Thoughts on Noam Chomsky

[FlatAssembler]

So, guys, what are your thoughts on Noam Chomsky?
Regarding his linguistic work, I am not a linguist, but I happen to know something about linguistics, so perhaps I an have some opinion about that. I don't really see why is he so famous. Linguistics, like any science, should be based on falsifiable theories, and I don't really see what would falsify his theories. Also, his claim that languages are not learned primarily by experience and inductive reasoning, but by some innate linguistics capacity, really bothers me. The simple fact is, a layman who tries to reason about language usually gets things wrong. For example, the names of some Croatian rivers are Krka, Korana, Krapina, Krbavica and Karasica. To a layman, it's very tempting to conclude that there was a language spoken in Croatia in which *kr meant "to flow", yet we have good reasons to think that's not true. That is, "Krapina" and "Karasica" come from Latin fish names "carpa" and "carassius", "Korana" probably comes from the Celtic word "carr" meaning "stone", "Krbavica" was originally probably not a hydronym at all, and "Krka" is of unknown etymology, but almost certainly unrelated to any of those other hydronyms. To a linguist, even if he wasn't aware of the etymologies of those river names, the explanation that *kr meant "to flow" wouldn't seem convincing at all. There are hundreds of hydronyms in Croatia, so an element of two consonants apparently repeating itself in few of them doesn't seem unlikely at all. Also, if there really was such a language, we would expect the suffixes and the root vowels to be the same, or at least coordinated. Yet, we have apparent zero grades of the root yet different suffixes, in "Krka", "Krapina" and "Krbavica". That's really not what we would expect if they come from the same language. Yet, to a layman, it seems tempting to conclude that they do. Maybe even a better example, to a layman, it would seem obvious that the toponyms such as Issa, Balissa, Almissa, Certissa and Iasa are related, when it's linguistically almost impossible that they are. If an element repeats itself at the end of many toponyms, it's much more likely that it's a suffix than that those are compound words. "Issa" and "Iasa" are very unlikely to be related, because what would the change in the root vowel be triggered by, when both the root and the suffix are the same? Why it is like that? It's quite obvious that we are not using some innate knowledge of languages, but that we are using inductive reasoning alone.
Chomsky is often credited to be influential in the natural language processing. However, I would argue that the opposite is true. Thinking that it's impossible to acquire grammar through inductive reasoning alone might have even held the research in natural language processing back.
As for his political work, I agree with his defense of absolute freedom of speech. However, I don't think he understands economics. In his view, if I correctly understand him, there is no difference between government owning the means of production and one person owning the means of production. He would say that both of them are authoritarian, and that the means of production should be collectively owned, that is, decided about by democratic means. Well, I think there is a huge difference. An individual owning the means of production has an incentive to make informed decisions about them. Government and people participating in the democratic elections? They may also have it, but much less so.
I also don't quite understand why exactly he was praising Hugo Chavez. My best guess is that he didn't really investigate what was happening in Venezuela, since what Chavez was doing wasn't quite in line with the Chomsky's political philosophy. In my opinion, it was rather reckless of Noam Chomsky to say those things, since that, without a doubt, had a profound influence on what happened later in Venezuela. Many people took him seriously, and he didn't really know what he was talking about.
I'd like to hear your thoughts.