system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Noam Chomsky says that America is a 'state capitalist' - how true is this?

Chomsky:

* Capitalism is a bit of a myth. We have state capitalist societies. And the state has always played an essential central role in development and extension of the capitalist system. That goes back to England in the 17th century and all the way through the history of development, but let's just take the recent period.

* Take today's high tech economy. Take say your iPhone. If you take your iPhone and you the technology in it and take it apart, turns out that almost everything comes from the state sector. The GPS was developed by the Navy. The electronics was developed in military labs.

* The computer that's in front of you - the computers began to be developed in the 1950s. It wasn't until 1977 that Apple was able to product a computer that could be marketed for a profit. That's after about 30 years of research and development in the state sector.

* Now suppose we had capitalist societies, one of the principles of capitalism is supposed to be that if you invest in something, especially if you invest to make a risky costly investment over say 30 years, and there's some profit that comes out, it's supposed to go back to you. But our system doesn't work like that. It goes to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

* Now the public pays the costs through various devices (the university labs etc) and then after many years, something has handed over to private corporations and they make the profit.

* Same with the internet, the beginnings of the internet were in the late 1950s. It developed over decades within the government system, meaning taxpayer support. Finally around 1995, the public made a gift to private corporations say "ok you guys can have the internet that we developed."

* Now we have the half a doze huge mega corporations which turn the internet. Across the board, that's the way it is. If you go back to the 19th century when the (what was then called) "America system of production" developed amazed the world with mass production, quality control, interchangeable parts. Most of it was developed by government. That's where you can do experimentation, you can make investments for the long term. Private corporations don't do that. They want to make profit tomorrow.

Is Chomsky right?
gpt
Unfortunately there isn't a strict and consistent definition of capitalism, economically speaking, and other potential flavors of capitalism fall to the same sythe. This makes it difficult to talk about what capitalism is *really though* when everyone conversing is using the same words to refer to different ideas. Put another way, if Marx points to systems of production and allocation present in the 18th and 19th centuries and calls them capitalism, while Chomsky points to those same systems and calls them state capitalism, it is unclear to me that they even disagree, let alone what potential implications would arise from the disagreement.

However, if you're looking for examples of state involvement in markets, you don't even have to go as far as product R&D. Markets cannot exist without some degree of state influence. We rely on the state to enforce property rights, for instance, without which markets and trade aren't really possible.