John Carmack on government
media.armadilloaerospace.com
media.armadilloaerospace.com
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./
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.
Hypothetical anarchyland isn't a very nice place to live, though. Most libertarians are not anarcho-capitalists (let us ignore the subset who are because they're crazy), and are quite happy to pay the portion of taxes which go towards sensible things like the police force and the enforcement of contracts. The problem is that governments get to set whatever tax rates they like, inevitably wind up with a desire to go beyond this and to begin using tax dollars to feather the nests of whoever gets to make the government's decisions, whether it's a solid gold tomb for the King or free welfare checks for the bottom 51% of the population. And, y'know, we can deal with some of that happening, because it's inevitable, but we do need people to be standing up all the time and saying "Hey look Mr President, how about we get to keep a bit more of our money and you get to fly around in a private 777 instead of a private 747?"
I'm not sure how you make the leap from "the government is necessary to protect your private property" to "it's not really your property, it's the government's". The bank is also necessary for me to get paid, and so is the electric company and the telephone company and the nice lady down in HR, but it's still my money. I don't mind paying for the services they provide either, but I'll still complain if they take more than they're entitled to.
For once, a subset of ancap are able to engage in dealing with a Neal Stephenson plot device.
I often feel like I am in a cyberpunk novel. ;)
When everyone gets to decide how much they want to pay for private goods, ceteris paribus we get better, cheaper private goods. When everyone gets to decide how much they want to pay for public goods, ceteris paribus we get worse and fewer public goods.
1. Cheaters are most problematics to deal with, especially with drive-by fraudsters. They make everything worse for everybody else, not just the direct recipient of the fraud. 80% of drive-by cheaters can be prevented with simple measures. However, the rest are long term scammers who build up reputation and than cheat over us. This is extremely difficult to prevent. Thus everyone factor in the risk of being cheated out of their money.
2. Reputation is VERY IMPORTANT in an economy with no court and police.
3. Paypal dollars and anything that is chargebackable is BAD MONEY. It is the DOMAIN of scammers and fraudsters. They also cause bank runs as people transfer their worthless money into something more valuable.
Is the economy a utopia? No. There are some scumbags who cheat and sometime got away with it. In one situation, their fraudulently brought merchandise got confiscated by an exchange mediator but not before it cause damage to the system. However, others were not so lucky. A guy got 2000 dollars in chargeback and had to shut down. What people will do, is learn how to handle cheaters, and find better methods to avoid cheaters. Since it is the internet, you can't just do "violence" or coerce individuals. It's impossible. Contracts are entirely based on reputation and trust. Nobody want to go to a state court and waste lot of money on lawyer.
"However, the rest are long term scammers who build up reputation and than cheat over us."
Well you have that in the rest of the world too -- only they go by nobler-sounding titles of government agents, bureaucrats, commissioners...
"Reputation is VERY IMPORTANT in an economy with no court and police."
What's the problem here -- reputation can be earned, through quality, and should. The stronger it is, the less it can be shattered by drive-by morons who haven't built it for themselves yet (and if they had, they wouldn't need to).
"They also cause bank runs as people transfer their worthless money into something more valuable."
The corrective invisible hand at work, it sounds to me. Again, what's the issue?
"Contracts are entirely based on reputation and trust. Nobody want to go to a state court and waste lot of money on lawyer."
I think the western world will be moving to that direction as public services keep increasing prices and decreasing quality, as every coercive monopoly must, especially a high-deficit one.
Contracts in the end are always primarily based on reputation and trust, aren't they? And shouldn't they?
There is no country in the world that is at the very least quasi-anarcho-capitalist. This economy deal entirely on the internet and with bitcoins as its currency.
I think the western world will be moving to that direction as public services keep increasing prices and decreasing quality, as every coercive monopoly must, especially a high-deficit one. Contracts in the end are always primarily based on reputation and trust, aren't they? And shouldn't they?
Keep in mind, these are lessons, not a critique. I am not criticizing the reputation based nature of a cryptoeconomy. Rather it is lessons in how the cryptoeconomy really works.
I did not mean to imply you were criticizing. Your lessons are valid examples of a quasi-anarchic situation. People policing themselves, organizing networks of trust and reputation and self-protection.
Sounds like there is a market in there for mutually-trusted middlemen acting as, well, "trustees" or escrow services? Or is that built into BitCoin already. Of course if the scam only materializes after the transaction was already completed to mutual consent, that's a different matter. But what kinds of fraud are happening there?
The notion of bitcoin being backed by CPU mining or even GPU mining is a fallacious notion. CPU and GPU are used to mine bitcoins and create bitcoin blocks, nothing more.
Every currency will probably have an exchange market. Bitcoin is no different. People have brought pecious metals with bitcoins, as well USD. However, USD are usually prefixed with a service such as Paypal USD and MtGox USD, and so on because of additional monetary property that the service provider imbues to it. Thus, Paypal accounts are considered risky because of chargeback.
Sounds like there is a market in there for mutually-trusted middlemen acting as, well, "trustees" or escrow services? Or is that built into BitCoin already. Of course if the scam only materializes after the transaction was already completed to mutual consent, that's a different matter. But what kinds of fraud are happening there?
The trust network is mostly around the bitcoin forum. There has been talk of creating reputation systems of some kind but nothing of substance come out yet. Most frauds are usually the drive-by scams type of frauds. However, the other concerns is when escrow failed to do their job or simply disappear. There may be no intent of fraud involved, but people lose their money all the same.
The flaws should have been apparent to anyone who understood human nature and was willing to sit down and ask the obvious questions like "What happens when X" and "But won't people Y?" They were less apparent to people who didn't want to sit down and ask these sorts of questions.
This is pretty much exactly the same level of crazy you get from anarcho-capitalists.
This brings to mind my favorite communism story. 15 or so years ago my local newspaper ran a story about a young lady who was moving away to go work for the American Communist Party, because she had taken a trip to Cuba and seen Communism in action; it was clear to her that this was the ideal form of government for the people. That same day, the news was full of stories of people risking their lives to leave Cuba in homemade boats. It always amazed me how this girl could completely miss this.
By necessity, local landlords and smaller communities were in a much stronger "competition of sorts" with their neighboring "jurisdictions", more effective than our grand nation states with their inter-national tax agreements. Some of them were nasty bastards, but the next one presumably less so. They seriously couldn't indebt themselves and keep raising taxes quite as abusively as today's nation governments do, the world over, and didn't. You do realize than sub-10% taxes were the default scenario in these times long past, and in many European provinces they were in fact paid voluntarily, for real armed protection services that could be denied if you chose not to pay them, but weren't forced to.
References / citations? Read Hans Hermann Hoppe's Democracy book, it's full of them.
Libertarians has proposed a number of ways by which to regulate the market economy that doesn't involved coercion. Whether or not that is feasible is another matter entirely.
That being said, I prefer the alternative of being a member of the unorganized milita rather than a police state that handle every security services for me. I believed that a professional, well trained army are of some use but they should be limited to a size that doesn't allow them to invade nations and conquer the locals.
Wars is the death of empires, nations, and government.
No, it's not. I could suggest that we can power cold fusion with green cheese but that doesn't mean it will heat your house this winter.
Enforcing trademarks another example of a social program for business that I guess you could live without. We could disagree about the need for patents and how the US Patent and Trademark office is configured, but most people here, among them entrepreneurs, would agree that trademarks are a good thing, and that they should be enforced.
But let's see what happens if we were to hijack each other's brands. Maybe we should take over the YCombinator trademark. After all, enforcing trademarks isn't directly concerned with national defense. In the name of limited government, it's OK to suggest affiliations with corporations by using their trademarks without their approval. Especially since we dyed-in-the-wool libertarians don't believe in negative externalities, and that businesses have the right to do whatever they want. Those other companies with their putative concerns about reputation and perception about their brands, trademarks and logos are third parties to the exercise of our God-given libertarian rights. I only hope my militia is stronger than their militia.
I see no dichotomy between keeping a properly sized professional army, a militia, and an unorganized militia. The problem is that temptation of giving up responsibility entails giving up freedom and the issue of incentives.
I certainly do not like to see another Napoleon and Ceasar arising from the improper organization of military defense. Men like George Washington are rare in the history of the world.
But let's see what happens if we were to hijack each other's brands. Maybe we should take over the YCombinator trademark. After all, enforcing trademarks isn't directly concerned with national defense. In the name of limited government, it's OK to suggest affiliations with corporations by using their trademarks without their approval. Especially since we dyed-in-the-wool libertarians don't believe in negative externalities, and that businesses have the right to do whatever they want. Those other companies with their putative concerns about reputation and perception about their brands, trademarks and logos are third parties to the exercise of our God-given libertarian rights. I only hope my militia is stronger than their militia.
Much problem are there with the silliness of trademarks. However, I have little to say on this issue either way. I did studied patents and copyrights system and concluded to the best of my knowledge that they are not good public policy.
As I noted, libertarians hated the congestion on public roads. We certainly do believe in negative externalities. Does it not goes further to say that libertarians thought certain kind of regulations hurt the regular people and benefit corporations? There is such term called crony-capitalism, you see.
If a militia decided to invade a country for the sake of ransacking it, than the milita lost sight of its purpose.
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.
"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."
Now let's talk about waste in military spending. I would also count the off-the-books (as in, not part of the official budget) spending as wasteful military spending, almost by definition. So now we're talking a very large fraction of the federal budget. Note, however, that arguments to "get the government out" of various affairs rarely include the military.
People who complain about "pork" in government spending: if you were really serious about cutting spending, you'd include the military (like the UK government recently did). But they never do.
I sympathize with many libertarian goals, but this generic "anti-inefficient-government" rhetoric doesn't help any of them. Rhetoric is a luxury of mainstream parties. Ross Perot got a significant portion of the votes in many states by hammering on a single issue: the budget deficit. After that, the Clinton administration mysteriously decided that shrinking the deficit was a priority. Which of course didn't exactly last long, but imagine if someone continued to hammer on that with the same fervor throughout Bush's presidency, and into the current administration?
Oddly enough, though, nobody seems to argue for just "More government" in general either. People instead argue for specific programs they want.
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.
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.)
Most of your taxes are simply taken and given to people less productive than yourself.
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.
The facts are easy to check:
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%.
Of course, education isn't a public good. It's rivalrous (you and I can't simultaneously enjoy the same seat in a classroom) and excludible (if you don't pay, they don't let you in). That makes it a private good.
I do still think that education should be a function of the government, however.
Edit to expand on my position: I had confused the terms public good and common good. I believe that a solid, (to some extent, but not as far as we are now) standardized education system is in the best interest of our nation. I don't think this could be provided privately.
A bunch of whining about "government" just betrays either ignorance or willful omission by people who talk about "smaller government" in between assuring seniors that their medicare is safe.
But I'll be explicit in my position since you want to imply I'm being deceptive about it: the government should not pay for private goods.
I'm not going to debate the matter here, however, beyond pointing out that in a population of 2 wolves and 1 sheep, lamb chops are an incredibly popular dinner choice.
What does that sentence mean? Who defines "private good"? Are interstate highways a public good? Are positive externalities from a social safety net a public good?
It's evasive and hand-wavey because you don't know what an economics term means and didn't take 30 seconds to look it up on google or wikipedia? I expect better from everyone on HN.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_goods
Something is a private good if:
- it can be distributed individually (that is, you can allow only those who've paid for it or registered for it to use it)
- its use/consumption by one party precludes its use by another party
Roadways can probably be categorized as a "club good" -- they can be used by multiple people, but it's possible to make them available only to "paying customers". Toll roads are a club good for those who pay the toll, while other roads are a club good for all registered/licensed motorists.
To be a truly "public good" it needs to be impossible to exclude non-payers; things like clean air or military protection are public goods.
Externalities are not goods; they are costs or benefits associated with goods but incurred by outside parties.
"I don't think the government should produce private goods" means effectively nothing.
Medicare: Rivalrous (the same dollar can't reimburse the doctor for your benefits and mine) and excludible (if you don't pay, they don't reimburse the doctor). Private good.
SS: Rivalrous (you and I can't both spend an SS check) and excludible (if you don't pay in while young, they don't send you a check when you are old). Private good.
Should I do the same thing for cheese fries or can you figure out for yourself that cheese fries are also a private good?
Suppose I now say that welfare is a public good since without it we'd have poor folks either rioting or dying in the streets. I benefit from that and so do you.
Another line-blurring example: food in prison is a private good in that only one prisoner can eat it; however I don't have a problem with the government paying for that.
Welfare checks are private goods, because if the funds go into one person's check the same funds can't also go into another person's check (rivalrous) and the checks can be sent to some people but not others (excludable).
Food and clothing for prisoners or for military personnel are also private goods, though they're better categorized as components of the public goods of "functional criminal justice system" and "military protection".
I suppose "functional criminal justice system" is actually a service, as well, while "prison" is a good.
But don't miss the forest for the trees here. Your problem is with entitlements, not some grander definition of public/private goods. I mean, if I could convince you SS was a public good, it wouldn't change your opinion, right?
Yeah, it would, though I strongly doubt you can do that given the definition of ``public good.''
I'm glad you don't view intellectual property as legitimate property.
Please do not drag the discussion off topic by twisting the definition given into something it's not.
Interstate highways are a public good, at least for as long as technology is not advanced enough to make metering them/excluding freeloaders feasible.
As for what I'd cut, social security, medicare and welfare are at the top of my list. Quite a few conservatives (the limited government kind, not the "Dem + Christian nationalism" kind) have explicitly stated this, for example Paul Ryan. See our conversation from a month ago, the last time I pointed this fact out to you: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745714 (I believe Ron Paul also pushes cutting SS/medicare.)
And what about the military? Military protection is commonly cited as a public good, but sustaining the military requires massive government expenditures on private goods. How does that square with the idea that the government shouldn't pay for private goods?
I think you're being overly harsh on the idea that the public/private goods distinction isn't always black-and-white. There are many obvious gray areas.
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, unless you are discussing something silly like the government buying tanks and giving them to private individuals. There are gray areas, but I think the biggies in the federal budget are pretty clear.
Citations please.
As for people on welfare wanting to work, that's unclear. Most (about 80%) poor people don't want to work [1] and I expect the ones who do work are less likely to be on welfare (though I don't have stats granular enough to prove this). Do you have a better estimate?
Go read the first 3 sentences of the report. That includes clauses inside parenthesis.
More details: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
By the way, didn't mean to sound hostile in my last post. I think I came across a little stronger than I meant.
It probably depends on how you define "many", but I don't think history sides with you on this one. Welfare programs in the US have tended to produce more people on welfare, rather than getting them off.
Please send me your bank account deetz so I can spend some of our money.
kthx!
I'd be willing to bet humans had the concept of wealth long before the concept of government.
> I want discussion, reason, and persuasion to be used to
> solve society's ills; you want the gun.
How do you decide if that is justified? If you have evidence that a man robbed you, are you allowed to seek him out and steal back what was taken from you? What if he ate it? To kill him? How does the society know that you found the right man? What if you got it wrong?
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Joe Civilian will likely seek out producers of police services and insurance services (rather than rely on his own daily gang fights), both of which will out of self-interest police each other against abusive behavior, and private courts of law have often worked exceedingly well in the short spans of history where they were permitted by oversight or accident.
> Discuss their crimes with them and persuade them
> to pay restitution?
Discussing and admitting the crimes would help the victim and be cheaper. In our current law system the victim, who is the one we should pay most attention to, is mostly ignored.
For more on this controversial standpoint read up on how Tutsi & Hutu learnt to live together after the genocide.
or:
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/0691148643
Saying that I, or the previous commenter whom I mostly agree with, "would gladly have [our] opinions and preferences imposed [our] neighbours with the threat of force" is wrong, and not very conducive to debate. To say that we "want the gun to solve society's ills" is even more so.
Democracy is supposed to be a grand discussion. I can't have my opinions forced on others, we all have to talk and come to an agreement on how things should be done. So, thinks like jury duty and social security were put into place to attempt to solve problems like "how can we best determine if someone is guilty of a crime?" and "what can we do about old people who have worked their whole lives but are reduced to eating cat food because they have no money and no real ability to make more?"
Now, ideally, these decisions could be made by consensus. Every single person in the country could agree on the right way to do things. But, having participated in a consensus based community for a number of years, I can tell you that it does not scale. So instead, majority rules (with checks and balances, in the US). My understanding is that your viewpoint would be that, while we can all discuss possible solutions to these problems and work on making our country a better place together, no individual should be coerced into supporting the solutions. I certainly see a lot of merit in this view. It seems fundamentally fair and respectful of personal freedoms in a way that our current democracy perhaps doesn't. However, I see it as less fair than our current system in other, important, ways.
Mainly, it is difficult to separate out the ways in which governmental programs benefit you in a useful way that would allow people to not receive some of those benefits. We are all benefited by not having poor people, young and old, dying in our streets. It seems fair to me to say "if you want to be a part of our community, you have to play by our rules" What should be great about democracy as compared to many other forms of government, is that by becoming a part of a community, you are given a path to be a part of shaping those rules.
This is long, so I will stop. I'm still very much in the process of working out what I think about all of this, in fact, writing it here was helpful for me. I'd love to hear what you think.
I don't want to see people dying on the streets, you don't, presumably, and almost everyone I have had this discussion with has the same concern. Isn't it reasonable to assume that the more educated and productive members of society would be willing to bear this burden without having it squeezed out of them by threat of jail? You hear "I want to make the world a better place" so often it has become cliché.
I donate to charities under our current system; I would be more inclined to do so if I weren't deprived of 40 or 50% of my income by the state. Moreover, private charity would be far more accountable than welfare programs since "customers" could take their money elsewhere. Clearly there is a demand for efficient charity services, and it could be readily met on the free market by entrepreneurs. We've seen remarkable generosity this past week on HN. I think it tends to come to the surface when people are interacting in free and voluntary circumstances.
A completely free society is not something I expect to see in my life time, but that doesn't mean it is unattainable by future generations. Many Western values we take for granted today would have seemed Utopian just a century or two ago -- the abolition of slavery, women and children's rights, the general decline of racism, and so on.
You accuse me of over simplifying, but it's unlikely the abolitionists would have made the progress they did without an unequivocal denunciation of slavery. In response they heard something along the lines of "[you have] distilled a very complex issue into two different polarizing viewpoints".
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.
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 :/)
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.
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.
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#...)
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.
I know there aren't 300m taxpayers, and it shouldn't be divided equally, and countless other things. If anyone has a more accurate figure I'd be interested to see it.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
Updating to include citation: http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8AGMUZ?...
You are right to point out that a good chunk of the population will make a net gain, but many of them will only do so because they're very poor. Some poor people are lazy, but it doesn't follow that all poor people are freeloaders. Unfortunately, less honest people than you have made a lot of spin out of those statistics, for a variety of political ends.
Heres one. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00...
Heres another. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/25/1017004766310.html
One more. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/14...
I don't know how partisan these articles or newspapers/publishers are, but you asked for citing.
Oh, here's another one, PBS this time. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interv...
Feel free to upvote my prior post, thanks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Coughlin#Habbush_letter
> Heres one. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_F._Hayes#Writings_and_p...
> http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/25/1017004766310.html
This is well known. Saddam provided/ claimed to provide compensation for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. There is no connection with the Al-Qaeda here.
> Oh, here's another one, PBS this time. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interv....
You did not read he editor's note
[Editor's Note, November 2005: More than two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there has been no verification of Khodada's account of the activities at Salman Pak. In fact, U.S. officials have now concluded that Salman Pak was most likely used to train Iraqi counter-terrorism units in anti-hijacking techniques. It should also be noted that he and other defectors interviewed for this report were brought to FRONTLINE's attention by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a dissident organization that was working to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Since the original broadcast, Khodada has not publicly addressed questions that have been raised about his account of activities at Salman Pak.]
If you want an overview of the planning/preparation of Sep 11 attacks it is easily available here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_of_the_September_11_at...
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.
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?
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
If majority of voters want to cut government spending in more than 50% of areas, then spending would be cut.
In the list you provided I'd say everything should be cut. Say, 10%/year cut until spending is at least 50% lower.
My personal preference would be not to cut interstate highway system too much, but everything else deserves at least 50% cut in the next 10 years.
Like many people I view the Tea Party movement as a Republican sock puppet designed to convince voters that this time they really mean it when they say they want small government.
PS: I base this on the wiliness of Tea Party members to run in republican primaries.
What primaries should they have run in?
It's much easier to take over a political party than to start one AND knock out one of the big two. Libertarians and greens have proved that.
It would have been absurd to run in democrat primaries.
Sharing some libertarian beliefs doesn't imply an obligation to join the LP, especially since the LP has repeatedly demonstrated that it's more interested in making a statement than actually getting elected and changing things.
It takes a lot of money to get elected in the US. And you don't get re-elected if you then vote against the interests of your donors. And they certainly aren't donating money so that you'll cut off government spending.
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.
A more straightforward way to say this is that there's a £60 fine, which increases to £120 if you don't pay promptly.
"The Penalty Charge of £120.00 must be paid no later than the last day of the period of 28 days beginning with the date of service of this Notice. If the Penalty Charge is paid no later than the last day of the period of 21 days beginning with the date of service of this Notice it will be reduced by 50% to £60.00."
Based on the general meanness of the service, I think it's reasonable to presume that they phrased it this way so some people would not read to the end and overpay £120 instead of £60. Given such bad faith, I don't see why I should make the effort to rephrase their own statements to look more favourable towards them.
You can ^W instead of ^H to delete a whole word instead of just a character. ;)
(Though I have always had a soft spot for the people that take the time to get the number of ^Hs correct.)
Makes me want to post to rec.humor.funny from vim, just for the thrill of it.
I'm a pedant. Is it that obvious? :-)
The Congestion Charge systems won't tell you whether you should pay or not
Of course not, because the cameras don't record every number plate reliably.
So politely ask the person to pay the original fee, and fine them if they don't pay promptly. The problem is that the system assumes bad faith.
As I said in my original post, any system that asks you to speculatively pay for something which you don't know whether you've actually used, in order to avoid a hefty government-enforced fine, is a morally reprehensible. I cannot condone any such system existing. It is, quite simply, extortion, and I cannot support its existence. They might as well have said "pay us, or we might come and break your legs".
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/London_conges...
If you're so disorganized that you are oblivious to these signs and don't know the day of the week, really you shouldn't be driving a car at all.
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/helping-you-with-your...
I think it's very expensive and maybe not good value, but back when I lived in London I don't recall any difficulty in knowing whether or not I had driven into the downtown area where I was required to pay the traffic fee. Have they removed all the signs or something since then?
There are also some confusing bits - a friend told me he got charged for doing a U-turn that took him partly into a congestion zone. He was trying to avoid being in the congestion zone, and wasn't sure whether he did manage to avoid it, but had no way to check (and so ended up penalised).
The auto-deducting thing is due to come in in January - until then you have to manually go and pay the charge if you think you should, without any way of knowing whether you should.
Considering the bad faith of the system as it is, although I probably will sign up for the auto-deducting system, I am concerned about giving direct access to my bank account to such people.
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).
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)
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.
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.
That's actually a good argument. Though of course I'd incur huge expenses moving to another country than the one I was born in (new language, no contacts, maybe fewer legal rights, etc) so it only works up to a degree.
> 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 makes no sense... Are you saying I wouldn't buy an umbrella for $2.99 at Walmart because I bought an umbrella for $12.99 at a mom-and-pop store before Walmart came to town?
The issue is that you won't have 10 or 20 providers for roads, water, electricity, landlines. Anything where infrastructure costs are high or where its nearly impossible for two providers to have identical, commoditized services as with roads will not be competitive.
For things like getting a passport, driver's license, etc you will have some competition, but there are plenty of private companies that provide crappy service as well. How many people who buy cheaper merchandise later think "what a piece of crap"?
If you don't pay your taxes, you'll get put in a cage or shot. That's not a "willing" payment.
A country and its government are not the same thing. The cost-benefit balance can be made positive by benefits that are independent of government, such as cultural attitudes or proximity to specific private institutions.
Just out of curiousity: Do you mean impossible in the US, or in general?
If that's the case in the U.S. imagine countries like China or poor African countries with even fewer resources.
I'm not happy with that reality from a humanitarian perspective but I don't see how it isn't the case. Being a doctor is hard and there are only so many raw materials out there so I don't see a way around it.
(But the important point here is that it is debatable and that's where the problem comes in)
No, that is a lie. What Universal Healthcare is about is about a better distribution mechanism.
The market is a mechanism for efficiently distributing a limited resource based on people's ability to pay.
Universal healthcare aims to distribute a limited resource based on need not ability to pay. Proponents like this because it is fairer and doesn't leave people suffering. Capiche?
What you're saying doesn't change the fact that the resource is limited. The question is can the limited resource be stretched to accommodated everyone and if so can government create a more efficient distribution method to harness that resource. Because if either of those things aren't true than your "need-based" distribution is going to leave as many if not more people without treatment (it will just be richer people)
That's the debate: Is it possible to give high quality health care to everyone?
You stating that there are enough resources as a certainty is just arrogance on your part.
Yes, as you mentioned, you would certainly see more wealthier individuals that would be denied care. You would also see more poor people getting care they desperately need.
>That's the debate: Is it possible to give high quality health care to everyone?
I don't think this is really the debate. I think the debate is whether or not health care should be portioned out based on how much money someone is willing to/able to spend or based on how badly somebody needs the treatment. Personally, I think that's the only moral way it can be done.
And opponents dislike this because it's impossible. If such a magical distribution method existed then we should obviously be using it for everything, not just healthcare, and that's called socialism.
I consider efficiency to be secondary to the saving of human lives or the general improvement of people's living conditions by curing them of curable ailments.
Long story short: I think your health care market got you the worst possible solution to health care in the world.
An American Red Cross statement was issued saying that 91 cents of every dollar donated specifically for the Hurricane Katrina disaster will go directly to disaster relief. This overhead of only <B>9%</B> is quite low for such a large organization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross
Social Security is impressive because "the dministrative costs of the U.S. Social Security system are very low--<B>less than one percent of revenues.</B>" She claims this compares favorably with the overhead costs of the partly privatized Chilean system, which she says are "in the neighborhood of 15 percent of revenues." http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-19085869.html
1. DHHS != Social Security 2. The core point is choice. I prefer donating to a neighborhood charity that I can confirm is spending money responsibly. If you believe the government generally provides healthcare with lower overhead and more efficiency than a private nonprofit, one might politely point out that same government has spent several hundreds of billions has been spent blowing people up in Iraq. I don't think even the Red Cross spends its 9% on that...
politicians play no role.
In Canada we have universal health care, and it works reasonably well. Some would argue waiting lines and all that, I've never experienced them to be that bad, I live in a large urban center (Vancouver) and have found the services to be exemplary.
I'd rather hear stories like that then stories about people denied treatment because they got denied by some corporate bean counter.
And your stories aren't indicative of any failing of the Canadian system. Let's not forget the American's that rely on Canada for their health needs.
I have a relative who is an Oncology nurse in a major US city. She sees a lot of patients from Canada who come to her hospital because they can't get the treatments they need in Canada. Of course, it's only the wealthy ones, because they're the only ones who can afford it.
Similar problems exist with the US government healthcare (through the VA). My father was denied a lifesaving transplant because he didn't meet the government board's criteria for a transplant. Mayo Clinic came through with the transplant and saved his life.
On a much lower scale then in the US. I see first hand the realities of the differences between the two systems. In Canada, their is much less worry about health care than in the US. Their are still issues, but not the same fundamental ones that the US has.
This also ignores the fact that Canadian patients often go to the US for reasons other than the one you describe. Often times, they go to a hospital known for being the best in certain types of care. Other times, it's also a timing issue: they want it resolve sooner than what Canada will do for them.
Finally, the same problem exists on the private side as well. Health insurance companies deny lifesaving operations all the time.
Edit: Another problem with your argument is the assumption that Canada doesn't have private insurance on top of public. It does. It sits on top of the public insurance. And while it's great your father got help from a non-profit, I wonder how much help he would have gotten from a non-socialised health care plan?
Isn't that a huge problem though? For cancer and other progressive illnesses, each day's delay can mean the difference between surviving or not.
There may be some short comings to our system, and inefficiencies but I will say I am pretty damn happy that I live in a country that provides that level of coverage to any citizen.
I certainly think the U.S. should try to learn from some of the things Canada has done but at the same time Canadians need to acknowledge they have some kinks to work out as well.
My wife has her issues with the HCS here, but she's scared to death of the US system should we ever move there (being American myself). Their is a reason the guy behind Canada's health care system was made a national hero.
We already have a pretty good K-12 public education system. At least it's pretty good for its original purpose which is to make better workers. I say we overhaul the K-12 system so that by the time each person graduates they'll have the equivalent of 3-5 years of medical school. Then, in addition to college + traditional medschool (or just votech), give people the option of attending a publicly funded quasi-votech-medschool, the graduates of which will be licensed to practice medicine (and these people will have about 7-9 years of training at that point).
So, we would have simultaneously increased the number of doctors and nurses, decreased the need for them (since medical knowledge will be more or less ubiquitous), created some parity in knowledge between health care providers and consumers (the disparity is one of the big reasons a free market can't work). Most importantly, since medical knowledge/skill will be so pervasive we would see a lot more innovation and entrepreneurial activity in that space. Instead of people working on the next Facebook in their garage/dorm room we might have them working on new kinds of equipment, treatment, or even medicine (like that doctor that built a dialysis machine in his garage: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1180628/D-I-Y-dial...). Or perhaps more stuff like this: http://www.wakemate.com/
Simply make everyone a doctor of sorts.
For my particular condition a subcutaneous treatment was developed in Scandinavia and the UK. It costs half as much to treat a patient and requires no care from a nurse to administer the alternative IV. I can give myself my drugs on my own time instead of taking time off work to go into a clinic. The drug is finally making its way over the pond now, but uptake is slow. Not every person with my condition can go on the subcutaneous, but back of the envelope math says at the very least $100 million a year would be saved if all patients who could go on went on it. In addition 150,000 nurse hours would be freed up as well each year.
Let's not forget the personal savings of time being on the phone with the insurance company. In the year before I moved to Sweden I lost roughly a week of work to being on the phone with the insurance company cause things weren't billed right or they just decided that I didn't need my IV anymore or getting them to pay for things they pre-authorized, but decided to deny when the bill showed up. I have spent absolutely no time discussing those sort of things in the last 3.5 years I've lived in Sweden. That's time I spend earning money and paying taxes, which seems to be win-win.
Hell no. A combination of private charity and vigorous markets have provided quality universal food and entertainment. Government is presently attempting quality universal housing and education -- and its failing miserably on the "quality" point, and ain't doing that great on the "universal".
If quality universal health care comes from anywhere, it will be from Silicon Valley & Red Cross. The most government will ever do is mandate it, try to implement it, fail, and claim it's doing its best and just needs a little more money.
I can't think of a single country where there is no government food assistance and no one starving to death. Where are you thinking of?
Some might disagree that EBT is not a major contributor, though. Point retracted. I guess I just have 'entertainment'.
http://feedingamerica.org/faces-of-hunger/hunger-in-america-...
Is that because they can't afford medium-quality food, or because they're choosing to buy substandard food anyway?
I've gone shopping with people way below the poverty line; in every instance, they spent as much as I did for a similar time period, at the same quality of store, and yet came out with far crappier food. I don't know if my experience is typical, but I find it hard to believe, given the prices on various types of healthy and unhealthy foods, that "eating low quality food" is a result of lack of money.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Executive summary: It didn't work.
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.
(++) Those credit-default swaps, etc need lots of technology to manage the accounting.
The only way to get elected in this climate is to pander endlessly to the masses and never discuss real issues at all, which is not a game that the engineers or scientists are ever going to win.
Personally, I think the quality the world needs more of in its leaders today is humility. Our theories are probably wrong (an argument for conservatism in a classical sense) and we, as a group, are likely just as corruptible as any other group.
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.
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.
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.
I wish I wasn't a cynic and could believe that.
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?
I'm familiar with the "tragedy of the commons" issue but there just isn't any clear evidence that:
More government spending -> better environment
> ...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.
From a pure capitalist point of view, there will always be isolated instances of short-term enterprises destroying the source of their wealth --- their river, land, fishing or hunting grounds --- but the ones that will logically prevail are those that protect and future-proof their resources for long-term wealth gains, especially when the investment is very high (talk about oil, mining etc.) so that the return on investment will need to be earned over decades. It is not in the interest of the farmer to devalue his land. It is not in the interest of the fisher to exterminate all fish.
It may well be in the interest of global corporations to drain the natural resources of poor countries where the land is granted by the government rather than privately owned and only the short-term monetary gain matters to both parties. But libertarians also make a credible case that Big Corporations would have a much tougher time, and would be a lot smaller, in government-free or minimal-government environments.
There however were places without central government or tax collectors. Like Somalia, or Afghanistan.
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._N...
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.
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.
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?
Also consider that defense spending is 51% of discretionary spending and almost $500 billion more than any other discretionary spending category.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budg...
Imagine if the company you worked for (or started) decided it was going to spend 51% of it's discretionary operational expenditures on a security system and security guards, yet there were furious debates about whether or not to provide health insurance to all employees? Also remember that the likelihood of being a victim of terrorism is less than that of winning the lottery.
There's something about war debt that cause revolution and collapse of empires.
So I dont buy into the "small gov" argument unless someone starts addressing the big resource hogs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_h...
Where he explains how society can live without taxes extracted by the threat of force.
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.
[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]
-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?
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2010-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
He would say that...
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.
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.
- 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.
So if government employs somebody and wastes employee's effort in the process, then these efforts is actual loss for the economy.
Also, most government jobs are lower paid than private industry. If people are declining your job offers to go work for the government, that suggests something's wrong with your business, not with government.
2) If I have unlimited money supply -- I can always outbid you so you would not be able to hire anybody for your business.
2) Maybe they could, but in practice, most government jobs don't pay high salaries. You're much more likely to be outbid by another private company.
I'm glad you cleared that up. That explains government economics pretty well, yes.
source: 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) and specifically, with regard to government spending, there is the fiscal multiplier effect: 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_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?
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
"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."
[FTFY]
The fact that our particular government is systemically broken does not mean the concept of government is inherently flawed.
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.
This is hacker news... where anything intelligent and interesting is kosher. I found Carmack's argument interesting and solid.
> 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.
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+taxe...
There are people on this site who had not even been conceived when these same arguments were already going back and forth.
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.