, which points out, sometimes correctly, that you can increase output by moving to market arrangements. Market arrangements essentially give more power to the powerful. That's what it amounts to. It's like a parliamentary system where the number of votes you have depends on the number of dollars you have. Well, we know what kind of democracy that would be, and we know where it would end up.
For one thing, future generations can't vote with their dollars in the market. My grandchildren can't decide how they want things spent, but they're going to have to live with it--which means the environment.
Take other issues. Suppose the people around here decide that instead of having more consumer goods they'd like to have more leisure. The market system doesn't allow you that choice. It drives you to having more consumer goods because it's all driven to maximizing production. But is the only human value to have more and more goods you don't need? In fact the business world knows that it's not. That's why they spend billions of dollars in advertising, to try to create artificial wants.
JB: The economists have a word, "autarchy," which they use to denigrate the notion of local self-reliance.
NC: Yeah, they say it's bad What "autarchy" means is people in some area saying, "Look, we'd like our lives to be like this, not like you guys tell us." Take Japan. Part of the Japan-bashing now is because Japan protects, say, mom-and-pop-style stores, and that blocks big supermarket chains from the West from coming in and taking over. Well, suppose Japan would like to have a community where you have mom- and-pop stores. I can remember that from childhood. You go 'round the corner and you pick up a loaf of bread, and you talk to the grocer. It's a lot nicer than going into the supermarket.
Now it's economically inefficient by the economist's measures. It means that things cost a little bit more. But suppose people say, okay, I'm willing to spend a little more because I want a nicer life. The economists say you're not allowed to make that decision, because the only human value in the world is maximizing profit and efficiency. Who says that's the only human value?
Adam Smith didn't think so. You go back and read their hero. What he said, in fact, is that in any civilized country, the government is going to have to intervene to prevent market forces from destroying people and reducing them to creatures as ignorant and stupid as is possible for a human being to be. The natural effect of the division of labor, maximizing efficiency, is going to turn people into tools.
There's one well-known truth of economic history, and that is that every developed society has succeeded by radically violating these principles. You get this in the current negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). One of their prime elements is to increase protection on things like patents--it's called intellectual property rights. The idea is obvious. You want to make sure that the transnational corporations monopolize the technology of the future, meaning that U.S.-run biotech corporations or pharmaceutical firms will have all the capacity to produce food and drugs and India won't be able to produce drugs for itself at 10 percent the cost. That's protectionism, that's not freedom.
We've always had industrial policy, but ours was hidden behind the Pentagon. The Clinton people said, "The state has to become involved more aggressively in paying the welfare for the rich"--which is what industrial policy is. The Berkeley Round Table did studies which pointed out that just about every functioning aspect of the U.S. economy is publicly subsidized. You've got computers, agrobusiness, lasers, pharmaceuticals. Why do you have them? Because the public pays a lot of the cost.
JB: But subsidizing the growth of multinational companies continues the trend toward greater inequality and the growing assault on the environment. So something is going to have to give.
NC: The executives who live in Connecticut and go into New York where the big offices are and have a branch office in Zurich and have production plants in Poland and Mexico--they don't care what happens to this country. They care what happens to the part of the country that they live in. But that's protected. The suburbs of Greenwich, Connecticut are going to be great. There will be golf courses and police and they keep black people out and soon.
Walk through New York City now. It's beginning to look like San Salvador. You've got very rich people living behind walls. Once in a while a gate opens and a limousine comes out from this complex, and outside you have people starving in the streets. That's a third world country. You drive through LA, you see it. And the people who are behind the walls, their goal is to enrich themselves. For them, it's crucial that there be an attack on democracy, because if the general public becomes involved in these things, well ....
You take a look at polls. This is a very heavily polled society, because business wants to keep its finger on the public pulse. They know that over 80 percent of the public thinks that the economic system is inherently unfair. Half the population thinks both parties ought to be disbanded. Alienation from institutions goes up every year-like, two-thirds of the population thinks none of the institutions function. I think that's where Perot came from. People would have voted for Mickey Mouse if he came down from Mars and said, "I've got 50 billion dollars and big ears, go vote for me. Why not?
People are desperate. If this can be organized into a functioning democracy, wealth is in trouble. Serious trouble.
JB: Can you really have democracy when more and more power is lodged in distant private and public bureaucracies? Do we need to break things up, to decentralize?
NC: The Financial Times, which is the main international business journal published in London, had a lead article on this about a year ago in which they pointed out, quite accurately, that what's happening --they think it's great, of course --is what they called a de facto world government of executive agreements with its own institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank, the EC executive, G-7 meetings--and GATT and NAFTA would be part of it. This whole structure of executive power operates independently of public involvement. Even parliaments can't influence it. Who knows what's going on at IMF meetings? You can't subpoena World Bank records.