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I’ve heard Chomsky describe himself as a “libertarian socialist” which I take to mean liberty for him and socialism for the rest of us. And BTW a two million buck net worth is eldorado for most us out here in the hinterland, far from the rarefied air of California. The only way I’ll ever see that much lucre is in a Monopoly game.

Roger,

So I assume you haven’t set up one.

It’s an Irrevocable Trust. A Revocable Trust does not move assets out of your control and thus not out of your estate for Estate Tax purposes when it passes to anyone but your wife, or a Charity, assumably your kids.

The question is is Chomsky worth 2 million because some Real Estate like a house he owns has doubled or tripled in value - he owns 2 million in Life Insurance - or most of it is liquid or semi liquid investments.

Obviously, if the latter than he’s wealthier than the 2 former. However, it is notable that the fraud set up a Trust altogether.

Roger, since you’re on your 2nd marriage and have a young child I am always available for consultation on Estate and/or Insurance Planning.

Mike

The thing that I find so confusing and rather annoying about Chomsky is that he did some seminal work. Every computer science grad student, and undegrads in better programs, learns about the “Chomsky Hierarchy”, a mathematical model of grammars that underlies an awful lot of computer science.

He also was one of the first to show that mathematics could be used to describe grammars in general. All great stuff.

But his influence on linguistics since then has been mostly pernicious, and infected with a kind of mystical vitalism — the notion that there must be something radically and qualitatively different about human cognition, enforced primarily by his authoritarian personality and his cult — while his politics is the wildest crackpottery, made respectable by his position at MIT.

Solomon posted something that Chomsky’s biggest theory on language learning for toddlers has been likely proven wrong, ironically by some Israeli physicist, psychologist and computer scientist. They built a computer model proving that the original thought on language development through trial and error was correct and that Chomsky’s theory rebutting that was likely wrong after all.

http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archives/006672.shtml

Roger -

After reading the article it appears that Chomsky’s assets are likely liquid from book sales and speeches as well as ownership of his book rights, ie… he’s reasonably wealthy I would guess.

Oh and it also appears, though the writer is certainly not very fond of him, that he is something of a sales/money hore. But it’s ok because he’s for the little people so he needs the money…. did he get that tip from Slippery Al?

I suspect that the $2 million figure is a lowball estimate. What amazes me (and is discussed in the article) is that people buy his cruddy books, which are generally comprised of speeches, interviews, etc.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Chomsky is this generation’s Carlos Casteneda; someone that everybody reads in college and ends up being embarrassed to admit reading about ten years later.

If Chomsky is the world’s #1 intellectual today, then it’s certainly the case that the status of the public intellectual has declined markedly since the days of Sartre. Think about it: in the 1950s, even the likes of Henry Luce’s TIME magazine would publish articles on leading French intellectuals like Sartre. LIFE would do glossy photo shoots. Sartre’s philosophy, as murky as it was, nonetheless rippled across the popular culture and was embodied in Hollywood archetypes like Bogart. (Read Peter Bogdanovich’s superb tribute, “Bogie in Excelsis”(?), for an explication of Bogie as existentialist).

All gone. It’s doubtful that even one American in ten, and one European in five, has even heard of Chomsky, let alone could recognize his face or quote him. His epigrams, if he has any, haven’t penetrated the public consciousness to the point where barroom jokers can get a laugh from mixing them with Sinatra lyrics (To do is to be - JS; To be is to do - Kant; Do be do be do - Frank)

I don’t know why public intellectuals have declined so precipitously in the last thirty years, but I’m sure that part of the explanation has to do with the decline of the Left ideology’s explanatory power and appeal in the Brezhnev era of the late 1970s, and its complete collapse after 1989. A prize for leading public “intellectual” today is a bit like a prize for the #1 network news broadcaster. Who cares?

Chomsky’s hiding his money from the taxman in a revocable family trust is hugely hyprocritical for someone with the intellectual’s ‘progressive’ views

Why “hypocritial?” Does being a progressive somehow mean you owe it to your government not to take advantage of the tax policies which good old Uncle Sam himself put in place? Perhaps if our government’s policies at home & abroad had some moral underpinning (other than one an evangelical Christian could get behind) then I could make that argument. But as it is…

Does a progressive have to pay all those taxes trusting that doing so means your country will spend it wisely? If you disagree w. wasting scores of billions of those taxpayer dollars on an adventure in Iraq does that mean you’re duty bound not exploit the tax system? And if wealthy Republican fat cats can do it, why can’t a good progressive?

Chomsky’s ideas are banal retreads

When you have the intellectual brilliance of Noam Chomsky then you can talk–until then your opinion doesn’t amount to much. Personally, I don’t subscribe to Chomsky’s views in every detail. In fact, at times I’m quite critical of him. But to hear him speak or read one of his essays is to realize that you’re a witness to an intellectual force of nature. Even if you disagree, you have to marshall all your intellectual resources to do so. I wonder how much you’ve read by him & whether you’ve ever heard him speak & if so, how long ago?

“Why “hypocritical?” Does being a progressive somehow mean you owe it to your government not to take advantage of the tax policies which good old Uncle Sam himself put in place?”

When you rail against those tax policies (and particularly trusts), then yes, it is hypocritical.

“I wonder how much you’ve read by him & whether you’ve ever heard him speak & if so, how long ago?”

Read 9-11, which of course was not really a book or an essay, and I have heard him speak many times (albeit on MP3s, not live). I read a number of his other books (e.g., Manufacturing Consent, What Uncle Same Really Wants) but not recently. His most impressive quality as a speaker is his ability to stack dependent clause on dependent clause without losing his place (unlike much of his audience).

He will only seem a sage to those who buy his worldview, which is pretty much limited to college students and the hard-core left. By couching everything as media criticism he manages to mislead without actually lying, most notoriously in his defense of Pol Pot’s regime, which he later claimed was not a defense, but merely a critique of the Khmer Rouge’s critics.

He may have a first-rate mind, but he uses it in pursuit of a fourth-rate agenda.