What’s the point of being better than someone else? - Noam Chomsky

At one point you talked about the change from language acquisition to language development. And I think that's a very significant idea. Language isn't really learned; it just grows in the mind. It's something that develops naturally, automatically [...]. It's almost like learning to walk. You don't learn to walk, it just comes automatically. At a certain point a child stands up, starts moving, figures it, gets to understand how to distribute your weight. Nobody's taught you this, but, a lot of calculation and computation goes into simply walking down the street. You don't know the rules, you couldn't know the rules, maybe some biologist could figure out what they are. But that's not the way you pick up walking.

That is neoliberal democracy in a nutshell: trivial debate over minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same pro-business policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate. Democracy is permissible as long as the control of business is off-limits to popular deliberation or change; i.e. so long as it isn’t democracy.

Ricardo's "science" was founded on the principle that capital is more or less immobile and labor highly mobile. We are enjoined today to worship the consequences of Ricardo's science, despite the fact that the assumptions on which they are based have been reversed: capital is highly mobile, and labor virtually immobile -- libertarian conservatives lead the way in rejecting Adam Smith's principle that "free circulation of labor" is a cornerstone of free trade, in keeping with their contempt for markets (except for the weak).