An edited interview with Noam Chomsky appears in The Nation for April 24, 2000
titled Talking "Anarchy" With Chomsky and subtitled 'There's a movement out
there, he says, and it's gathering steam.’ I don’t find the interview format
especially interesting other than being a talisman in the cult of
personality.
An accessible piece of celebrity. If it enlivens univerity students to demand
social-justice, that’s fine. Social-justice must somehow be different from
plain justice... oh, I get it. Social-justice is why we can go to the streets
so the cops can try out their non-lethal toys. I’ve earlier attempted to point
out Chomsky’s use of commas to include clauses within sentences is a most
transformational-generative stream of text and this is missing in the
interview
format.

What is present is a pair of seemingly contradictory statements and several
implied assumptions which might be a bit shaky. In the interview, Chomsky
seems
to imply that markets left to their own devices would root out moral hazard --
That lenders should be responsible for their bad loans and also the bad loans
are encouraged by the IMF apparatus since repayment failures are shouldered by
northern taxpayers. Perhaps Deutsche Bank commando raids on Indonesian board
rooms would play better. The underlying assumptions are that reward implies
risk and that market failures are due to immoral behavior. This is contrary to
the rationale of why there is an IMF which is a lender of last resort. Also,
the Indonesian example appears to be an effort to stack the deck in portraying
an evil IMF. The Asian crisis was not centered in Indonesia and did not come
about through kleptocracy. I find Chomsky’s assumptions to be in themselves
rather US-centric and pre-Marxian in their faith in the unseen hand of
markets.