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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

by 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.)
CamperBob 16y ago
All I have to do to shoot down every one of your points is ask why none of those things happened in the Soviet Union.
- xilun0 16y ago
  He is not arguing that everything is done/organized by the government. Which is what was tried in the Soviet Union. So I don't see how you had shoot down every one of his points, nor why you wanted to try that in the first place...
ArturSoler 16y ago
All that was not funded with money that appeared out of nothing. It was paid with money taken from people, and which would have been spent in even more productive things from their owner's judgement.

by rhygar 16y ago

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.)

CamperBob 16y ago

All I have to do to shoot down every one of your points is ask why none of those things happened in the Soviet Union.

xilun0 16y ago
He is not arguing that everything is done/organized by the government. Which is what was tried in the Soviet Union. So I don't see how you had shoot down every one of his points, nor why you wanted to try that in the first place...

ArturSoler 16y ago

All that was not funded with money that appeared out of nothing. It was paid with money taken from people, and which would have been spent in even more productive things from their owner's judgement.