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John Carmack on government

• dennisgorelik 16y ago
  It's a great summary of libertarian perspective on government. I wish more people could understand it and made the government to cut spending.
• demallien 16y ago
  None of us is an island. Taxes are the money that we pay to make our society civilised, and to provide the services necessary to allow those of talent to rise up above the crowd, instead of those that inherited wealth accreting ever more power. There are exactly zero examples of meritocracies without taxes in history, but plenty of examples of countries with taxes where someone with talent can rise to the top. I know which I prefer. I wonder if John realises that a reduction in taxes could very well destroy the future of the next Carmack coming up through grade school in a modest neighbourhood right now.
  • drcode 16y ago
    > Taxes are the money that we pay to make our society civilised. I would say that trade and enforcement of contracts are what make our society civilized. I think it makes sense to have the government help in the enforcement of contracts to some degree, through modest fees and/or taxes. > provide the services necessary to allow those of talent to rise up above the crowd I'm sure John C wouldn't advocate throwing orphans and disadvantaged children into a "dog eat dog" world. In a longer essay he would agree with you that children need to be cared for by society and that this requires tax money to some degree. His argument is focused towards how competent adults should be treated. Once a person reaches a certain level of adulthood, giving him/her additional resources through government programs (in the millions of different ways the government distributes money, directly or indirectly) is a very inefficient proposition. > There are exactly zero examples of meritocracies without taxes in history At one point there was no state in history in which women could vote. At one point there was no state in history in which slavery was abolished. Sometime you need to buck history to progress. That said, I don't think it's clear who to cast a vote for to accomplish John C's goals- It's hard to know who the candidates are who "vector in that direction." Even though I agree with the thesis that "less government is usually better" I still end up voting mostly for Democrats, since the Republicans in recent history seem anti-rationalist to me. Rationality is a necessary ingredient. Just because the Tea Party folks say "let's decrease government programs" doesn't mean casting a vote for them is actually a step towards accomplishing that goal. I'm sure if they got power they would think _their_ government programs would be a fine way to spend money.
    • eru 16y ago
      > In a longer essay he would agree with you that children need to be cared for by society and that this requires tax money to some degree. Yes. Actually children could probably be provided for to a large extent with charity. Though I imagine less sexy causes are more in need of public money.
      • drcode 16y ago
        > Actually children could probably be provided for to a large extent with charity. I wish I wasn't a cynic and could believe that.
    • forinti 16y ago
      >I would say that trade and enforcement of contracts are what make our society civilized. That's a businessman's perspective; there are a lot of other players and concerns in society. What about caring for the environment, enforcing better safety regulations, enforcing better work conditions, etc?
      • drcode 16y ago
        > What about caring for the environment... I'm familiar with the "tragedy of the commons" issue but there just isn't any clear evidence that: More government spending -> better environment What do you think all this government money is going towards? A lot of it is used to run cars and do other things that hurt the environment. Do you think this whole "government stimulus" stuff made the environment better off? > ...enforcing better safety regulations... I won't argue with you that the government does a fantastic job creating more regulations of all kinds :) > ...enforcing better work conditions, etc? Again, the benefit of government here is tenuous. Sure, some things they do might help, but these benefits need to be weighed against the "opportunity costs" of what else could have been done with that tax money.
      • dpatru 16y ago
        The environment is taken care of when it's privately owned. People take care of their own properties. Safety regulations and working conditions are improved via the free market and productivity increases and, to a much lesser extent, by the tort system which punishes unreasonable behavior.
  • dantheman 16y ago
    Money is not a problem in education. Second, his critique was mainly aimed at the federal government.
  • adolph 16y ago
    The gist of Carmack's statement is that government delivers poor ROI, expands into inappropriate roles and obfuscates how much consumers spend on it. I didn't read "without taxes" or "reduction in taxes" anywhere; I read that Carmack thinks things are trending in the wrong direction. I wonder if demallien realizes that not reducing the number of carrier strike groups (currently _eleven_) could very well destroy the future of the next demallien coming up through grade school in a modest neighborhood right now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_battle_group#The_U.S._Navy_carrier_strike_group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_battle_group#The_U.S._N...
    • logicalmind 16y ago
      But the government that delivers this poor ROI has produced John Carmack. Who is to say that some of the "inefficiencies" in the system did not lead to John becoming the person he is today? The results depends on what is being measured. If you're measuring dollars in vs. dollars out, then that is one thing. But if your measuring the "number of John Carmack's produced" then the government is 100% efficient. It's not unlike someone climbing Mount Everest and then looking back and saying "Mount Everest is easy to climb". From the perspective of the person who has successfully made the climb, it is easy. But you can't apply that perspective to the vast majority who have not made the climb.
      • adolph 16y ago
        But the government that delivers this poor ROI _today_ has produced John Carmack _many_years_ago._ My reading of the linked article is that ROI is trending in the wrong direction. Systemic inefficiencies or the flying spaghetti monster may have lead to the personage of John Carmack. To me, the article didn't sound like he wants to remove the ladder now that he is up; it sounded like he thinks that ladder is becoming less stable for everyone.
      • dualogy 16y ago
        "But the government that delivers this poor ROI has produced John Carmack" I don't think the man did anything to deserve such an insulting blow. "Who is to say that some of the "inefficiencies" in the system did not lead to John becoming the person he is today?" If you are going to argue that it's government efficiencies that "produce" creative, productive men, rather than their parents and their own effort -- I think the burden of proof is on you. Good luck. "But if your measuring the "number of John Carmack's produced" then the government is 100% efficient." You are arguing that "as long as there is just one talented, capable person growing up in North Korea, its government is doing a splendid job and deserves all its powers. So much so they would be granted to it voluntarily by the people, even if they hadn't outgunned them in the first place. "But you can't apply that perspective to the vast majority who have not made the climb." What's your point here relating to this discussion?
• TomOfTTB 16y ago
  The problem with his thesis is most rational disagreements in government revolve around things that are either impossible or can only be done by the government. So inefficiency isn’t really the issue. Take health care as a perfect example. Having studied the issue I personally think it’s impossible to have quality universal health care. Others disagree. But what we can both agree on is that only Government could do it if it is possible. So the question isn’t inefficiency because both sides concede government is inefficient. But if government is the only power that can do it than inefficiency isn’t the issue. The conflict lies in what can be accomplished not in whether government could do it efficiently. (People like me would argue the question is whether the private sector could provide better quality health care to more people but as long as the other side believes universal health care is possible the point is moot to them)
  • drcode 16y ago
    > But what we can both agree on is that only Government could do it if it is possible. How so? The government could mandate health insurance, and provide a health care option for those who choose not to get it from somewhere else. If enforced, this would make health care (of some sort) universal to everyone. > So the question isn’t inefficiency because both sides concede government is inefficient I agree with you that this is a central weakness in John C's argument: Libertarians (like myself) spend a lot of time trying to convince others that the government is inefficient, when the argument can only be resolved by quantifying exactly _how_ inefficient it is, whether the costs override the benefits. This is a much harder proposition to prove, though I suspect that John C is right that the costs almost always are greater than the benefits.
    • secretasiandan 16y ago
      Re : costs almost always are greater than the benefits Perhaps you can argue this on a case by case basis, but do you think this is still true if you have to take or leave all service at once? As evidence that the costs are worth the benefits I submit the fact that you (perhaps not you in particular but any citizen of a country who makes this claim) haven't renounced your citizenship for that of another, better cost-benefit ratio, country. Incidentally, I think that if many government functions were privatized you would be paying a (much) higher rate than you are now since you've already shown the willingness to pay the current rate. That combined with the fact that there rarely if ever is competition in large scale services like those the government provides. As evidence, take a look at any large scale private contractor industry like construction or defense/aerospace.
• ryandvm 16y ago
  He is definitely on the right track. I'm pleased to see that I share an opinion on this with one of the sharpest programmers on the planet. The reality is that I have almost zero influence on how a very large portion of my paycheck gets spent from Capitol Hill. Ideally the U.S. would return to the concept of using states as "laboratories of democracy". When you have states with economies that are larger than most countries, there is no reason to be bumping so many responsibilities up to the federal level.
  • Retric 16y ago
    I am in favor of a huge cut in government spending. Unfortunately I know of no politician that thinks that way and has a chance in hell of getting elected. Republicans like to talk about cutting government spending yet they never actually do so and in my lifetime they have dramatically expanded the federal government. Democrats are more than willing to cut expensive programs but they want to replace them with other expensive programs. Over the last few years both party's increased government spending on healthcare, yet somehow the Republican's approach (prescription drug plan) ended up costing more for a smaller benefit? Who exactly should I vote for again?
    • dennisgorelik 16y ago
      The underlying problem here is that not enough people care about cutting government spending. Prospective voters put more attention to the issues like gay marriage, war on terror, universal health care, and medical marijuana use. Most voters simply do not pay enough attention on cutting government spending, so politicians can get away with milking people more and more every year.
      • ajscherer 16y ago
        No, the underlying problem is that not enough people all care about cutting the same government spending. If I want to cut my personal spending by 20% next year I can't just wake up on January 1 and do it in one step. I need to figure out what exactly it is I'm going to not buy or pay less for next year. Likewise, Congress can't just pass a law to spend 20% less without identifying exactly what it is going to spend less on and how. Getting people to agree on those particulars is the problem. What makes it worse is that the things you might get wide agreement on cutting generally are things that would save negligible amounts of money. Also, even people who care a lot about the government (one way or the other) generally aren't willing spend time learning all the details of what the government is spending money on. Its really complicated and boring and I think people (especially us hn readers) would rather think of the problem at a higher level of abstraction (and in greatly simplified terms). Unfortunatley that just isn't helpful at this point
• zackattack 16y ago
  flagged
• nato1138 16y ago
  Rand-ists at every vantage point
• dstein 16y ago
  Maybe it's time for the country's smartest engineers and scientists to bind together and form a Technocracy party.
  • jswinghammer 16y ago
    Maybe they they can create a "scientific" socialism. That would fix everything.
    • dstein 16y ago
      You mean like on Star Trek, where they abolished hunger, poverty, disease, and began exploring the galaxy?
      • cynicalkane 16y ago
        It's a reference to "empirical" Marxism and the deluded theoreticians who thought it would work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_socialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_socialism Executive summary: It didn't work.
  • mathgladiator 16y ago
    Now, that would be interesting. I would actually vote for that kind of candidate. If Facebook and Google got behind it, and they used their marketing might, then it might just work.
  • adamtj 16y ago
    Smart engineers and scientists have a tendency to think they can fix things. This is exactly what he was talking about.
    • dstein 16y ago
      No he said politicians have a tendency to think they can fix things. So he advocates voting for politicians who do the least.
  • 16y ago
• erikpukinskis 16y ago
  An educated white man thinks government services are unimportant. Stop the presses.
  • lliiffee 16y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
    • pavel_lishin 16y ago
      Not to mention, I don't think he even read the article. He didn't say they were unimportant, he said they were inefficient and over-reaching.
• SandB0x 16y ago
  > "If everyone was required to pay taxes like they pay their utilities, attitudes would probably change." I wonder how people would react to a $500/year Antiterrorism bill. [Ballpark for 08-10? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War#Appropriations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War#...)
  • dpatru 16y ago
    Most of the income taxes in America are paid by a small minority. Most people probably wouldn't have a problem with a $500/year Antiterrorism bill, as long as someone else has to pay it.
    • bendotc 16y ago
      True, though most of the wealth in America is held by a small minority too, which kind of creates the weird taxing/spending incentives. (http://www.good.is/post/americans-are-horribly-misinformed-about-who-has-money/ http://www.good.is/post/americans-are-horribly-misinformed-a...)
      • Cushman 16y ago
        That chart needs to be distributed way more widely. Spoiler alert: the difference between what Republicans and Democrats think the median wealth should be is less than a quarter of the difference between the lower of those numbers and what it actually is. We're arguing over a fiction.
        • abrown28 16y ago
          I wonder how they calculate wealth and if they've ever tried to track which direction most people move on the wealth scale.
  • jpwagner 16y ago
    why is it divided equally?
• lukifer 16y ago
  I can refute pure libertarianism in one word: externalities. The fact that our particular government is systemically broken does not mean the concept of government is inherently flawed.
  • jpwagner 16y ago
    Is that really how you read it?
  • iwr 16y ago
    Would you like to provide some examples?
• jshen 16y ago
  I found the argument underwhelming. I'll give just one example in response, private prisons. The profit motive, when applied to certain activities, gives the opposite of a good result. There are two recent and famous examples of this in the private prison industry. One was a judge who got kick backs for sending kids to a private prison. The other is the arizona immigration bill which was written by the private prison lobby. I'd much rather path taxes for a public prison system that doesn't have a large financial interest in locking up as many people as possible.
  • pavel_lishin 16y ago
    I don't think he was arguing for a government that's profit-driven.
    • jshen 16y ago
      i didn't mean to imply that if I did. He was arguing for the private sector to do most things the government does. I don't want a private prison industrial complex. I think it's outcomes are worse than mere inefficiency.
• njharman 16y ago
  This and every other small gov / gov inefficiency screed I've read glosses over the point that most of all those billions the government "wasted" is paid to private (as in non-government) companies. Big portion of the rest is salaries. [The gov definitely employs too many people, but what ya gonna do? With our capitalist economy demanding abundance of consumers to support corporate bloat even if there's not enough work for them] The problem isn't government. The problem is corporatism & greed scamming/lobbying/abusing/leeching off of government. Inefficiency is a matter of scale. The private sector is not magically immune. Have you ever seen the money that big enterprise wastes? One or two guys in their garage can launch an iPhone app on a shoestring. It takes large corporation tens of thousands of dollars, months, and a dozen people. [spoken from direct experience].
  • drcode 16y ago
    > Inefficiency is a matter of scale. The private sector is not magically immune. The companies in the private sector goes bankrupt if they don't keep inefficiency in check. The reasons larger companies exist is because economies of scale balance out the inefficiencies in some cases. > The problem is corporatism & greed scamming/lobbying/abusing/leeching off of government. You can't leach off the government if it doesn't have money to spend.
    • jshen 16y ago
      I don't know how true this is. Many of the biggest companies are ... I don't know how to describe it so I'll call it quasi private. Telecommunications companies: use public air waves, depend on cable run all over the country that a startup can't duplicate, etc Large media companies: public air waves again. Natural resource exploiters: oil companies, logging companies, etc depend on extracting resources from a lot of public lands. Anything related to defense. And the final point, no matter how hard we wish there were a level playing field in the markets, big companies will always lobby for laws that favor them over smaller companies. Even if we have a minimal government we will still have things like contract law, patents, trademarks, etc. Large corporations will influence these laws.
• bwooceli 16y ago
  I can't take this man seriously. He's the frog in the boiling pot of water who is just now saying "Hey, wait a minute! This water's boiling!" Sorry, sir, but if you've been paying "millions" into a system and have to this point not been engaged in what the fruits of your labors are spent on then I have real trouble synthesizing your argument.
  • bwooceli 16y ago
    Yipes, two downvotes for suggesting a consistent engagement in your government might be a requisite step in establishing credibility for a position. sigh.
    • lee 16y ago
      Perhaps it's because you're making an ad hominem argument... which is rarely interesting or valid. Debating the points and issues of the article would probably not get downvotes.
• davidw 16y ago
  Ugh. Please, please, please could we leave the politics to another site?
  • lee 16y ago
    Why? This is hacker news... where anything intelligent and interesting is kosher. I found Carmack's argument interesting and solid.
    • steveklabnik 16y ago
      While I don't disagree with you, and I don't mind this being here, the parent isn't totally out of line. The guidelines do say: > Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon It does say most... this would seem to be an exception.
  • drcode 16y ago
    If John's C's first public expression of political opinion isn't Hacker News, I don't know what is.
    • davidw 16y ago
      If we start down that path, then someone will take it on themselves to start posting stuff from here: http://stallman.org/ http://stallman.org/ And then someone else will post reason.org articles, and then Krugman columns and on and on and on. Just have a bit of self-restraint and keep the politics elsewhere. I mean, are any of the comments above really something that has not been hashed out 1000 times on the internet? Just for fun, we do some usenet digging and find results for "libertarian taxes force" from between 25 and 20 years ago: http://groups.google.com/groups/search?as_q=libertarian+taxes+force&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&scoring=&lr=&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1985&as_maxd=1&as_maxm=1&as_maxy=1990&as_ugroup=&as_usubject=&as_uauthors=&safe=off http://groups.google.com/groups/search?as_q=libertarian+taxe... There are people on this site who had not even been conceived when these same arguments were already going back and forth.
    • 16y ago
• igravious 16y ago
  I guess the problem is this: from an engineer's point of view if one were to design an efficient (but as John says, not ruthlessly efficient) system that tends to the needs of society from scratch and design into that system a means for funding it would we end up with a system that looks like todays modern democracies, ignoring which side of the Atlantic we're talking about for the moment. I think this simple maxim says a lot; all things being equal a smaller government is better than a larger one. This is a perplexing thing for me because as far as I can tell the parties that talk like this are on the right of the spectrum and I've viewed myself as left-leaning but I'm beginning to think that each new label is just another excuse to see somebody as an Other and causes conflict. John wonders who to vote for. Even with my limited acquaintance with US politics it seems like Ron Paul is thumping the tubs that John is, maybe he should look towards the radical libertarian corner? I dunno, I don't either of the guys personally. :) The vast entirety of geopolitical arc of history has given us the systems we live under today. John talks about inertia, it's like trying to even find the right lever in the dark in a storm to try and turn the biggest supertanker a fraction of a radian. I know that a lot people on HackerNews think that governments take our money from us buy force if necessary but I ask you, how on earth do you get people to put aside their innate greed and and honestly and proportionately bear their burden? You could say that royalty and aristocracy created the mess that we're grappling with now but none of the issues John raises have any simple fixes. If I were to go out on a limb and be a hippy idealist for a moment: I'd say strangling the war on drugs or at least radically altering it and demilitarizing the planet would be the first obvious branches of government to target for judicious pruning. Not exactly HackerNews fodder but one feels a certain tension in the air these days that needs to be vented.
  • logicalmind 16y ago
    Yes, but here is the rub. Once upon a time only the aristocrats could afford to be educated. Then it was deemed by democratic government that education should be afforded to all. The people voted for that, knowing full well that it would cost everyone some of their hard-earned money (taxes). Generations have gone by and many people take the things that are "common goods" for granted. Unless John Carmack's family is from an aristocratic lineage and his family is wealthy enough to have given him privately funded everything, then he is also "standing on the shoulders of giants" who have paved his way. For him to now become essentially an aristocrat and now say that each people should fend for themselves is difficult to comprehend. At least Newton was humble enough to realize how he got to where he got.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• CoryOndrejka 16y ago
  By the way, here is the Wikipedia article for the man in jail for failure to pay taxes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Anderson_%28tax_evader%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Anderson_%28tax_evader%2... [Edited: had said "friend" which was incorrect] tl;dr He admitted to reporting only $67,939 in a year he made $126 million. He further admitted to hiding a total of $365 million. [Edited: hadn't included the $126 million detail for the year he under-reported]
  • jpwagner 16y ago
    so now you're joining in the slander? -he didn't use the word "friend" -you didn't read the article -According to Wikipedia, he reported just over $67,000 for just one year (not for his 370MM lifetime.) Sorry to be nit-picky, maybe he is a bad guy, but what's the point of presenting facts when you're going to attempt to exaggerate and not put in due diligence?
    • CoryOndrejka 16y ago
      Original comment corrected.
• jbooth 16y ago
  New rule: If you're making a point that involves use of the word "Government" as a proper noun, your point is probably dumb. Just to break it out a tiny bit -- within the federal government, you have SS, Medicare, domestic discretionary spending and military spending. These 4 are radically different from each other, they get their revenue from different sources and have entirely different raisons d'etre. So, I repeat, if you're making a point about "Government", and you can't be bothered to delve into the least bit of detail besides some handwaving about "regulation" and "taxation", your point is stupid. I only read the first paragraph. Does he make a coherent policy recommendation anywhere? I can get "government this, government that" at my local tea party meeting.
• swombat 16y ago
  Having just dealt with the London Congestion Charge rapists^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsystem, I can definitely relate. In terms of abject inefficiency combined with application of plain and simple force, consider the London Congestion Charge system. They built a system whereby you are charged a fixed fee (supposed to be £8) if you drive into the congestion charge zone at all during the hours of 7am and 6pm. It's £8 if you pay it on the same day. It's £10 if you pay it on the next day. After that period, you are now officially a war criminal of the road, and penalised with a whopping £120 fine (reduce to £60 if you pay promptly). Later, it turns into £180, and then more... No problem, you say, I'll just make sure I pay all my charges on the day. Ah, ok, but how do you know you've got to pay a congestion charge today? Turns out there's no way of checking. The Congestion Charge systems won't tell you whether you should pay or not. The only time when they'll tell you you need to pay is when they send you a penalty notice. I asked one of their agents about this, he suggested it was best to pay if you were in any doubt, "because the penalty is so much more expensive". This is somewhat akin to going to the supermarket, filling up your trolley, going to the checkout, and being asked to guess how much you should pay. "If you guess too little, we'll penalise you by charging you 1200% of the price of what you bought, so make sure you don't guess too low." I find such a system morally reprehensible. It is a vile abuse of power and the people who voted in, designed and built such a system are soulless scumbags. But because it is a government system, rather than a business, there is nothing I can do to take my business elsewhere (other than move to another country of course, but that will have its own sets of tradeoffs). The greek have a saying that "if you're not stealing from the government, you're stealing from your family". Like John Carmack, I don't go that far. But I don't support any expansion of government powers or responsibilities whatsoever. The less the government does, the better (within reason of course). Yet, despite this, I still think it's a good idea for the government to intervene when it comes to fundamental things like road maintenance, the fire service, healthcare, or a criminal justice system. The government should do no more than handle the fundamentals, but a government which fails to handle the fundamentals is even more of a disaster than one which handles too much.
  • dionidium 16y ago
    penalised with a whopping £120 fine (reduce to £60 if you pay promptly) A more straightforward way to say this is that there's a £60 fine, which increases to £120 if you don't pay promptly.
• raheemm 16y ago
  From a gov services standpoint, the ROI in general has been low. Focusing just on the investments; defense, social security and medicare are the biggest resource hogs and hence where the spotlight should focus. Unfortunately, these three areas are political hot potatoes with massive entrenched interests. Republicans are always fighting defense cuts and dems are always fighting soc sec cuts. So I dont buy into the "small gov" argument unless someone starts addressing the big resource hogs.
• ilijavanil 16y ago
  http://budget-democracy.org/ http://budget-democracy.org/ Tax should be managed by those who vote.
  • drcode 16y ago
    sounds like California's referendum hell to me.
  • jpwagner 16y ago
    this seems like a terrific idea, until you think of the practical implications...
• dugmartin 16y ago
  I think the main driver in the recent massive expansion in the US government is that we've abandoned raising taxes and switched to just borrowing from a seemingly endless supply of money. Without that check in place there is no limit on the growth of the government, and as John says there is always _something_ that _someone_ truly believes needs more money (like space flight?). I've always thought it would be interesting to put the following process in place: the congresspeople who vote for an appropriations bill need to meet and then physically count out money using $10,000 bills, one bill at a time. Then, maybe an extra 700 million dollars attached to a bill would have some real meaning. (You couldn't use real money of course, you can't trust a politician with that many unmarked bills).
  • chadgeidel 16y ago
    Count money? I'd be happy if they just read the bill and showed up for the vote!
• skybrian 16y ago
  It's pretty clear he has a few misconceptions about economics. First of all, maximum efficiency happens when people are out of work. So, however inefficient a government job might be, so long as something gets accomplished, it's less inefficient than one alternative. In times of low unemployment, we might say that government inefficiency is the problem since it crowds out private investment, but currently there is a worse problem. Unless you're competing with the government to hire people (and how many companies do that?), you don't lose anything when the government puts people to work. Yeah, but they're spending tax dollars, right? Well, the only reason the government has to collect taxes is to prevent inflation. It's not because they need the money (the Fed can always create more money). It's to offset the inflation caused by government spending. (This is quite similar to a MMORPG where you need to control the sources and sinks.) We can talk about better ways to drain the system that would provide for better incentives and more interesting economic activity, but there have to be sinks somewhere, or money loses its value.
  • barmstrong 16y ago
    "So, however inefficient a government job might be, so long as something gets accomplished, it's less inefficient than one alternative." Not true at all. If a government employee is paid $100k and only delivers $50k worth of value, it would have been better if he remained unemployed. The citizens would have keep their $100k and presumably invested it in something with a higher return.
    • skybrian 16y ago
      A few things wrong with that: - Since inflation is so low, the government doesn't actually have to raise taxes. (This is the part people don't seem to get - taxes are to prevent inflation, so when there's no inflation, there's no reason for a tax increase.) - Currently, money is not the limiting factor for investment. Savings are up, investment is down, and money can be borrowed at very low interest rates. If investors wanted to invest more, they could, but they aren't. Your example is the same (economically) as paying one person $50k and giving away $50k to someone else. Capacity is standing idle due to lack of demand. It's the sort of thing that makes economists joke about burying cash in mines for people to dig up (Keynes) or dropping money from helicopters (Bernanke). Of course, it all changes if the economy picks up again.
• Ixiaus 16y ago
  Great article - while I agree on many fronts with Anarchism and the hackers that generally make up the Anarchist minority, it is refreshing to hear a point of view from a renowned hacker that isn't so idealistic. [FTFY]
  • drcode 16y ago
    Whoah! Too many negations in that last sentence for my meager brain.
• ChristianMarks 16y ago
  This is neither original nor insightful. The political economic function of government is to ensure that markets function under controlled conditions. An elaborate government apparatus exists to manage vast social programs for business. The US Patent Office is one small example, but there are many others that would be apparent, were it not for pervasive anti-government rhetoric. Another example is limited liability. Without the enforcement of limited liability, elementary transactions we take for granted--mutual funds, for example--would be inconceivable. Misunderstanding about the relation between business and government is encouraged and systematically exploited. For example, Wall Street likes to create the misleading impression that it wants government out of its business. According to regulators in Washington, Wall Street wants government to give it business. And Wall Street is getting it, off the backs of the working and middle classes. While I agree that the system is dysfunctional, I disagree about the political economic function of government. Anti-government rhetoric is the diametric opposite of the truth, which is that the political economic function of the government is to ensure that markets function under controlled conditions. Instead, you hear that the government is not (or should not be) the insurer of last resort and that negative externalities and risk pools do not exist. Not a single one of the anti-government rhetoricians have provided a useful measure of efficiency, incidentally. They conveniently tend to forget that big corporations are bureaucracies as well.
• paulsmith 16y ago
  I have a number of problems with this essay, but I want to focus on this idea that people work and earn money, and that money is theirs, and them the government tax man comes around and takes their money. This has to be one of the biggest fallacies of the modern era. I hear it echoed in various forms by people of all different stripes. The notion that there is an independent, absolute concept of wealth or money or cash apart from the laws and government we put in place is so injurious to a healthy understanding of self-governance that I often can't take people seriously after I see them start to go down that road of argument. Implicit in that dollar you have in your pocket, in your paycheck, is a whole set of social and political conditions that allowed you to work, safely, without discrimination or abuse, or threat to your health, to get that dollar in the first place. This idea of "my money" is willfully ignorant of the tax payer-funded or -secured bounty that allows these same people to have such a high standard of living and a platform upon which to spout their anti-government, every-man-for-themselves arguments. The sheer scale of the background conditions that these people take for granted -- roads, sewers, police & emergency responders, airwaves, parks, clean water, the military, etc., etc., etc., -- is so enormous, encompassing, and enabling that, for people like Carmack decry the very system that made them so wealthy, the disingenuousness and hypocrisy is staggering. It's time -- lord, long past time -- for smart hacker types to leave behind the immature, naïve libertarianism that pervades their industry and engage with a real, honest politics that, at least implicitly, acknowledges and owns-up to the great wealth and resources already afforded them. /You didn't get here on your own, and you never would have otherwise./
  • Kisil 16y ago
    (Waring: US-centric answer) I agree that capitalism relies on government-supported stability and infrastructure, but I don't think Carmack was arguing the opposite point: >>This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services ... The argument concerns dollars spent at the margin. Should the amount of government we have increase, or should it decrease? At the margin, I agree with Carmack that there are many places where we would be better served with less interference, and that we should be cautious about adding new government programs. Clearly there is some fuzzy line between "the justice system" and "corn subsidies". I wouldn't argue that the government has all the program it needs, but neither would I argue that the government needs all the programs it has. At the risk of flame baiting: I wish I could vote for fiscal conservatism without also voting for hateful and intrusive social conservatism. I also have low confidence in either major party reducing the government in the areas of real excess (see farming), as opposed to e.g. creating new pork-flavored subsidies in the guise of tax relief. Suggestions for concrete ways to battle Parkinson's Law are welcome.
• kiba 16y ago
  Pretty much all empires that I ever read about fall prey to wars, wars debt, or inflation. There's something about war debt that cause revolution and collapse of empires.
• logicalmind 16y ago
  Considering he is posting this under his aerospace company, does anyone else wonder where aerospace would be today without government funding? Sure, you could argue that it has been inefficient in terms of pure dollars. But there is more to advancement than simply the money spent.
  • edelweiss 16y ago
    Yes, just look at Boeing vs Airbus and the WTO. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2010-07-01-boeingruling01_VA_N.htm http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2010-...
• monological 16y ago
  > "that at least vector in that direction." He would say that...
• rhygar 16y ago
  Carmack must be angry about the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Too bad he forgot: 1. The Internet was created by DARPA (government) 2. Armadillo Aerospace would not be possible without NASA (government) 3. OpenGL would not have been happened without research grants from the government 4. Google is a product of "big government". It began at Stanford as a research project funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies. A huge amount of technical innovation comes out of government funded research grants/projects. Those innovations are then turned into commercial products by private industry. As taxpayers, maybe we should be demanding more taxes from the corporations that benefit from publicly funded research? I lost a lost of respect for him today - he comes off as a greedy jerk in this essay.
  • amh 16y ago
    It's far from clear that the things you list couldn't have been developed without government intervention. Unfortunately, without an alternate fork of reality to try the experiment, we'll never know. But the idea that because something was developed using government funds, it could never have been developed without them, is a logical fallacy.
    • splitrocket 16y ago
      Many of the things mentioned above were in fact produced without government intervention by private enterprise before the widespread adoption of the government funded projects. They were not, however widely adopted, nor resulted in the technologies you are using on your computer sitting in front of you. There is a reason why people joke about selling bridges yet simultaneously rely on bridges for their commutes in and out of work: some things, if you try to make them profitable from the get-go will never achieve the scale necessary for them to provide utility. One of the many functions of Government is to provide a mechanism for the economy to move beyond a suboptimal economic maxima. Spending money on infrastructure, like bridges, does exactly this. No private firms will build a bridge because they can't make money off of it, but all private firms benefit from the increased availability and mobility of labor. The pre-bridge state of affairs is a suboptimal maxima. (Protip: WWII military spending enabled the US to escape the suboptimal maxima of the Great Depression. That is, government spending, of which, military spending is among the least effective at creating jobs and improving the economy.)
• Tycho 16y ago
  Interesting phrase he used, 'positive inertia.'I'd like more information on that (what causes/supports it etc). Throughout history, there have always been those that argue that the world is going to hell, yet here we are, better off than any previous generation. Not only are things pretty damn good, but there is a lot of positive inertia that makes it likely that things will continue to improve for quite some time. We aren’t balanced at a precipice, where the result of any given election can pitch us into darkness.
  • CamperBob 16y ago
    I'd think the proper term would have simply been "momentum," but I'm no rocket surgeon.
• projectileboy 16y ago
  I agree with everything he said, as long as he also applies the notion to defense spending, providing financial security for the elderly (either as Social Security or as pensions), and subsidizing liquidity in the financial markets (via debt). If these are ignored (as they almost always are by self-anointed 'fiscal conservatives'), then it's a bogus argument. If they're not ignored, then I'm on board for the discussion.
• mike_esspe 16y ago
  If you agree with John Carmack (at least somewhat), then you should read "For a new liberty" by Murray Rothbard: http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp Where he explains how society can live without taxes extracted by the threat of force.
• vitolds 16y ago
  > "Due to Armadillo Aerospace, in the last decade I have observed and interacted with a lot of different agencies, civil servants, and congressmen, and I have collected enough data points to form some opinions." I think this is very important part of his argument. A person who has just graduated from high school has very little first hand knowledge about how things work and can only parrot stuff learned mostly from media sometimes from books. You can dismiss Carmack's arguments only if you think that Carmack: a) has a political agenda and is lying about his experience with government b) has a low IQ and is incapable of seeing how things "really work" c) has significantly less experience than you and your experience with government has been very much different. If you just graduated high school a year ago and everything you needed to know about politics you learned from the Daily Show, at least give Carmack the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's on to something.
• stretchwithme 16y ago
  Government would be far more efficient if you had a choice about whether you participated in its schemes. Mutual self-defense is the purpose of government and is very cheap compared to the total cost of the US government. I doubt anyone would opt out of that arrangement, especially if they then had to pay an additional tax whenever they wish to trade with the US. And all of the rest, the insurance schemes, forced charity, regulation can surely been done and are done better by voluntary arrangement. Even local government would be better if you could leave any municipality that failed to deliver. So the problem is lack of choice, lack of competition. In other words, they can compel you, so they don't have to pay attention to all of the concerns that entities always must pay attention to when you have a choice. If state and city governments knew that territory and the taxes it pays could "walk away", they would be much more responsive. Or they would start shrinking, as people left for better arrangements. In more primitive tribal arrangements, that's exactly what people did when someone became a tyrant. We have lost that and we need to get it back.
• galactus 16y ago
  Noam chomsky, on taxes: "In a democracy, April 15th, when you pay your taxes, would be a day of celebration. Here we've gotten together as a community, we've decided on certain policies and now we're moving to implement them by our own participation. That's not the way it's viewed in the United States. That's a day of mourning. There's this alien entity, sort of like a-as if it's from Mars somewhere, which is stealing our hard-earned money from us. We have to give it up, because we have no choice. Well, that reflects the undermining of even a conception of democracy."
  • reedlaw 16y ago
    Or that it's obvious that we don't live in a democracy, or if we do, don't really wish to live in one.
• Symmetry 16y ago
  I think this is probably a good time to plug the book "The Myth of the Rational Voter" on why our government tends to end up the way it does. I'd seen the book plugged by people I trusted but still sort of expected to it be an overview of rational ignorance plus some amusing anecdotes. Instead, it convinced me that rational ignorance can't explain bad outcomes in the first 5 pages, and went on to totally overturn my ideas about democratic government - though looking back I'd already seen many of the general principles the book outlined in certain special cases.
• natrius 16y ago
  I agree with this almost completely (though I think having a health care mandate so we can do away with the concept of pre-existing conditions is a good thing). However, I value the rights of my fellow citizens far more that I value an efficient society, and the politicians who claim to want a more efficient society also want to strip rights away from segments of society they disapprove of. No thanks.
• splitrocket 16y ago
  Whenever I encounter someone arguing about federal government spending, I do a quick search for the word "military" and "defense", as it is the second largest line item in the budget at $663 Billion, below social security, and is the largest line item in the discretionary budget, larger than anything else by over $500 Billion. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budg... I didn't find it in Carmack's article. It's a useful heuristic as it distinguishes people who know what the US spends its money on vs. those that do not. All spending and consumption has something called a multiplier effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics) and specifically, with regard to government spending, there is the fiscal multiplier effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier essentially, all government spending produces some amount of multiplicative increase in gdp. Of all government spending, guess what type has the lowest multiplier effect? Defense Defense spending produces the least net gain to national wealth, standards of living, and productivity. Additionally, defense spending disproportionately goes to private contractors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S... Almost every year, the defense budget represents the single largest wealth transfer from the public to private hands in the history of the world. So, the question I put to Carmack, and thus those that tend to agree with him is this: Exactly how inefficient is the federal government? If 60% of all discretionary spending is used in the least possible productive way, what portion of that overall federal inefficiency is directly related to discretionary defense spending? And finally, what political parties are more historically responsible for discretionary defense spending, thus with radically increasing the overall efficiency of our government? (See the gulf war, and the inception of the Iraq war and the Afghan war.) Arguing for a smaller government is like arguing that you should decrease your startup's opex. The answer is almost always yes, but randomly cutting services without actually looking at what the big expenditures are, without looking at the productivity upsides of certain expenditures, etc. is foolhardy at best. Moreover, cutting the things that directly enable the productivity of your employees, rather than those things that do not directly enable the productivity of your employees is nothing short of insane. It's like spending the money you would have spent on health insurance for your employees on a ridiculously expensive security system for your office. People get sick all the time, but you're about as likely to experience terrorism as you are to win the lottery. Would that make sense in your startup? Does it make sense for America?
• sh1mmer 16y ago
  I probably have a different perspective on this than a lot of the Americans having lived my whole life in the UK until a couple of years ago when I moved out to San Francisco. I think my issue with this essay, and a lot of the politics I hear in America, is that two separate issues are conflated. Those issues are whether government should regulate an industry/practice/area of life (regulation) vs. if government should provide services in that industry/practice/area of life (services). There are many places where the government in the US provides both these roles, for example the financial space. For example, the Fed provides a government run service in the finance space which to provides services which are both used by private enterprise but also competes with them. In the same space the government also provide regulations and guidelines which (supposedly) protect the public interest to temper the raw self-interest of the market. When people talk about government inefficiency they generally mean that government is doing a poor job of running their services. However there also many examples of extremely popular government services, such as Medicare. The question in my mind is less about discouraging government from being in a space, but what the balance of government regulation vs. services is. A good example of this is health care. As the US moves towards providing universal healthcare there are a couple of different models can be looked at from various countries. From the UK we have a huge government run service, the NHS, which provides our healthcare. In Germany they have a strong regulatory solution in which the government mandates the criteria in which private healthy insurance companies must operate, as well as mandating insurance. I don't think many people would argue against the need for some centralised government (either at the state or federal level) that protects the commons, and the rights of man. What I would like to see more of is arguments about how we implements those rights. A good example of a debate we should have is this part of the healthcare one. The highly distributed healthcare in the US (for those with insurance) means that electronic mostly medical records don't exist or aren't shared amongst providers. In a centralised government run bureaucracy (or a private bureaucracy like Kaiser) electronic records are much more possible. Kaiser in-fact, demonstrated massive efficiency gains through their electronic records system. It doesn't mean that electronic medical records couldn't be provided through a regulatory mandate, but in order to have that discussion we have to get past the "big government" vs. "little government" and decide what we want our government to do for us and if it should do that by services or by regulation.
• SkyMarshal 16y ago
  "My vote is going to the candidates that at least vector in that direction." This implies he is going to vote Republican. The problem is that not even the Republicans live up to that standard anymore, they just pay lip service to it until they get elected, then deficit spend the nation into oblivion anyway. This should have been made completely clear during the Bush administration. From $5T in debt to $10T between 2000-2006, then to $12T by the time Bush left office, it's clear the GOP is just as unable to control their tendancy to spend as they accuse the Democrats of. The main difference is that the Democrats at least tend to raise taxes to fund that spending, so the citizenry is more likely to feel the cost immediately (instead of punting it down the road with deficit spending and additional interest payments). Ironically that's one thing Carmack is arguing for - the benefit of taxing people in such a way that they feel it, rather than having it hidden in the income tax system. When even staunch conservatives like Chris Buckley, son of the founder of modern conservatism William F. Buckly, abandon the GOP over this hypocrisy, people like Carmack should take notice and realize that voting for the GOP is in no way a vote in support lower taxes, more efficient government, or any of the other related outcomes they want: "Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case. So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me." - Chris Buckley, 2008 I do not think the modern GOP is who Carmack thinks it is.
• vishaldpatel 16y ago
  I wonder how much of a role the fact that Americans mistrust their government (and one part of the government mistrusts the other) plays in increasing the size of government - at the end of the day, every last piece of legislation - good or bad, needs checks and balances, right? Could it be that the cost (in both time and money) of checks and balances eventually outweighs the benefits of having them? Perhaps that should be a way to measure if a government has grown too large.
• parasubvert 16y ago
  Every organization, private or public, has enormous waste. It seems that at a US-level scale that leads to a crippled government. Canada and Scandinavian governments seem to more or less work & get things done, even in the face of waste. That said, the main issue is who does the work that is inherently not measurable by profit. Peter Drucker did a lot of writing about this - when you don't have profit to measure your performance, you have the mission. Non-profit hospitals are measured by patients cured, the DHS is measured by threads eliminated, etc. Government isn't a good doer, they are a policy setter. They need to spin out functions to non-profits and measure their performance based on mission-based factors.
• arohner 16y ago
  Extremely informative chart on US federal spending: http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ Though the chart only contains * discretionary* spending, so it doesn't include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and a few other things.
• DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I liked the fact that Carmack tried to go meta with the discussion. I'd much rather talk general principles instead of personalities and policies (which change year to year) I'll try to go even more meta: any form of government, over time, will break. This is because people actively seek to control government for personal reasons (good or bad). If this is done blatantly, people would rebel. So our politicians have learned that creating more complex systems allows them the control they need, without the obvious example of people pulling the strings. As the system becomes more and more complex -- I doubt anybody alive on the planet knows exactly how to file income taxes with all the edge cases -- it actually makes governments more tyrannical. If there a billion rules, it's much easier to have your way than if there were just one or two rules. The sad part of this is that there is no "evil" required: people can make great decisions that are the best available choice -- and still the system is doomed to burdensome complexity and tyranny over time. In the U.S., the founders tried to fix this by separating powers among the local, state, and federal governments. They created three branches of government for each of those levels. What's happened is that the federal government is becoming the de facto universal government: responsible for bailing states out, determining certain kinds of licensing standards -- even controlling what people can do with their land. As the number of people responsible for government decreases -- we probably have about a thousand people of all parties who control the national government and the national government is taking control of everything -- and the laws become more and more complex, the system becomes unable to accomplish anything. As far as I know, these are architectural issues, and not related to any one party or election.
• chubs 16y ago
  Almost reads like a tea party position statement. I love it. John carmack is now my hero.
• cjbprime 16y ago
  I'm surprised Carmack doesn't address the obvious response to his position, which is "You're a millionaire, of course you think people should pay less taxes". Libertarianism contains the wealthiest demographic -- it is an entirely unsurprising position for Carmack to be taking. I expect that simple self-interest tends to determine most of our political positions; which suggests that if we want to rationally determine what our society's obligation to poor people is, asking rich people for their opinion is the last thing we should do.
• korch 16y ago
  Let me get this straight. A wealthy, white, educated, privileged male who is incredibly talented and who won both the birth and tech lottery back in the 90's is now whining about the government taking too much in taxes? Cry me a fucking river. There are tens of millions of poor Americans & immigrants working as a permanent class of indentured laborers, while a smaller pool of the middle class are slowly being bled to death, both physically and economically(who's kids are more likely to die in foreign wars, the rich or poor?), by our American culture's inhumane, cruel war mongering fetish. Yet the rich fucks who have to pay the majority of the taxes, and who already get to keep the majority of the profits for their own lavish life styles feel entitled enough to complain that their slice of the pie isn't big enough? Seeing this appalling attitude of entitlement everywhere makes me so angry, and I wish I could just open these ignorant people's eyes, hearts & minds. There's a good reason I have little interest in the rambling, detached kooky political and economic opinions of luminaries from the tech world. Stick to hacking code and making entertainment software, and stay out of running the real world.
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