David Barsamian
David Barsamian founded and directs the award-winning radio program Alternative Radio (www.alternativeradio.org). His latest book is a collection of conversations with Howard Zinn called Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics (Harper Perennial). He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
The Common Good
An Interview With Noam Chomsky
If a true democratic society were allowed to function, it’s extremely unlikely that the things now called “inevitable results of the market” would ever be tolerated. These results certainly concentrate wealth and power and harm the vast majority. There’s no reason for people to tolerate that. These so-called inevitabilities are really public-policy decisions designed to lead to a certain kind of highly inegalitarian society. Talk about the inevitable processes of the market is almost entirely nonsensical, in my opinion. And if we did have a functioning democracy, we would solve the problem as Aristotle suggested: by reducing poverty and making sure that almost everyone had “moderate and sufficient property.”
November 1997
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