#chomky

That fat Dino from blinkomania, man, i love him.

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

Today the masters of mankind are multinational corporations and financial institutions, but the lesson still applies and it helps explain why the state-corporate complex is indeed a threat to freedom and in fact even survival. By now there are important elaborations of Smith's truism applied to the modern world. The most significant and sophisticated version that I know is by political economist Thomas Ferguson, what he calls his investment theory of politics which in brief, simplified, simply views U.S. elections as occasions in which the coalitions of private investors coalesce to invest to control the state. It turns out to be a thesis of quite predictive success over more than a century as he shows. What it means in effect is that elections are pretty much bought and that the buyers expect to be rewarded, and that happens all the time.