8 ms·

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

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.
- aamar 16y ago
  I'm very sympathetic to your overall stance on this and greatly appreciate that you named a specific type of spending to cut: corn subsidies. That said, I'd be grateful for backup/citations that corn subsidies are bad for the U.S. in economic terms. Two common complaints about corn subsidies -- that the U.S. is cheating on NAFTA, or that overconsumption of corn products lead to health problems -- seem legitimate, but they don't seem to have inflicted any economic damage to the U.S. Further, although there's both redistribution and waste associated with the tax revenues that pay for the subsidies, corn is an infrastructural element of U.S. food production, and presumably corn's cheapness and relative consistency of supply lead to many multiples of downstream ROI. I do, by the way, think economic harm is the right standard here, as it seems to be the main consideration in Carmack's essay. (Carmack and many commenters here do make reference to more abstract ideas of fairness and legitimacy, but that analysis seems irretrievably subjective and unproductive.)
kiba 16y ago
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./ This argument is highly misleading. Libertarians complain about the quality of the public services all the time. They complained about congestion on roads, the high expenses of hospitals due to emergencies law, and police that spend way too much time chasing drug dealers rather than providing actual security. They are taking money by force. You pay your taxes, or you go to jail. You don't have any option of not driving on roads, not getting emergencies care services, and so on. It is by laws that emergency services will be provided for you, regardless of your ability to pay. It is by government mandates that create all these roads that we drive on. Your security is not provided by a local milita but by a professional army. That is the cost of giving up your freedom. It's freedom that I wouldn't want to give up. Because a large enough government to give everything you want is large enough to take it away. The French revolution history lecture by my history professor is enough to change my very reason of being a libertarian from idealism to never again resolve.
- rwmj 16y ago
  "Money" only exists because of the organization of government. If we didn't have any, I could just come on to your land, shoot you, and take all your land and possessions.
  - fondue 16y ago
    At the risk of being shot by the land owner or whomever else has a stake in you not doing that.
    - evgen 16y ago
      As all of the "they are taking my hard-earned money and giving to those unproductive masses" like to point out, there are far more of them then there are of you. Eventually you would run out of bullets and end up decorating your precious property as a wall-hanging or drinking mug.
jpwagner 16y ago
I, for one, appreciate that you've logically outlined some counterargument. There are certainly immature, naive libertarians out there (probably down-voting your comment right now,) but the places where you have been immature and naive here are in thinking that anti-gov't/every-man-for-himself is the cornerstone of the opposing argument. When I read Carmack's post I think of anti-inefficient-gov't not anti-gov't. You may attempt to say those are the same, but I disagree. The "imagine a privatized [gov't agency]" argument is a thought-experiment to show the idealism behind the anti-efficient-gov't movement. It should not be taken literally. By the way, work earned that dollar; it did even when there was unsafe work, discrimination, and abuse.
- secretasiandan 16y ago
  I think the color of Carmack's statements are much more anti-gov't than anti-ineffcient-gov't. The way I read it, he's saying lets make government more efficient by cutting out services, not by making all services operate more efficiently. To me, that is only anti-inefficient-gov't by way of anti-gov't. He effectively states that gov't can't be efficient : "Sure, there is room for improvement everywhere, but there are important fundamental limits." "So, the federal government is essentially doomed to inefficiency, no matter who is in charge or what policies they want it to implement." "I would ask that it stop doing the majority of the things that it is currently doing" Note that he is also glad that the government is doomed to inefficiency : "Even if you could snap your fingers and get it, do you really want a razor sharp federal apparatus ready to efficiently carry out the mandates of whoever is the supreme central planner at the moment? The US government was explicitly designed to make that difficult, and I think that was wise."
  - gills 16y ago
    It read to me as "government performs most tasks inefficiently, and that's ok; but let's have it perform fewer tasks inefficiently so we can perform them more efficiently ourselves and have a little less fiscal drag on our lives.
  - smokeyj 16y ago
    An efficient government would be dangerous, and an inefficient government is draining. If relying on government is a compromise between those two, then why not go with the better option (free markets)? Markets are fast and efficient, a concept foreign to governments everywhere.
deadsy 16y ago
It's true that we each find ourselves in a context of public and private institutions and that (in addition to our own efforts) we owe our wealth to the existence of those institutions. It does not logically follow that our obligation to support government projects with taxes is unlimited. For example- Should people pay taxes to support the Judiciary? Should people pay taxes to subsidize corn farmers? We must be critical of public projects invented by government and parsimonious with our tax dollars. If we aren't then we will fall victim to every political group that says "we have a problem - and there ought to be a law to fix it."
yummyfajitas 16y ago
And your post is willfully ignorant of the fact that most of your taxes don't pay for the public goods you've listed. Roads, sewers, police and clean water are a ridiculously tiny fraction of what you pay in taxes. If you exclude waste in the military (and the other small ticket items you mention), it is even smaller. Most of your taxes are simply taken and given to people less productive than yourself.
- borism 16y ago
  he didn't talk only about taxes HE paid. There were 10+ generations that paid taxes to the United States of America for the last 200+ years to become what it is now. even if I agreed with your assumption (which I don't), I would certainly not be able to agree that US taxpayers subsidized "less productive" for past 200+ years and US still became what it is now.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    even if I agreed with your assumption (which I don't) The facts are easy to check: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html Of the top 5 biggest expenditures in the US as of 2008 (the last year for which full data is available), only the #4 expenditure (the military) was a public good. The #1,2,3 and 5 items together account for 58% of government spending in the US. The basics mentioned by the original poster are actually pretty cheap. Water and sewers are about 2% of government spending. Police, fire, prison and courts were only 6%. Roads are another 5%. The military (the biggest public good expense) is only 14%.
    - jokermatt999 16y ago
      I'd argue that education is a public good. Even if you don't have kids, it seems like it would be in your interest to ensure that the people who will be running things in the future are informed and competent.
      - enki 16y ago
adolph 16y ago
Dear sir, Please send me your bank account deetz so I can spend some of our money. kthx!
ramanujan 16y ago
paulsmith, the acid test is probably mobility. Do you think Carmack would still be a millionaire with a similar quality of life in a lower tax jurisdiction like Singapore? Probably he would. An even lower tax jurisdiction like Somalia? Probably not. Seasteading (www.seasteading.org) is an interesting experiment which can help us empirically find exactly where that "minimum necessary government" point is. Judging by the migration choices of many Chinese and Indian expats, for many people that promised land is no longer today's USA.
- secretasiandan 16y ago
  Arguably, Singapore/Ireland/other small, developed, low tax nations can only exist given the presence of high tax countries like the US, UK, etc.
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree, but would you mind explaining your reasoning behind that?
gcheong 16y ago
"The notion that there is an independent, absolute concept of wealth or money or cash apart from the laws and government" I'd be willing to bet humans had the concept of wealth long before the concept of government.
cubix 16y ago
As libertarian, I couldn't disagree more. The fundamental difference between us is that you would gladly have your opinions and preferences imposed upon your neighbours with the threat of force, and I believe that all human interaction ought to be voluntary. I want discussion, reason, and persuasion to be used to solve society's ills; you want the gun. Yours is the mature position?
- caffeine 16y ago
  It's the realistic position.
  - cubix 16y ago
    So was slavery at one point.
- jberryman 16y ago
  Your comment reads like breathless Ayn Rand fan fiction.
  - dualogy 16y ago
    Yes she made the same points. What's yours?
- joeyo 16y ago
  > I want discussion, reason, and persuasion to be used to > solve society's ills; you want the gun. What do you do with criminals in your utopia? Discuss their crimes with them and persuade them to pay restitution?
  - dualogy 16y ago
    Retaliate by the same natural right to your own person that forbids you to initiate force against others.
    - macrael 16y ago
amalcon 16y ago
This is sort of the elephant in the room. The only reason that you are given compensation for your work at all is because it theoretically motivates you to do more of it. The "rewarding hard work as an ethical value proposition" thing really only crept up in the past century. While I think it is a good theory, treating it as essentially the only parameter to an ethical decision is extremely simplistic. You can argue for smaller government in ways that don't consist of counting dollars taken away from people at gunpoint. I find those sorts of argument much more compelling.
mfukar 16y ago
On systems of government like the US republic or the various democracies around the European continent, there is an absolute concept of a citizen's contribution to the infrastructure that the state.. It's called taxation. And it is not the only one. Citizens have various duties in every state; they don't have to be enumerated. For people that make their fortunes by not paying their taxes, lying to the government, etc. your argument might have some value. For people that are working in the public sector exclusively, your argument might have some value. For an absolutist government, your argument would make a lot of sense. But not for the rest. (edited: my grammar sucks. i should get some sleep :/)
drcode 16y ago
You make it sound like John Carmack is advocating for lower taxes so he can afford a new Bugatti or somesuch. The truth is he advocates for this because the current system appears irrational to him. I'm sure John Carmack would be successful, to some degree, in almost any system of government- He is unusually gifted. Saying he's a counterargument to his own political position and that he is "a product of the current government system" is both unfair and untrue. Since he is a person of such unusual competence I think his opinion should carry a lot of weight- It does for me. Your (pretty irrational) argument appears to be that because he is competent and successful his opinion should carry LESS weight.
- jozo 16y ago
  I think you should weight his argument by the quality of the argument itself. While I respect John Carmack as a computer programmer, I also know that computer programming is very different from macroeconomics. I personally don't think his reasoning is very good. He's saying that you shouldn't be forced to pay for something that's inefficient, but also that government can never be efficient enough. So the argument of an inefficient government merely becomes a justification for his ideological viewpoint that you shouldn't be forced to do something, in this case pay taxes. But as he indicated that his viewpoint was formed by experience, and not some sort of political commitment, it all seems very biased to me.
  - smokeyj 16y ago
    What is so abstract about the non-aggression axiom? I wouldn't be so quick to trust the macroeconomist over a computer scientist. I mean, does anyone really understand macroeconomics? Greenspan thought he did, ha.
reedlaw 16y ago
While your argument can be applied in a sense to federal reserve notes, it in no way applies to actual _wealth_. Imagine two people on a deserted island. One finds a gold nugget. Both occupants value gold. The one with the gold possesses wealth. This idea of wealth is about as close to an independent, absolute concept as anything I can imagine. Can anyone point out to a single culture or people group where this was not the case? Could the discoverer of gold in any way owe his discovery to the existence of "government"? The ideas of property and wealth are ingrained in us from birth. The idea that anyone, whether government or individual, can take away property by force is morally questionable at best.
- eat 16y ago
  Well, you've kinda missed the point. The point is that this isn't a deserted island. It's a carefully structured system, one purpose of which is to give individuals the foundation to be as successful and innovative as Carmack has.
  - reedlaw 16y ago
    The parents implies there is not even an absolute concept of wealth.

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.

aamar 16y ago
I'm very sympathetic to your overall stance on this and greatly appreciate that you named a specific type of spending to cut: corn subsidies. That said, I'd be grateful for backup/citations that corn subsidies are bad for the U.S. in economic terms. Two common complaints about corn subsidies -- that the U.S. is cheating on NAFTA, or that overconsumption of corn products lead to health problems -- seem legitimate, but they don't seem to have inflicted any economic damage to the U.S. Further, although there's both redistribution and waste associated with the tax revenues that pay for the subsidies, corn is an infrastructural element of U.S. food production, and presumably corn's cheapness and relative consistency of supply lead to many multiples of downstream ROI. I do, by the way, think economic harm is the right standard here, as it seems to be the main consideration in Carmack's essay. (Carmack and many commenters here do make reference to more abstract ideas of fairness and legitimacy, but that analysis seems irretrievably subjective and unproductive.)

kiba 16y ago

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./ This argument is highly misleading. Libertarians complain about the quality of the public services all the time. They complained about congestion on roads, the high expenses of hospitals due to emergencies law, and police that spend way too much time chasing drug dealers rather than providing actual security. They are taking money by force. You pay your taxes, or you go to jail. You don't have any option of not driving on roads, not getting emergencies care services, and so on. It is by laws that emergency services will be provided for you, regardless of your ability to pay. It is by government mandates that create all these roads that we drive on. Your security is not provided by a local milita but by a professional army. That is the cost of giving up your freedom. It's freedom that I wouldn't want to give up. Because a large enough government to give everything you want is large enough to take it away. The French revolution history lecture by my history professor is enough to change my very reason of being a libertarian from idealism to never again resolve.

rwmj 16y ago
"Money" only exists because of the organization of government. If we didn't have any, I could just come on to your land, shoot you, and take all your land and possessions.
- fondue 16y ago
  At the risk of being shot by the land owner or whomever else has a stake in you not doing that.
  - evgen 16y ago
    As all of the "they are taking my hard-earned money and giving to those unproductive masses" like to point out, there are far more of them then there are of you. Eventually you would run out of bullets and end up decorating your precious property as a wall-hanging or drinking mug.

jpwagner 16y ago

I, for one, appreciate that you've logically outlined some counterargument. There are certainly immature, naive libertarians out there (probably down-voting your comment right now,) but the places where you have been immature and naive here are in thinking that anti-gov't/every-man-for-himself is the cornerstone of the opposing argument. When I read Carmack's post I think of anti-inefficient-gov't not anti-gov't. You may attempt to say those are the same, but I disagree. The "imagine a privatized [gov't agency]" argument is a thought-experiment to show the idealism behind the anti-efficient-gov't movement. It should not be taken literally. By the way, work earned that dollar; it did even when there was unsafe work, discrimination, and abuse.

secretasiandan 16y ago
I think the color of Carmack's statements are much more anti-gov't than anti-ineffcient-gov't. The way I read it, he's saying lets make government more efficient by cutting out services, not by making all services operate more efficiently. To me, that is only anti-inefficient-gov't by way of anti-gov't. He effectively states that gov't can't be efficient : "Sure, there is room for improvement everywhere, but there are important fundamental limits." "So, the federal government is essentially doomed to inefficiency, no matter who is in charge or what policies they want it to implement." "I would ask that it stop doing the majority of the things that it is currently doing" Note that he is also glad that the government is doomed to inefficiency : "Even if you could snap your fingers and get it, do you really want a razor sharp federal apparatus ready to efficiently carry out the mandates of whoever is the supreme central planner at the moment? The US government was explicitly designed to make that difficult, and I think that was wise."
- gills 16y ago
  It read to me as "government performs most tasks inefficiently, and that's ok; but let's have it perform fewer tasks inefficiently so we can perform them more efficiently ourselves and have a little less fiscal drag on our lives.
- smokeyj 16y ago
  An efficient government would be dangerous, and an inefficient government is draining. If relying on government is a compromise between those two, then why not go with the better option (free markets)? Markets are fast and efficient, a concept foreign to governments everywhere.

deadsy 16y ago

It's true that we each find ourselves in a context of public and private institutions and that (in addition to our own efforts) we owe our wealth to the existence of those institutions. It does not logically follow that our obligation to support government projects with taxes is unlimited. For example- Should people pay taxes to support the Judiciary? Should people pay taxes to subsidize corn farmers? We must be critical of public projects invented by government and parsimonious with our tax dollars. If we aren't then we will fall victim to every political group that says "we have a problem - and there ought to be a law to fix it."

yummyfajitas 16y ago

And your post is willfully ignorant of the fact that most of your taxes don't pay for the public goods you've listed. Roads, sewers, police and clean water are a ridiculously tiny fraction of what you pay in taxes. If you exclude waste in the military (and the other small ticket items you mention), it is even smaller. Most of your taxes are simply taken and given to people less productive than yourself.

borism 16y ago
he didn't talk only about taxes HE paid. There were 10+ generations that paid taxes to the United States of America for the last 200+ years to become what it is now. even if I agreed with your assumption (which I don't), I would certainly not be able to agree that US taxpayers subsidized "less productive" for past 200+ years and US still became what it is now.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  even if I agreed with your assumption (which I don't) The facts are easy to check: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html Of the top 5 biggest expenditures in the US as of 2008 (the last year for which full data is available), only the #4 expenditure (the military) was a public good. The #1,2,3 and 5 items together account for 58% of government spending in the US. The basics mentioned by the original poster are actually pretty cheap. Water and sewers are about 2% of government spending. Police, fire, prison and courts were only 6%. Roads are another 5%. The military (the biggest public good expense) is only 14%.
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    I'd argue that education is a public good. Even if you don't have kids, it seems like it would be in your interest to ensure that the people who will be running things in the future are informed and competent.
    - enki 16y ago

adolph 16y ago

Dear sir, Please send me your bank account deetz so I can spend some of our money. kthx!

ramanujan 16y ago

paulsmith, the acid test is probably mobility. Do you think Carmack would still be a millionaire with a similar quality of life in a lower tax jurisdiction like Singapore? Probably he would. An even lower tax jurisdiction like Somalia? Probably not. Seasteading (www.seasteading.org) is an interesting experiment which can help us empirically find exactly where that "minimum necessary government" point is. Judging by the migration choices of many Chinese and Indian expats, for many people that promised land is no longer today's USA.

secretasiandan 16y ago
Arguably, Singapore/Ireland/other small, developed, low tax nations can only exist given the presence of high tax countries like the US, UK, etc.
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree, but would you mind explaining your reasoning behind that?

gcheong 16y ago

"The notion that there is an independent, absolute concept of wealth or money or cash apart from the laws and government" I'd be willing to bet humans had the concept of wealth long before the concept of government.

cubix 16y ago

As libertarian, I couldn't disagree more. The fundamental difference between us is that you would gladly have your opinions and preferences imposed upon your neighbours with the threat of force, and I believe that all human interaction ought to be voluntary. I want discussion, reason, and persuasion to be used to solve society's ills; you want the gun. Yours is the mature position?

caffeine 16y ago
It's the realistic position.
- cubix 16y ago
  So was slavery at one point.
jberryman 16y ago
Your comment reads like breathless Ayn Rand fan fiction.
- dualogy 16y ago
  Yes she made the same points. What's yours?
joeyo 16y ago
> I want discussion, reason, and persuasion to be used to > solve society's ills; you want the gun. What do you do with criminals in your utopia? Discuss their crimes with them and persuade them to pay restitution?
- dualogy 16y ago
  Retaliate by the same natural right to your own person that forbids you to initiate force against others.
  - macrael 16y ago

amalcon 16y ago

This is sort of the elephant in the room. The only reason that you are given compensation for your work at all is because it theoretically motivates you to do more of it. The "rewarding hard work as an ethical value proposition" thing really only crept up in the past century. While I think it is a good theory, treating it as essentially the only parameter to an ethical decision is extremely simplistic. You can argue for smaller government in ways that don't consist of counting dollars taken away from people at gunpoint. I find those sorts of argument much more compelling.

mfukar 16y ago

On systems of government like the US republic or the various democracies around the European continent, there is an absolute concept of a citizen's contribution to the infrastructure that the state.. It's called taxation. And it is not the only one. Citizens have various duties in every state; they don't have to be enumerated. For people that make their fortunes by not paying their taxes, lying to the government, etc. your argument might have some value. For people that are working in the public sector exclusively, your argument might have some value. For an absolutist government, your argument would make a lot of sense. But not for the rest. (edited: my grammar sucks. i should get some sleep :/)

drcode 16y ago

You make it sound like John Carmack is advocating for lower taxes so he can afford a new Bugatti or somesuch. The truth is he advocates for this because the current system appears irrational to him. I'm sure John Carmack would be successful, to some degree, in almost any system of government- He is unusually gifted. Saying he's a counterargument to his own political position and that he is "a product of the current government system" is both unfair and untrue. Since he is a person of such unusual competence I think his opinion should carry a lot of weight- It does for me. Your (pretty irrational) argument appears to be that because he is competent and successful his opinion should carry LESS weight.

jozo 16y ago
I think you should weight his argument by the quality of the argument itself. While I respect John Carmack as a computer programmer, I also know that computer programming is very different from macroeconomics. I personally don't think his reasoning is very good. He's saying that you shouldn't be forced to pay for something that's inefficient, but also that government can never be efficient enough. So the argument of an inefficient government merely becomes a justification for his ideological viewpoint that you shouldn't be forced to do something, in this case pay taxes. But as he indicated that his viewpoint was formed by experience, and not some sort of political commitment, it all seems very biased to me.
- smokeyj 16y ago
  What is so abstract about the non-aggression axiom? I wouldn't be so quick to trust the macroeconomist over a computer scientist. I mean, does anyone really understand macroeconomics? Greenspan thought he did, ha.

reedlaw 16y ago

While your argument can be applied in a sense to federal reserve notes, it in no way applies to actual _wealth_. Imagine two people on a deserted island. One finds a gold nugget. Both occupants value gold. The one with the gold possesses wealth. This idea of wealth is about as close to an independent, absolute concept as anything I can imagine. Can anyone point out to a single culture or people group where this was not the case? Could the discoverer of gold in any way owe his discovery to the existence of "government"? The ideas of property and wealth are ingrained in us from birth. The idea that anyone, whether government or individual, can take away property by force is morally questionable at best.

eat 16y ago
Well, you've kinda missed the point. The point is that this isn't a deserted island. It's a carefully structured system, one purpose of which is to give individuals the foundation to be as successful and innovative as Carmack has.
- reedlaw 16y ago
  The parents implies there is not even an absolute concept of wealth.