At 15:17 23/12/97 -0000, you wrote:
>This is maybe a little too flag waving for my taste, but this guy has most
of the right answers, & if he gets them from >his belief in the US
constitution....  I don't mind.....I have a hard time understanding how it
is that I find myself >agreeing with a right-wing (?) Congressman and
Texan, but........ please read.

With respect to this post, I think the guy's a fruit loop whos ideas would
be pretty much totally in contradiction to Chomsky's.

We'll ignore for the moment that the entire post is pretty much a call for
campaign contributions, and deal with the letter on its merits.

Libertarian socialists tend not to put their faith in electoral change, as
I understand it.  I could be wrong, of course.

>We would have no welfare for big corporations, or the "poor"

This person seeks an end to corporate welfare, which is good, but at the
cost of *all* welfare?

>no attacks on private property

No comment required.

>That system is called liberty.  It's what the Founding Fathers gave us.
Under liberty, we built the greatest, freest, > most prosperous, most
decent country on earth.

Which country is he talking about?  "Greatest" is a matter of opinion,
"freest" is debatable (it's free if you can afford to pay for the freedom -
something this guy should have learned by now), and as for "most decent" -
don't make me puke.

>Just as important, we wouldn't have this endless string of booms and
busts, recessions and depressions, with each bust >getting worse.  They
aren't natural to the free market; they're caused by the schemers at the Fed.

While Chomsky talks about the "free market" and its non-existance anywhere
in the world, I think we can be safe in assuming that the sort of free
market this person is talking about contradicts somewhat with the
libertarian socialist ideal.

>I also work to save our schools from D.C. interference.  Thanks to the
feds, new curriculums not only smear the Founders >as "racist, slave-owning
elitists," they seek to dumb down our students so they will all be equal.

He also appears to be engaged in ancestor-worship - either that or in denial.

>After all, the UN is socialist and corrupt (many votes can be bought with
a "blonde and a case of scotch," one UN >ambassador once said).

Corrupt, obviously, but socialist??

>Not one dime for the UN, and not one American soldier!  Not in Haiti, not
in Bosnia, not in Somalia, not in Rwanda.

We all like this idea, I'm sure... as would the victims of US soldiers or
soldiers trained by US forces throughout the world.

While there are a couple of things we can agree with in this person's
letter, the majority appear too scary.  The agreements we have are on the
surface, such as the US governemnt's interferance, curbing the rights of
its citizens and the like.  But people influenced by Chomsky's work would
surely not follow this man down the free-market path?

Alister