Noam Chomsky is a Hypocrite

Catallaxy's Rafe Champion has the scoop.

One of the most persistent themes in Chomsky’s work has been class warfare. He has frequently lashed out against the “massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich” and criticized the concentration of wealth in “trusts” by the wealthiest one percent. The American tax code is rigged with “complicated devices for ensuring that the poor — like eighty percent of the population — pay off the rich.”

But trusts can’t be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of $2,000,000, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston’s venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and with the help of a tax attorney specializing in “income-tax planning” set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.

Read the whole thing, to use a cliché. To those who are thinking of attempting a defence of Chomsky's financial maneuvers, let me say this: if you truly believe that "the rich" use all sorts of complicated dodges to escape their "fair" share of the tax burden, then I do in fact maintain that it is incumbent upon you to live by your self-proclaimed code and avoid taking advantage of such schemes yourself, just as I'd think a man who condemned all abortion a stinking hypocrite for getting his mistress or daughter one (and yes, I do think that "anarcho-libertarians" who say all taxes are immoral even while taking in more in government largesse than they pay in taxes are stinking hypocrites as well).

I have no problem with letting the wealthy keep most of their wealth myself, but Chomsky is a man who claims to be opposed to this and yet goes to great lengths to place himself in the company of those he claims to despise: we aren't talking of a liberal sitting back and enjoying tax cuts handed down by the Bush administration here, but an advocate of extreme left-wing equalitarianism who went out of his way to find tax specialists to help him take advantage of every dodge and loophole possible, indulging in the very shenanigans he himself has condemned as "greedy" and "immoral", and if that doesn't meet the textbook definition of hypocrisy, nothing does. One should either be willing to live according to the principles one preaches to others, or one should stop preaching them altogether.

Comments

[venusdefaro]

Given your dismissal of tax systems:
http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2005/01/your_tax_dollar.html

...I presume you never pay any tax. Anything else would, of course, be hypocrisy.

[Abiola Lapite]

"Given your dismissal of tax systems"

Huh? Given your complete lack of reading comprehension skills, I could scarcely care less about anything you have to say.

Now I know where Chomsky finds the geniuses who buy his political books ...

[dsquared]

I seem to remember that Robert Nozick took massive advantage of a local rent regulation once ...

[Abiola Lapite]

Which would make him a hypocrite as well.

[Jim]

"indulging in the very shenanigans he himself has condemned as "greedy" and "immoral", and if that doesn't meet the textbook definition of hypocrisy, nothing does.."

Come now, to the poure all things are pure. Chomsky is esy to understand if you undrstand his worldview. There are two utterly distinct kinds of people, the Righteous and the Wicked. Victimhood is the badge of righteousness, so a wealthy society like the US is by definition wicked. It all flows from that. But a righteous man has to look out for himelf; if he is not for himself, then who is? He expects his personal rights to be secured by the functioning of a government he abhors, so this tax business is nothing unusual.

As for the inconsistency, that is his trademark. He is famous for distorting the arguments of opponents and even his own when he starts losing the debate.

He is also famous for his aversion to hard data. Hard data are for all those boring, outdated Structuralist and descriptivist people. His own native competence in English (!) is more than sufficient to base all his dazzlingly clever counterintuitive theoretical assertions on. Quite the Wunderkind, even at what, 75?

[L]

The Nozick story bothers me a lot more than the Chompsky story, but I'm not sure if I think Nozick a greater hypocrite, or just think his action worse.

Taxation is a solution to collective action problem and it seems quite reasonable to hold that taxes should be higher or more progressive without donating one's money to the government.

How different is Chompsky's action than Buffet's complaining about Proposition 13 making his California property taxes much lower than his Nebraska taxes? There are two differences, that Buffet is up-front about his advantage from the law, and the difference between sins of omission and commission. I think these are real differences, but Chopmsky's actions just don't seem that bad.

[David]

Jim is unnecessarily hard on Chomsky's research method. Whatever Chomsky's faults, at least his use of the term "competence" does not set his private judgement up as a standard. His arguements always require that there be a strong consensus among native speakers on the correctness of the construction under discussion. "Competence" is an abstraction representing a supposed shared system of rules. Ideosyncratic he may be, but Chomsky clearly belongs to the tradition of structuralists going back to Saussure.

[Jim]

I am being lenient. Chomsky may have said all that about consensus, but I recall very clearly, though the 70's were a long time ago, but I recall how very lax he was about defining this consensus. He seemed for instance to include himself, despite being rather new to the language.

"His arguements always require that there be a strong consensus among native speakers on the correctness of the construction under discussion."

Yes, wonderful - how do you determine what this consensus is without some kind of rigorous method for sampling speakers' actual speech. It used to be called field work. I recall very clearly the poopooing of dusty old field work.

Again, it's been a long time, but his whole approach seemed quite Platonic. I recall the contortions over the passive in English. The base assumption appeared to be that there was this essence called the passive that somehow split and became all these different pieces in an English sentence. You have to be willfully blind to the historical development of the passive throughout western European languages to believe this, but historical and comparative was also somehow uninteresting, not quite MIT enough.

[david]

Jim, I don't want to defend all of old Noam's work. There are surely problems with the relationship between his abstactions (nore Cartesian than Platonic) and historical linguistics or sociolinguistics. Yes, he is famous for not caring about field work. Still, I don't think his notion of competence is completely arbitrary. Whenever I saw him argue, he always chose examples on which the whole audience agreed. The idea was to tease out the deep structure and transformations. The splitting of pieces you describe is supposed to be just the specific way English realises the the passive. Admittedly, he does never address the history of the form or how this particular pattern is related to patterns in related languages. The strength of his system is that he can account for many structures, including ones with identical form but different meaning, with a very small set of generative rules. Whether it represents actual brain activity is an entirely different question.
Chomsky's ideas may be counterintuitive at times, though I never had that impression. They also are not always concincing and change often. I lost track after binding and governance and move alpha. His goal is still to find that elusive universal system that he says lies behind and the contingent forms we see in reality. Hmmm. I guess that did sound Platonic, didn't it.

I hope I am not hijacking the threat here.

[Abiola Lapite]

"I hope I am not hijacking the threat here."

Not at all! It's a fascinating discussion the two of you are having.

[Jim]

"The idea was to tease out the deep structure and transformations. "

That more than anything else was his contribution. And I do think his contribution has been immense, in the way Eisenhower contributed to the war effort. He said he always had the good sense to hire people who were smarter than him. Chomsky's real contribution was the debate and chaos he kicked loose, not in anything he wrote or published, but it's all good - it is still a huge contribution.

Back in the day, I remember crawling through Zhao Yuan Ren's (structuralist) grammar of Chinese, and finding all sorts of cul-de-sac's because that method just won't do it for a language like Chinese. It works fine for Algonkian languages, where everything is clearly labelled, but in Chinese, or English, you get about half the relevant evidence and then have to connect the dots. Along comes Chomsky with his insights and the whole dark landscape is lit for a moment.

Come to think about it, a lot of my objections have to do with specific a priori nonsense that Chomsky's apporach was the only real antidote for, so it's exactly backwards to blame him. For instance, he always put an inpenetrable wall between syntax and lexicon - syntax was completely independent of meaning - furious green ideas and so on. I thought that was pretty a priori. He wouldn't have been so sure if he had someone to rub his nose in all the evidence from active-inactive languages, would he. But the point is that all that data was available only in response to his proposals, and perhaps only from applying ideas he and his acolytes had developed.

On the political side, he's just a throwback. He's like the one last Trot that Stalin didn't get to.