Chomsky on having a job (“living in a totalitarian system”)
False equivocation all over the place. If you need to shift the language to extremes to persuade people you are doing so by &quot;borrowing&quot; from those extremes.  Ie., fascism is widely regarded as &quot;bad&quot; so the tactic here is to borrow its badness and spread it around <i>without</i> actually arguing about the situation at-hand.<p>When you work for someone, as in many areas, you trade sovereignty for wealth. Freedom for security. And so on.<p>This is always a tradeoff in your interactions with others. A promise is an obligation; commitment, &quot;slavery&quot; etc. if one wishes to put these things so inflammatorily.<p>The relevant question is: in this particular situation, how serious is this tradeoff?<p>In the case where there are many jobs you are never &quot;starving&quot;, likewise when welfare exists. The governmental and economic context of a system isnt something extrinsic to the system that you can just dismiss: it is part of its functioning.<p>Yes, welfare may well be a precondition of a free market system to ensure that in extreme cases it isnt &quot;starve or else&quot;. Or equally, a big dynamic economy might be a predoncition. Maybe our sorts of markets don&#x27;t work with monopolistic employeers for the reasons he says.<p>However this does not generalize to work for a company as such which is always particular and always situated in an economic and political context which turns it from &quot;slavery&quot; to &quot;having to get in by 9am&quot;.