I am a dirty, dirty Chomskyite

Just to pre-empt the predictable charge leveled at anyone who dares suggest Chomsky might actually have a point (unless you're Bush and can't even spell Chomsky)...

I don't buy the neo-socialist stuff. At least not all of it. Anarchic socialism...or whatever it is he's advocating...has the same problem every other system of government has, which is that human nature is basically dark. Any system that doesn't allow for and take into account a) that a certain, probably large segment of the population is greedy, and b) that people seem to naturally form hierarchical organizations around leaders whose main qualification is that they believe themselves to be leaders, is ultimately doomed to failure. Or more accurately, is ultimately doomed to reform itself into a system that allows for those things. Yes, a large corporation is basically unaccountable to anybody, and yes the powers that be tend to be self-serving, but setting up any governmental structure that attempts to pre-empt those inclinations is doomed, ultimately, to be transformed into different versions of the same thing. Sad, but, I think, true.

That said, I do think the idea that maybe people's primary motivation isn't money has become sadly taboo. Chomsky points to academics, but I think many people care about non-monetary benefits like time with family, leisure time, enjoying what they work on, etc. This isn't to say that such people aren't motivated by money at all. It's just to say that they aren't _primarily_ motivated by money, and that beyond some subsistence level of income, other factors dominate. Maybe not for some, but definitely for a non-trivial segment of the population, and moreover, as psych study after psych study has shown, it is these factors and not money that lead to a higher level of contentment with one's life.

With regard to the issue of media self-censorship, I don't really have anything to add other than to wonder what effect the Internet has or will have on the messages that end up being broadcast. Idealists might be inclined to argue that with ubiquitous access and such a low bar to publishing, more and more radical ideas should end up being published. While I think that's true, I don't see anything that would gain them any more audience than they already have. It has been pointed out by many people smarter than I am that the Internet, far from being unifying, is actually quite a divisive and compartmentalizing influence. It provides a means for people who already agree with each other to gather, reinforces their biases, and does nothing to force people to confront that which they don't already believe. Call it the Fox News effect, except that instead of pandering to such a broad and nebulous class of people like "conservaties," you can have separate communities for every weird little specific ideology you can imagine.