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

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.