I tend to agree with Chomsky's views, but sometimes I feel he's too extreme and that makes him lose credibility. Maybe it's my misunderstanding, but he often sounds like there is a bunch of people, "the elite" that plan together how they are going to control the rest of the world. I see this instead as a natural, non-coordinated phenomenon caused by various powerful people trying to serve their self-interests.

If you read more of what he says, you'll find Chomsky says exactly this.

So you might summarise Chomsky's book as "some people are more persuasive than others"

Does he also say that these people may be powerful because they are persuasive?

I think it's more along the lines of they are persuasive because they are powerful. The golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

Well of course they're persuasive because they are more powerful. That's the main theme (as I understand it) and agree.

I was suggesting the other way is true too.

It is easy to be persuasive when you are asking people to simply remain as they are: uninformed on important matters.

David Hume came to this conclusion in OF THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT (in the 1st paragraph).

people of the United States are heavily controlled by the elite is too simplistic and some "elites" make the world better.

Isn't "making the world better" a value judgment that can be shaped by your peers and by your environment, and also not mutually exclusive with making the world worse?

Thus, if an elite makes the world worse in my opinion by reducing diversity of competing opinions in mass media, they could use that platform to propagandize and publicize any philanthropic efforts they may also involve themselves with, such that your opinion of them is neutral or positive.

Do you derive from first principles what things would make the world better and then check to see who might be doing any of them, or do you hear about what certain people are doing, and then make value judgments on their public activity?

An example from the set of making the world better would be Bill Gates' foundation which is helping eradicate polio [0]. If that is not a good thing I give up.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20080414095646/http://www.polioe...

Giving these individual examples, anecdotes really, is even more simplistic in a sense. Within just about any social phenomenon, you can find examples of practices/effects that are incongruent, or even opposite, to the “main gist” of the phenomenon itself. It's really not about what any particular individual does at some particular time, it's about the collective effect a certain social group.

Of course, having the state of affairs as we currently have it, B&MGF's efforts are certainly to be saluted, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't contemplate and work towards a world where you don't need to depend on the good will of a billionaire to have a chance of people not dying of various preventable diseases; Or, indeed, even to recognize that such a state of affairs is unacceptable.

Bear in mind that the BMGF is a separate entity from Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, albeit nominally controlled by them. It may control funds that do not even come from the Gates family (most notably Warren Buffett).

It isn't clear to me that establishing yet another donor-advised trust is making the world a better place, and it seems to me as though the foundation funded by the trust is not taking action on its own initiative, but instead just giving money to those people and organizations who are already actually expending the effort in making the world a better place.

Yes, it is a good thing, but don't go overestimating the wattage of that halo on Bill Gates's head. I give most of the credit to the people who actually uproot their lives, go to Pakistan and similar environments, and try to administer vaccines to people who deeply mistrust their motives.

In what way is it too simplistic? Is it not correct? I don't think I commented on whether or not it's good. Though I happen to think we'd be better off with a more democratically organized society.

You are giving them too much credit, we live in a system of rules (loosely speaking) and it is these rules which have the power. In fact "elites" are probably more frustrated by them than the average citizen because they stumble onto them more quickly.

Who is too blame for advertising to children directly? Is it a few people? Probably not, in fact it brings in a lot of talented people, of whom each may in fact have a negative opinion of advertising to children when asked.

If you are talking about giant corps that can influence rule(s), then ok, but these are not individuals but are the stakeholders and can be large swaths of people.

We also compete to rise to the elite ranks, demote persons and families who prove themselves incompetent and boast a competent (a function of competition, in contrast to Europe) and diverse (a function of not killing each other, in contrast to China or Russia) elite.

I think the meaning of “elite” is clear from context here (i.e. C. Wright Mills' economic, government, and military elites). He certainly didn't mean elite academic mathematicians, etc.

As an independent/libertarian, I find this distinction lost on most democrats. Sadly, it seems they define people by income - thus the income inequality debate - which, among other confounding variables, completely ignores things like mobility.

This remark of yours is truly an ideological minefield!

I completely agree that the debate on income inequality and the resulting sorting of people is irrelevant. Income inequality itself is irrelevant, it's just an ideological misdirection. But, since you proclaim to be libertarian, I suppose you wouldn't agree with me on why it's irrelevant: it's being pushed to actually preserve overall capitalist relations. Sacrificing low taxes of a billionaire or two is a small price to pay to help the ruling class keep ruling. This is practically the central theme of Keynesian economics, and thus of a great deal of 20th century. The strategy is still extremely effective, and so in this election cycle we had good old Bernie Sanders act as an acceptable vent for social and economic discontent of working people by ranting about “the billionaire class”. To anyone not horribly politically illiterate (sadly American culture is generally grotesquely politically illiterate) it was painfully clear from the moment he entered the primaries how his “revolution” will end. So income inequality discourse not only does not help alleviate the problem, it maintains it.

Democrat-style liberalism is so effective because it's an ideological Escher drawing. To even start to explain why it's wrong (or even better: why it's not even wrong!) and even in many cases harmful, you have to rewind the arguments aaaall the way to first principles (let's ignore the likely case that then you end up with the problem of getting people to universally agree on a coherent set of first principles) while constantly being under the threat of being, 1930s Pravda style, denounced as pro bigger evil. As a friend of mine recently semi-jokingly said: “There are no bad guys, just a liberal hell in which all is mixed, a hell in which evil people do good things and good people live in a fantasy.”

As for mobility, there really isn't any significant mobility, this is empirical. Unless you count moving from lower middle to upper middle class (I'm not sure even that is a significant case, I just assume it is, but even then it's likely plastered with all kinds of demographic qualifiers). But still, income inequality in and of itself is not a cause of this, it's one of the symptoms, and not a particularly onerous one.

"The elites" are sure changed out a lot.

It's worthwhile thinking of advertising as a persuasion technology ( because that's what it is by definition ) and adjusting your expectations accordingly. A wise man once told me "If yer at a poker game and you don't know who the sucker is, you're it." Or, if you prefer, "Learn or be sold to."

It really helps a lot when you have huge swaths of the population that are simply stupid and you can turn them against minorities to further manipulate and control them. I think the US is far and ahead of all other nations in such means of control and has been employing it for hundreds of years. The difference now is that they have realized that they do not have to control all speech or even most speech and they do not have to use violence to suppress speech. It's a lot simpler to just mark people who the government doesn't agree with as conspiracy theorists or nut jobs and let the idiot masses discount them with their idiocy.