Reddit mentions of Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order

Noam Chomsky is the author of Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, and countless others.

Naomi Wolf is the author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, and others.

Chris Hedges is the author of "Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You", The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress, Death of the Liberal Class, and others

Daniel Ellsberg @ http://www.ellsberg.net/articles

Cornel West @ http://www.cornelwest.com/

Birgitta Jónsdóttir's website & twitter

Alexa O'Brien's website & twitter

Kai Wargalla's twitter account.

Tangerine Bolen @ RevolutionTruth; website & twitter

Two good videos on youtube to watch are the debate with William Buckley as well as the documentary on Manufacturing Consent.

Two books I'd recommend for a beginner in him are Profit Over People and, probably the best introduction to him, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom.
The second book is a collection of two different lectures that were given by Chomsky after the death of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. The first half deals with Chomsky's philosophy of language and the second half with the immorality of the Vietnam war. I highly recommend it.

http://www.amazon.com/Profit-Over-People-Neoliberalism-Global/dp/1888363827

Specifically: You see it everywhere. Pretty much every large corporation (or even small). Flint, Methane in CA, Slave labour, Oil spills with little repurcussions, Banking crisis, Wood shavings in parmesan at Walmart, 20% meat in the meat at Taco Bell, etc... It´s often not the corporations themselves, but the system that allows these ongoings to thrive and even encourages them.

> Capitalism has been consistently proven to raise the standards of living wherever it has been tried.

Google the word neoliberalism sometime, and spend a day researching it.

> Meanwhile, every single attempt at socialism - the USSR, the PRC, the DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba - has resulted in disaster, and has lowered the standards of living wherever it has been tried.

In what sense are these socialist, apart from what they call themselves in name? An anarcho-capitalist can have some actual, justified criticisms against socialism in practice (I've seen many), but when people like you plow forward with such an elementary misunderstanding, believe me when I say you look bad, even to your own camp.

The Zapatistas? The Paris Commune? The Ukrainian Free Territories? Revolutionary Catalonia? The Israeli Kibbutzim? That is your actual target.

> There is a reason why every single country that was once considered communist has transitioned towards capitalism...

Because they were bombed to hell in the interest of the capitalist class?

> ... and it should be no surprise to anyone that the standard of living has raised in these areas.

Like the four asian tigers did through State intervention? (And like the US did, also). Nothing even close to a free market prescription, albeit a quasi-capitalist one nevertheless.

profit over people is the new world order

Look, I'm not interested in getting into a debate about semantics. My primary reason for replying was to point out some of the shortcomings of a "free market" (or laissez faire capitalism).

Anyway, I'm not an economist nor a philosopher. You should decide what you value most: markets or human beings. If you have a religious devotion to the former then there is nothing I can do for you.

If you're interested in criticisms of a capitalist free market you should check out Profit Over People by Noam Chomsky or anything by Karl Marx who obviously has some interesting views on the matter.

He advocated positions that lead to neoliberalism (he is THE neoliberalist), neoliberalism itself is very VERY bad for people who aren't rich, but the neoliberalist state naturally involves into corporatism/fascism, something he criticizes as "socialism." I don't understand why anyone who calls corporatism/fascism socialism is taken serious.

He also lays "social responsibility" with government, stating that business only have the obligation to make profit and somehow thinking that social activism on part of corporations leads to indirect taxes to shareholders and consumers. In the same essay he states that the idea of "social responsibility" for the State is the classic definition of socialism, but he dismisses this without giving why.

In (the last?) an essay just before his death he tried to argue that the policies enacted during the Great Depression (Contraction) were ineffective by --wait for it-- comparing the Great Depression with the Japanese Crash in the 90s and the Web Bubble. The whole essay is badly written because he places his thesis in his conclusion, with his introduction being vague. His essay also is a few paragraphs with 3 figures. This simplistic thinking would be appropriate for a high school economics student, but not for a fucking serious economist.

Then you have other nutjobs like Rothbard who suggested repudiating the [U.S] national debt. The appeal of libertarianism is that it has some common sense solutions to problems; but it fails to address the adverse effects of neoliberalism and capitalism in general.

I recommend reading Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order to understand the adverse effects of neoliberalism. I would also like to remind everyone that in a capitalist "democracy," the people are not informed enough to regulate private interest --the "social responsibilities" Friedman talks about.

And as such corporatism, just like imperialism, is an evolved form of free market capitalism. Free market capitalism also has lots of problems, mainly that it's a feudalistic economic model and that it values profit over everything else and that it needs to be restrained by the State--what Friedman calls social responsibilities.