Hear, hear! (And from a patchouli-scented peacenik who reads Chomsky, that's high praise.)

In fact, the theory of regulatory capture doesn't go far enough. The regulatory agencies aren't just "captured" by corporate interests; historically, the corporations have been the main force behing creating the regulatory state in the first place. As Gabriel Kolko argued in The Triumph of Conservatism, the main force behind TR's "progressive" regulatory state was the regulated industries. The trust movement, as a voluntary effort, had been a miserable failure. The over-leveraged, inefficient trusts began losing market share as soon as they were formed. The advantage of a cartel formed though government regulation, on the other hand, is that it is stable and non-defectable. And it applies to all businesses in an industry, so that there aren't any more efficient smaller businesses that gain a competitive advantage by ignoring the restrictions. What really cemented things was the "unfair competition" provisions of the Clayton Act, which outlawed price wars and finally made oligopoly markets stable. And the chief actor in framing FDR's "progressive" economic agenda was good old Gerard Swope of GE. As Roy Childs put it, the liberal intellectual has historically been the running dog for big business.