But trusts can't be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of US$2-million, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston's venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in "income-tax planning," set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.
Chomsky favours massive income redistribution -- just not the redistribution of his income. No reason to let radical politics get in the way of sound estate planning.
When I challenged Chomsky about his trust, he suddenly started to sound very bourgeois: "I don't apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren," he wrote in one e-mail. Chomsky offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam. (However, Chomsky did say that his tax shelter is OK because he and his family are "trying to help suffering people.")
Indeed, Chomsky is rich precisely because he has been such an enormously successful capitalist. Despite his anti-profit rhetoric, like any other corporate capitalist Chomsky has turned himself into a brand name. As John Lloyd recently put it in the lefty New Statesman, Chomsky is among those "open to being "commodified" -- that is, to being simply one of the many wares of a capitalist media market place, in a way that the badly paid and overworked writers and journalists for the revolutionary parties could rarely be."
Chomsky's business works something like this. He gives speeches on college campuses around the country at US$12,000 a pop, often dozens of times a year.
This is more of typical "find some way to make everyone who takes any action into a hypocrite". First of all, just because Chomsky believes something doesn't mean he has to practice it if no one else is. What would it benefit the world for him to be poor?
I have some strong Anarchistic beliefs (i.e. the immorality of one man ruling another, not the smash-things-up kind) but I do literally nothing (outside of talking) for it because it's not practical. I could only ruin my own quality of life and who would see that kind of example and say "wow, count me in!". I'm in a capitalist system so I may as well learn it and use it to the best of my abilities. It's almost certain to be the only system I ever live under no matter what actions I take.
Likewise, very few people listen to Chomsky so he may as well use the system he will live his whole life in to the best of his ability.
And finally, the messenger is different than the message. It is perfectly valid for a smoker to preach about the evils of smoking. He can even call people who smoke stupid. Him smoking doesn't make his message invalid.
Look, I'm not saying you're a bad guy or that working within the system for change is illegitimate.
My point is this: smoking while convincing others that smoking is bad makes you worse off but others better off. That's a failure of will.
But piling up millions in a trust while arguing that other rich people should be punitively taxed makes Chomsky better off but others worse off. That's hypocrisy.
It would only be hypocrisy if he said they should be punitively taxed and he shouldn't. So long as those holes exist he would be foolish to not use them.
He's in the same situation as Warren Buffet: both condemn/ridicule the current system and both do what ever is available to them within the current system.
His "fortune"? You know he's a college professor right?