Noam Chomsky, so I am told, is much admired as a truth-teller among young people looking for accurate explanations of what is going on in America politically and economically. His basic thesis is that the small number of people who are in power in this country exert their interest in enriching themselves by pursuing imperialist policies abroad and oppressive policies at home. They keep down poor and even middle class people both foreign and domestic. I think this view is mistaken. Rather, Chomsky is just repeating shibboleths that were inaccurate when they were first enunciated by Lenin and then, for a later generation, by C. Wright Mills, who wrote in “The Power Elite”, in the Fifties, that militarists dominated the United States government and fomented wars so that they could increase the defense budget as well as keep America in control of third world countries, the natural resources and domestic labor of these countries that fell into the American sphere of influence thereby available for exploitation. Let us deaggregate this point of view into distinct propositions and hold them up for examination.