chomsky used to denounce the intranet and technologies developed by the warmongers as a tool to further control the minds of the people and further the imperialistic goals of the powerful elite. but now after it turns out those technologies are benefiting the people and in fact promoting freedom of information that gets anti powerful elite candidates like ocasio cortez and bernie sanders elected, leftists like chomsky and yannis are now claiming those technologies were developed by the state and funded by the people. now leftists are complaining the companies who are making billions from those technologies are not sharing their profits to the people who are suppose to be the owners of those technologies.
that's like telling red hat to sharing their billions to the contributors of open source linux. that's like telling the manufacturers of generic drugs, who are making drugs that are more affordable to the poor, to give their profits to big pharmaceuticals who invented the drugs. that's like telling trucking companies to give part of their profits to the people for using the roads and freeways which the people paid for. oh wait. they do. by paying taxes. just like microsoft and apple who are also paying taxes. that's even a giant understatement because a truck driver on a video call with his infant daughter while doing an interstate delivery on those long lonely highways is priceless. you can't even put a price tag on what iphone has given back to the people. the left's usual mistake is to value something solely by it's price tag.
i'm not an expert but i FEEL that if chomsky gets to decide and the public or government gets a share of the profit or if apple has to pay huge royalties to the government, then the iphone will probably cost $10,000 instead of only $120. also note that anyone is free to buy apple stock and ride the gravy train. moreover, the earnings of apple do not go directly to share holders. it gets reinvested or kept as cash. it is the virtual or perceived value of the stock that makes it grow and the shareholders who sells and buys at the right time are rewarded. apple shareholders can easily lose money if they buy and sell at the wrong time. but lets say the profits are given to us taxpayers. first the iphone would not be developed because there is no re-investment. apple probably would have stopped after the first macintosh. also there will be no capital because no one will invest in something where the profit will just be given to taxpayers. i hope i'm just missing something but i really feel leftists are lunatics.
although the right also makes similar mistakes when they claim privatization makes the system more efficient just by looking at the numbers. example is when a privatized bus system cuts unprofitable routes, it may look good when the earnings report comes out but not for the night shift janitor who has no bus to ride home at 11pm. although if the janitor is a right winger like sean hannity (who used to be janitor), he will just get a bicycle and bike to the nearest bus stop that still has bus service. if the janitor is a leftist, he will quit his job and blame his demise on neo-liberalism.
the left's seething animosity towards the winners of the game just baffles me. it's like when obama said "you did not build that". the republicans should have said, "yes mr. president, we did not build it that is why we pay taxes. what do you want mr president? state communism?". instead the republicans idiotically replied "yes we built it !!!". republicans should hire me to coach them on what to say.
i know corporations like apple do creative accounting like using tax havens but it's just part of the game. the beauty of corporations is that ordinary people can invest in apple to ride the gravy train and even do some tax avoidance creativity of their own. example, i usually trade in my IRA account which is a legal tax shelter. in my NON IRA account, i'm always 50% stocks and 50% bonds so in the 2008 crisis, i made a lot of money by rotating my bonds into assets that became dirt cheap because of the crisis. mostly properties and index funds to avoid a wash sale (e.g. vegas houses - https://ian-crystal.blogspot.com/2011/09/once-in-a-milenia-opportunity.html). i then converted my 50% stocks into bonds so now i have a humongous carry over loss on my tax returns that i can always use to not pay taxes on future capital gains and decrease my taxable income by 3,000 each year. despite all my success in investing, if you look at my tax returns, it looks like i'm the biggest loser. that's why i laughed when msnbc tried to show trump's tax return where he lost billions to show he sucks as a businessman because it showed how naive they are with "creative accounting".
yanis and chomsky also uses the state developed technologies used by microsoft and apple as an example on why government works. actually it only destroys the left's narrative and supports the right wing narrative. right wingers believes the government's only responsibility is defense or national security. and those technologies were originally intended to defend our country from the communists.
it also confirms the right wing narrative that society has to be exceptionally humane and competent to have a big socialist democrat government that functions properly (the greek crisis is a glaring example of what happens when this prerequisite is not met). government needs motivation to serve the people because unlike in the private business world, government has no competition. government can make a burger that sucks and insanely expensive and the customer can't just go next door to the competition to buy a better burger. so what was the motivating factor for the government scientists to develop those technologies even if there was no business competition? how about not dying from a soviet invasion? i think that's a pretty strong motivating factor. besides, the government created technologies that only became really useful and beneficial to the people when private corporate tyrannies took over the development (e.g. iphone). and i'm sure the scientists in maoist china and the soviet union were given special privileges which is against true socialist or leftists ideals of equity.
also, scientists are statistical outliers in the corruption curve. the people collecting taxes and administering the healthcare system and free college services are not scientists and can easily ruin the system if they are corrupt (just like in greece). as i said, socialism has it's merits, capitalism has it's merits, it's stupid to have to choose a pure form of one or the other. mainstream right wingers are against big government. we are not for ZERO government. of course there are extreme libertarian capitalists on the right who want no government, but there are also socialists on the left who also want no government (libertarian socialism). chomsky is an example.
and now that the cold war is over, why did the supposedly selfish powerful elite allow ANYONE, including a teenage nerd by the name of bill gates to work in his garage and develop those technologies? last time i checked, bill gate's parents were not part of the powerful elite. i almost fainted when i saw a youtube video of chomsky calling bill gates a parasite just waiting in the sidelines - Noam Chomsky on Internet and Bill Gates. hmmm..... let me do a simple math ...... BILL GATES WAS JUST A TODDLER !!! you can't expect a 5 year old to be designing a 10-Mbit Ethernet CMOS with silicon coupler data-link control and transceiver chip. which by the way was designed by a once ordinary filipino named dado banatao but is now a powerful elite in america using his wealth to selfishly give scholarships to bright filipinos. i say dado banatao is selfish because he only gives scholarships to bright people. according to the left, everyone should get scholarships because everyone has equal inborn potential and capabilities and the only thing that's holding us down is lack of government funding because of the evil right wing conservatives !!! i don't understand that narrative because if i was given a scholarship to MIT i would have lost my self esteem and quit trying to be a programmer. maybe i'm just missing something but i really feel MIT doesn't make bright people. instead, MIT is a school that only accepts bright people. if MIT is turning students with low SAT scores into scientists, then i would be out in the streets campaigning for bernie sanders.
it's not like everyone was going - "you know what? i can develop those government technologies and become a billionaire but i won't because that will make me a parasite". you see how ridiculous that is? every normal person with an ounce of common sense would have done exactly the same thing bill gates did. except only bill gates had the ability, foresight and foreskin to actually do it.
bill gates was really more of a winner than a parasite because he was also fighting to the death with other parasites like netscape. and the wonderful thing with powerful elites is that anyone is free to challenge them like what the developers of linux, google and firefox did. who still uses internet explorer? who still uses the yahoo search engine? keep in mind firefox and linux are free. i didn't know there is such as thing as a benevolent parasite. the parasites myspace and friendster got swallowed by facebook.
(for more of my knowledge bombs, click the "ian's knowledge bombs" banner at the top of this article and choose any article in the table of contents that piques your interest)
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