John Carmack on the Government
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No one is immune from human nature after all.
Your comment about the US tax rate is misguided though. While we might technically pay less than some European countries (not much less, in some cases), we also receive a lot less in return.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth...
A vast amount of US tax dollars go towards social security--a creaky, shuddering retirement plan that many expect will collapse before they ever benefit from it--and defense. When ~32% of your paycheck evaporates with no clear benefit like those enjoyed in European countries, it makes sense to complain.
That government cannot be made to work for the people IS controversial (and kind of un-American, really). That evidence of wastefulness weakens the usefulness of government IS controversial. That a wasteful democractic government at least ostensibly answerable to its constituents isn't better than any alternative IS controversial.
You're basically saying, "he said the sun's coming up tomorrow and we're all going to die in a horrible conflagration, and really the sun coming up tomorrow isn't a particularly controversial opinion".
You can see this at work in industries with monopolies or duopolies: how many people are over the moon about the service and support they receive from, say, Comcast?
Carmack's point seems to be that an entity with no competition and the ability to requisition cash at a whim is inherently wasteful and broken.
But your government is exactly a duopoly -- there is no real competition -- not because it's a fundamental property of government but because you have a very strict two party system. Do you live in a Comcast or Time Warner city? Do you live in a Republican state or Democrat state?
Large systems that have been able to stand the test of time and deliver good have had safety mechanisms to deal with the danger that they stop providing value.
Governments have a different (and in some ways, more competitive) check mechanism to companies probably because the catastrophic failure of government is even more traumatic than the catastrophic failure of companies.
Undermining trust in the systems (engaged citizens, the press, elections) that keep government honest is exactly the wrong way to go about solving this problem.
Why is this uncontroversial?
>A vast amount of US tax dollars go towards social security--a creaky, shuddering retirement plan that many expect will collapse before they ever benefit from it--and defense.
I'm not a fan of the defense spending, and I've heard it is quite inefficient. Social Security, however, seems very efficient and effective: elder poverty is nothing compared to what it was before Social Security, and the administrative overhead on the program is tiny.
Also, it's not creaky and shuddering at all. All it needs for indefinite, perfect solvency is to have its contribution cap lifted so people actually pay in proportion to their incomes.
>When ~32% of your paycheck evaporates with no clear benefit like those enjoyed in European countries, it makes sense to complain.
I don't see how Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act are "no clear benefit". They seem like society's lifelines to me.
Carmack is totally right. Most Americans are totally right. The government in the US is totally huge, bloated, and wasteful.
What's really foolish is that they attribute that quality to the fact that it's government, and by definition governments are incredibly incompetant and wasteful. Nope, it's just their government.
American's never seem to ask why their civil service is so poorly run in comparision to other developed countries. They just seem to want to punish it out of fury.
1. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/US_per_capita_spending.h... 2. https://www.cihi.ca/en/spending-and-health-workforce/spendin...
It's actually quite amazing what happens when government is efficient and successful. One of my favorite examples is the UTA Trax. Built initially off the support of the liberal core in SLC, they did something rare: they built it on time and cost efficiently, and then operated it cost efficiently. And magically, even though every expansion proposal put it deeper into the most conservative areas in the entire country, and passage depending almost entirely on pure red votes, every expansion proposal has passed easily. Because when you actually deliver on your promises, people are willing to part with their money.
That's just not so.
Canadians are required by law to pay medical premiums in the amount and manner determined by their province. It's currently C$75 per month for a single person in BC, with subsidies available to those with low income. It's paid just like any other utility bill.
Overall people seem happy with the system, though most of them have nothing else to compare it with.
I don't know what you're getting at with "most of them have nothing else to compare it with". Are you suggesting that Canadians are ignorant of other countries health care systems? Certainly not of America's - many Canadians go to the States to vacation or have relatives there and have first or second-hand experience with it. Also the whole world got to watch the insane debate over ACA.
Objectively, the health care outcomes aren't any better in the States than in Canada, despite the fact that it's essentially twice as expensive once you add in their insurance premiums.
Yes, you're right. The rate is fixed, not based on individual risk. Really, it's no different than Employment Insurance, which is also more of a tax than an insurance.
> Are you suggesting that Canadians are ignorant of other countries health care systems?
I'm suggesting that the vast majority of Canadians, myself included until relatively recently, are almost completely unaware of affordable options available world wide. (Other than in the US, which isn't affordable at all)
The real damning part is that there have been concerted efforts to reduce taxation in the US for decades but the net result seems to be that you still pay about the same amount but you get less and less for it.
My wish for your country (and mine for that matter) is that people stop focusing merely the bottom line and more about what you want to achieve. Single-payer health care, for example, requires taxation but would ultimately be a better use of your tax and personal money than the system you have now. But that is really wishful thinking, the political tides have turned everywhere in the world and there mere thought of destroying entire industries for the good of a nation is completely unpalatable.
The argument is that the tax rates (and control over resulting revenues) should be more of a local decision. It's an orthogonal concern to what government, at all levels, should take responsibility for. And therefore how revenue is collected is also an orthogonal concern.
However, we've seen how well that has handled the improper behavior of priests.
What tends to happen in the US is that issues tend to get ignored at the local level, and they basically go up the chain of authority until it falls in the hands of the federal government, not because they want to handle the issue, and not because they're the most capable, but because they can't pass the buck any further. And when the issue isn't handled, it's easier to blame the federal government than to identify the inability/unwillingness of local authorities to do it themselves.
Counterpoint: the various states suing the national government for overstepping its authority in the case of the ACA.
Also, lawsuits over immigration enforcement show that the national government can pass the buck just fine when it wants to.
Regardless of either point, the case is that local governments should be empowered and held accountable. To the extent that they "pass the buck", it's because citizens don't care that more and more issues are national issues. That's the trend that has to reverse, especially given that almost everyone is unhappy with one of the last two U.S. presidents.
My apologies for the late reply.
In most other countries people pay higher taxes, in the US people pay less in taxes, therefore I can't see why taxes should be lower.
How about reasoning from first principles?
What if the state of CA regulated Quality Controls and Error rates on Software produced? What if there is a regulation to prove that a Video game does not impair congnitive skills of 1% of people who play it etc.
The tech world is so lefty because, its "byte world" is nearly unregulated but the Aerospace, manufacturing etc. "atoms world" is regulated to death. That is the problem. If there is a person without depth, its is likely to be you than John Carmack.
Edit: As usual flagged, but if this was a testament to the group think article from the atlantic or new york times, this would have a couple hundred upvotes and a massive policy discussion. My respect for John Carmack has increased even further, he like many practitioners is an empiricist.
The old chestnut about "how can it be fair to extract money with the threat of jail" is also a huge warning sign. The government only has two methods of enforcement, one being fines and the other being prison. If you buy into that idea, you are left without any means to collect any taxes and therefore the concept of "government" no longer makes any sense. That leads you into Ayn-Rand-la-la-land which is a nice idea for a 14-year old to entertain but not a serious option to organise a society.
I'm also sceptical of his claims of government inefficiency, considering Armadillo Aerospace doesn't exactly strike me as a paragon for the magic efficiency of private enterprises.
One of the major reasons that the semiconductor and software industry took off is because of agencies like DARPA, where program managers are rotated (never permanent). If we continue to have careerists in charge then, unlike DARPA, we're bound to have inefficiencies develop. We would benefit from a reorganized government, where only small term-limited crack teams are kept in civil service and rotated to address gaps and challenges. This is how the Obamacare website was changed from a dysfunctional site being developed by a politically connected contractor selected/overseen by civil service to a more robust site developed by a volunteer crack team from SV. So, I disagree with Carmack in that it's possible to reformulate government to make it more effective and have government fund risks that private sector is unlikely to take due to short-term profit perspectives.
Despite the perceived waste in defense and other tech centers, I would guess the waste in the state department dwarfs everything. Not sure what to do about this area.
What gets me the most about libertarian rants though, is how the person writing is always so completely convinced that they have come up with some novel solution to the world's problems. As if the only thing standing between us and a techno-utopia is the EPA and the FCC. They do not acknowledge that the structures in place are a direct result of the failure of free markets to handle basic human needs on a wide scale.
That's not really correct: those structures are the direct result of politicians creating them, in response to a perception that markets (unfree markets …) failed to do one thing or another.
Was it a mistaken perception that rivers were catching on fire in the 60's, leading to the EPA? I guess we should have left that to the free market too.
Government and business can work together, but we must acknowledge that the goal of business is to drive profit, not human welfare. The goal of the government is to drive human welfare, not profit. The two should be seen as litigants in a court of law; combative yet civil, with an agreed upon set of values. The opposition of these two forces creates a dynamic far preferable to one extreme or the other.
I agree, and that is indeed a problem.
> The goal of the government is to drive human welfare, not profit.
I disagree strongly: the goal of government is power. No-one runs for office to make the world a better place: he runs for power or, if we're very, very lucky because he wants to be the one to make the world a better place.
To your dialectic of government & business, I'd like to add a third party: the people. We're not pure either, of course (as a group, we like to oppress, ignore & line our own pockets!), but we're the ones that create government; we're the ones it ought to serve; we're the ones who ought to hold it accountable.
Some of us fall into the trap that whatever a corporation wants is okay, others into thinking that the State is always right, others still into thinking that the People are always right. The truth is that all of them are sometimes wrong. There's no real solution.
But let's try to minimise the amount of violence in our society, and try to maximise the utility we get for that violence. Am I okay sending men with guns to wrest your property away in order to fund the national defense? Sure. Am I okay sending them to prevent people starving in the streets? Okay. Am I okay send them over in order to finance a cowboy poetry festival? Hell no.
nailed it.
Just because scaling a process results in inefficiencies doesn't mean there's no need to scale it. If you feel like you personally can help every person directly, please do, disrupt taxes! But until you, we're not tearing down the system that works (however inefficiently).
Need less government, government is bad, regulation is bad, taxes are theft.
There, I just saved you 10 minutes. I apologize for the snark, but for an outsider (someone who's not part of the tech bubble, and not a libertarian), these rants from libertarian tech people are comically identical to each other, yet none of them ever amount to anything, because all fail to take human nature into account.
Well, since we are stating theses, mine would be that while the government delivers poor value for services it consumes in some areas, the private sector sometimes provides very poor value for the services it consumes because it is incentivized to do the opposite.
Believing one is better than the other without actually looking at the economics involved leads to things like privatized prisons (where the incentive is to keep people in and returning to prison, not to rehabilitate them), and large public lending systems (Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac) which are susceptible to being brittle under economic stress.
Any time you think you believe something strongly enough that it falls under a 90/10 rule, it's probably worth really looking into that 10% and understanding it. You might find your 90/10 rule is more accurately a 70/30 or 60/40 rule, and that's really a different thing.