http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19970303.htm

QUESTION: At this point, what do you see as the greatest threat to democracy?

CHOMSKY: The greatest threat to democracy right now is the transfer of decision making into the hands of unaccountable private power. It's done by a lot of ways, but one of them is what they call "minimizing the state." This is kind of paradoxical for me. I'm an old-time anarchist from way back. I don't think the federal government is a legitimate institution. I think it ought to be dismantled, in principle; just as I don't think there ought to be cages -- I don't think people ought to live in cages. On the other hand, if I'm in a cage and there's a saber tooth tiger outside, I'd be happy to keep the bars of the cage in place -- even though I think the cage is illegitimate. I think that image is not inappropriate. There are plenty of good arguments, in my opinion, against centralized government authority. On the other hand, there's a much worse danger right outside. The centralized government authority is at least to some extent under popular influence, and in principle at least under popular control. The unaccountable private power outside is under no public control. What they call minimizing the state -- transferring the decision making to unaccountable private interests -- is not helpful to human beings or to democracy or, for that matter, to the markets. In this time when we are told there is "a triumph of the market," the markets are threatened themselves, aren't they? What's developing is a kind of corporate mercantilism with huge centralized, more or less command economies, integrated with one another, closely tied to state power -- relying very heavily on state power, in fact -- and enforcing social policies and a conception of social and political order that happen to be highly beneficial to the interests of the top sectors of the population, the richest sectors.