How it is we have so much information, but know so little? - Noam Chomsky

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

If you’ve ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don’t have to tell you, that’s not what’s done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it.

That’s not what an ad for a car is — an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices — that’s what advertising is.

In any event, the questions we have touched on here have not yet been illuminated in any serious way by approaching them within the framework of any explicit grammatical theory. For the present, one can barely go beyond mere taxonomic arrangement of data. Whether these limitations are intrinsic, or whether a deeper analysis can succeed in unraveling some of these difficulties, remains an open question.