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Comment by paulsmith | Hacker News Reader

I have a number of problems with this essay, but I want to focus on this idea that people work and earn money, and that money is theirs, and them the government tax man comes around and takes their money. This has to be one of the biggest fallacies of the modern era. I hear it echoed in various forms by people of all different stripes. The notion that there is an independent, absolute concept of wealth or money or cash apart from the laws and government we put in place is so injurious to a healthy understanding of self-governance that I often can't take people seriously after I see them start to go down that road of argument. Implicit in that dollar you have in your pocket, in your paycheck, is a whole set of social and political conditions that allowed you to work, safely, without discrimination or abuse, or threat to your health, to get that dollar in the first place.

This idea of "my money" is willfully ignorant of the tax payer-funded or -secured bounty that allows these same people to have such a high standard of living and a platform upon which to spout their anti-government, every-man-for-themselves arguments. The sheer scale of the background conditions that these people take for granted -- roads, sewers, police & emergency responders, airwaves, parks, clean water, the military, etc., etc., etc., -- is so enormous, encompassing, and enabling that, for people like Carmack decry the very system that made them so wealthy, the disingenuousness and hypocrisy is staggering.

It's time -- lord, long past time -- for smart hacker types to leave behind the immature, naïve libertarianism that pervades their industry and engage with a real, honest politics that, at least implicitly, acknowledges and owns-up to the great wealth and resources already afforded them. /You didn't get here on your own, and you never would have otherwise./

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(Waring: US-centric answer)

I agree that capitalism relies on government-supported stability and infrastructure, but I don't think Carmack was arguing the opposite point: >>This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services ...

The argument concerns dollars spent at the margin. Should the amount of government we have increase, or should it decrease? At the margin, I agree with Carmack that there are many places where we would be better served with less interference, and that we should be cautious about adding new government programs. Clearly there is some fuzzy line between "the justice system" and "corn subsidies". I wouldn't argue that the government has all the program it needs, but neither would I argue that the government needs all the programs it has.

At the risk of flame baiting: I wish I could vote for fiscal conservatism without also voting for hateful and intrusive social conservatism. I also have low confidence in either major party reducing the government in the areas of real excess (see farming), as opposed to e.g. creating new pork-flavored subsidies in the guise of tax relief. Suggestions for concrete ways to battle Parkinson's Law are welcome.

I'm very sympathetic to your overall stance on this and greatly appreciate that you named a specific type of spending to cut: corn subsidies.

That said, I'd be grateful for backup/citations that corn subsidies are bad for the U.S. in economic terms. Two common complaints about corn subsidies -- that the U.S. is cheating on NAFTA, or that overconsumption of corn products lead to health problems -- seem legitimate, but they don't seem to have inflicted any economic damage to the U.S. Further, although there's both redistribution and waste associated with the tax revenues that pay for the subsidies, corn is an infrastructural element of U.S. food production, and presumably corn's cheapness and relative consistency of supply lead to many multiples of downstream ROI.

I do, by the way, think economic harm is the right standard here, as it seems to be the main consideration in Carmack's essay. (Carmack and many commenters here do make reference to more abstract ideas of fairness and legitimacy, but that analysis seems irretrievably subjective and unproductive.)

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.

"Money" only exists because of the organization of government. If we didn't have any, I could just come on to your land, shoot you, and take all your land and possessions.

At the risk of being shot by the land owner or whomever else has a stake in you not doing that.

As all of the "they are taking my hard-earned money and giving to those unproductive masses" like to point out, there are far more of them then there are of you. Eventually you would run out of bullets and end up decorating your precious property as a wall-hanging or drinking mug.

Yes, the existence of money is what stops me from shooting you

I assume he means "the existence of government stops you" not "the existence of money stops you".

equally absurd

Unless I have a gun too, which I would in hypothetical anarchyland, in which case we've got a gunfight.

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.

Yes, but being an anarcho-capitalists is a very interesting rabbit hole.

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. ;)

> 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.

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.

I don't really think that anarcho-capitalists are _that_ crazy. I'd be quite happy if some of them were to try getting together and building their utopia somewhere, because I'm honestly curious as to how it would end up playing out. I mean, I strongly suspect it would be worse than the government we have now - but would it be that much worse? People even managed to make communism work for a little while and this seems a bit less crazy a priori.

I already have some experience in an quasi anarcho-capitalist economy. Here are what I learned:

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.

Which country is that supposed to be?

"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?

Which country is that supposed to be?

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.

This is pretty interesting. Do they ever convert BitCoins back to fiat money or precious metals at some point? Well I guess I can research this myself, I did come across BitCoins before. Fancy idea of backing currency by CPU power rather than a tangible, durable, universally accepted store-of-value but it's a step forward from fiat currency that is backed by the decree of Heli Ben and the gunned power of a state to tax future production...

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.

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.

Apriori (that is, without knowledge of the results) communism was way less crazy-sounding that some here tend to think, because look how many smart people it attracted! Look at 60's US or at Russia circa 1900, where communism was the belief system for smart young people to "graduate" to. It had the same hipster vibe as the belief in a benevolent singularity today, only more so.

I wouldn't say that this means that it's a priori crazy, merely that humans have an outstanding ability to believe crazy things.

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.

Untrue, the concept of money was developed long before government. Hammurabi's code only formalized a number of systems that were already in place. It took government to make money unsound.

Yeah, it took a government to transform "money == gold / gold in a bank" to "money == debt".

partially true, you are talking about Fiat money, and it is true that it is a fairly modern invention. Taxation was more abusive system prior to Fiat money, your local lord, or city state with its self issued currency, it was not a rosy experience always.

Depends on historians interpretations mostly -- as in any case there are instances that support your point and those that refute it, and there are historians who come to your conclusions and those that come to the opposite ones.

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.

thanks for the reference, in turn i offer Nial Ferguson excellent - the ascent of money. fantastic overview, if only for the analysis of the dramatic effect of fibonacci, and the ascent of the Medici family.

It's not misleading. The political economic function of the government is to ensure that markets function under controlled conditions. An elaborate government apparatus provides services without which capitalism as we know it today would be inconceivable. Those services are worth something. If you disagree, let the government cease the enforcement of limited liability.

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.

<i>Whether that is feasible is another matter entirely.</i>

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.

A false dichotomy. The choice isn't between living in a police state and running amok with your slingshot.

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.

A false dichotomy. The choice isn't between living in a police state and running amok with your slingshot.

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.

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.

If the need to enforce trademarks was actually great enough, then a private company or a standards body would obviously arise to fill the need.

LOL!

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

Most of your taxes are simply taken and given to people less productive than yourself.

he didn't talk only about taxes HE paid. There were 10+ generations that paid taxes to the United States of America for the last 200+ years to become what it is now.

even if I agreed with your assumption (which I don't), I would certainly not be able to agree that US taxpayers subsidized "less productive" for past 200+ years and US still became what it is now.

even if I agreed with your assumption (which I don't)

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%.

I'd argue that education is a public good. Even if you don't have kids, it seems like it would be in your interest to ensure that the people who will be running things in the future are informed and competent.

please look up the terms 'public good' and 'private good'

By this logic, any investment is a public good.

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.

You're correct on "not a public good", sorry. Complete economics brainfart; I was thinking public good = for the common good. I'm not sure who downvoted you or why, but I modded you back to +1.

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.

You seem to be missing a word on that last sentence, so my apologies if I'm misreading you. John Carmack talked about what he saw as the problem getting worse, and I think he would say that most of what we spent money on 200 years ago was money well spent. In fact, I would be very surprised if there were many things that the government did 200 years ago which he would be against the government continuing to do.

I would be very surprised if people 200, 150, 100, 50 years ago didn't think that things are getting worse and worse with government spending. And yet somehow America grew to become the World Power, long-lasting businesses were created, government-funded research led to many advances etc. And very often all that happened while tax rates were much MUCH higher and government was very much involved. So I call out BS.

Fine, then. If you want to be all against those programs, then explicitly say "What I want is for social security and medicare to be abolished". SS and Medicare run entirely separate from the rest of the federal gov't, raised on their own taxes, run by their own agencies -- they're entirely separate. You're not "anti government" and don't have a point about "government", you have a point about federally mandated social insurance programs that are incredibly popular with everyone else.

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.

What I want is for social security and medicare to be abolished.

I was only pointing out a logical flaw in paulsmith's argument. I wasn't taking a position one way or the other.

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.

"the government should not pay for private goods" -- this is the kind of evasive, hand-wavey crap that I'm talking about. Sorry about the tone, I don't mean to be insulting and think you're an alright guy from our interactions, but it is hand wavey crap. I constantly see conservatives talking about "smaller government and lower taxes" and I never hear one idea from them about what they'd cut, let alone an acknowledgement of the fact that we had a budget surplus in 2000 and very much not in 2008.

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?

> "this is the kind of evasive, hand-wavey crap that I'm talking about."

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.

Of course I know what the term means. The point is that the term is mushy enough to be meaningless in all but the most trivial of applications. Nobody thinks the government should be competing with Sam's club in the retail breakfast cereal market. If something's being debated, it's almost by definition in the gray area.

"I don't think the government should produce private goods" means effectively nothing.

Dude, just apply the definition. No honest person is debating that SS/medicare are private goods, they are only debating whether the government should pay for them anyway. Just to avoid being accused of handwaving, I'll write out the obvious reasoning explicitly.

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?

I agree with you, but I'm gonna argue the other side right now since I see an objection to that particular line of argument.

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.

One could argue that welfare benefits the public, but that is not the same as saying welfare checks are public goods. It's a technical term that doesn't say anything about the external benefits to the public.

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".

So we appear to be in blurry-definitionland. Meals for prisoners are private goods which are part of the public good "functional criminal justice system". Welfare checks for unemployed bums are private goods which are part of the public good "no dead hobos on lawns".

"no dead hobos on lawns" is not a good, it's a service. Various goods might contribute to that service, such as "homeless shelters" and "welfare checks".

I suppose "functional criminal justice system" is actually a service, as well, while "prison" is a good.

I would absolutely be in favor of prisoners (sentenced via due process) earning their own board. E.g., washing government vehicles, cleaning highways, hauling landscaping materials for erosion control projects at state parks, etc. etc.

"Apply the definition"? It's a qualitative term in a qualitative field. Everything in economics is about quantifying your qualitative assumptions of things. Which is probably the best way to study the matter.

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?

> 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.''

"- its use/consumption by one party precludes its use by another party"

I'm glad you don't view intellectual property as legitimate property.

I don't view intellectual property as private goods; it doesn't meet the definition. I said nothing about its legitimacy as property, nor do I intend to, as that's not the topic at hand.

Please do not drag the discussion off topic by twisting the definition given into something it's not.

Lotharbot pointed you to wikipedia which explains it pretty well.

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.)

Tollbooths?

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.

When tollbooths are feasible, roads are indeed a private good. You are indeed correct that many of the intermediate goods in providing a public good are private goods when they are sold.

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.

The point is, where do you draw the line? If you're comfortable with government spending money on private goods that are intermediate goods for military protection, then why not with government spending money on social programs that can be seen as intermediate goods for other kinds of public goods?

Excellent post, reminds me of http://log.ometer.com/2009-09.html .

Most of your taxes are simply taken and given to people less productive than yourself.

Citations please.

Already provided if you scrolled down. Here it is again:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html

None of those except perhaps welfare implies that the money is going to people less productive than yourself. Also, I'm sure many people on welfare would love to have a good job and be productive.

People who have retired from productive labor are, by definition, not productive.

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?

[1] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf

Sorry, did you get that "80% of poor people don't want to work" figure by dividing the number of working poor by the total number of poor people from that report you linked to?[1] I didn't see any information in that study pertaining to motivation or desire. Just because 75% of people below the poverty line were not employed for half the year does not mean that they did not want to be.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf

Just because 75% of people below the poverty line were not employed for half the year...

Go read the first 3 sentences of the report. That includes clauses inside parenthesis.

Quite right you are. I still take some issue with the idea that 75% of the poor don't want to work. The report is not entirely clear on what it means to be "looking for work", and it's hard to know what different motivations are driving that 10% of the american population. But, absent data, I will concede the point.

"Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work."

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.

Also, I'm sure many people on welfare would love to have a good job and be productive.

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.

You make it sound like John Carmack is advocating for lower taxes so he can afford a new Bugatti or somesuch. The truth is he advocates for this because the current system appears irrational to him.

I'm sure John Carmack would be successful, to some degree, in almost any system of government- He is unusually gifted. Saying he's a counterargument to his own political position and that he is "a product of the current government system" is both unfair and untrue.

Since he is a person of such unusual competence I think his opinion should carry a lot of weight- It does for me. Your (pretty irrational) argument appears to be that because he is competent and successful his opinion should carry LESS weight.

I think you should weight his argument by the quality of the argument itself. While I respect John Carmack as a computer programmer, I also know that computer programming is very different from macroeconomics.

I personally don't think his reasoning is very good. He's saying that you shouldn't be forced to pay for something that's inefficient, but also that government can never be efficient enough. So the argument of an inefficient government merely becomes a justification for his ideological viewpoint that you shouldn't be forced to do something, in this case pay taxes. But as he indicated that his viewpoint was formed by experience, and not some sort of political commitment, it all seems very biased to me.

What is so abstract about the non-aggression axiom? I wouldn't be so quick to trust the macroeconomist over a computer scientist. I mean, does anyone really understand macroeconomics? Greenspan thought he did, ha.

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

It's the realistic position.

So was slavery at one point.

Your comment reads like breathless Ayn Rand fan fiction.

Yes she made the same points. What's yours?

  > I want discussion, reason, and persuasion to be used to
  > solve society's ills; you want the gun.

What do you do with criminals in your utopia? Discuss their crimes with them and persuade them to pay restitution?

Retaliate by the same natural right to your own person that forbids you to initiate force against others.

So, kill them?

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.

So many books have been written about this. If you are genuinely curious, read The Production of Security (and justice is covered too) and other Rothbard or Hoppe writings.

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?

Why restitution? In some cases - violent crimes - any amount of money would not be enough. Punishment has no positive effect for society.

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

Well, you've done the Ayn Randian thing here, and distilled a very complex issue into two different polarizing viewpoints.

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.

We are all benefited by not having poor people, young and old, dying in our streets.

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".

I, for one, appreciate that you've logically outlined some counterargument.

There are certainly immature, naive libertarians out there (probably down-voting your comment right now,) but the places where you have been immature and naive here are in thinking that anti-gov't/every-man-for-himself is the cornerstone of the opposing argument.

When I read Carmack's post I think of anti-inefficient-gov't not anti-gov't. You may attempt to say those are the same, but I disagree.

The "imagine a privatized [gov't agency]" argument is a thought-experiment to show the idealism behind the anti-efficient-gov't movement. It should not be taken literally.

By the way, work earned that dollar; it did even when there was unsafe work, discrimination, and abuse.

I think the color of Carmack's statements are much more anti-gov't than anti-ineffcient-gov't. The way I read it, he's saying lets make government more efficient by cutting out services, not by making all services operate more efficiently. To me, that is only anti-inefficient-gov't by way of anti-gov't. He effectively states that gov't can't be efficient :

"Sure, there is room for improvement everywhere, but there are important fundamental limits."

"So, the federal government is essentially doomed to inefficiency, no matter who is in charge or what policies they want it to implement."

"I would ask that it stop doing the majority of the things that it is currently doing"

Note that he is also glad that the government is doomed to inefficiency : "Even if you could snap your fingers and get it, do you really want a razor sharp federal apparatus ready to efficiently carry out the mandates of whoever is the supreme central planner at the moment? The US government was explicitly designed to make that difficult, and I think that was wise."

It read to me as "government performs most tasks inefficiently, and that's ok; but let's have it perform fewer tasks inefficiently so we can perform them more efficiently ourselves and have a little less fiscal drag on our lives.

An efficient government would be dangerous, and an inefficient government is draining. If relying on government is a compromise between those two, then why not go with the better option (free markets)? Markets are fast and efficient, a concept foreign to governments everywhere.

In general, I think government waste is a red herring. It's such a vanishingly small percentage of the overall budget that it often is a stalking horse for a desire to have the government deregulate industries, for example.

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.

That's just it, though: why advocate an anti-inefficient-government position? Who, precisely, advocates a pro-inefficient-government position? Right, nobody. So, instead of advocating anti-inefficient-government, it makes a lot more sense to advocate specific measures that will improve efficiency. That might be cutting programs, but advocate cutting of specific programs, because of that program's inefficiency. Give a concrete reason for it, such as number of dollars spent by the average taxpayer, or an alternative use for that money. Pick a specific measure, not something general like "social security" or "TARP".

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?

Since I've NEVER seen the government do anything efficiently, anyone who argues for more government is by my definition arguing for inefficiency.

In this case (when they're arguing for more government), however, you could oppose it by arguing anti-government. That sort of puts us back where we started.

Oddly enough, though, nobody seems to argue for just "More government" in general either. People instead argue for specific programs they want.

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

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

Arguably, Singapore/Ireland/other small, developed, low tax nations can only exist given the presence of high tax countries like the US, UK, etc.

I don't necessarily disagree, but would you mind explaining your reasoning behind that?

"The notion that there is an independent, absolute concept of wealth or money or cash apart from the laws and government"

I'd be willing to bet humans had the concept of wealth long before the concept of government.

On systems of government like the US republic or the various democracies around the European continent, there is an absolute concept of a citizen's contribution to the infrastructure that the state..

It's called taxation.

And it is not the only one. Citizens have various duties in every state; they don't have to be enumerated.

For people that make their fortunes by not paying their taxes, lying to the government, etc. your argument might have some value. For people that are working in the public sector exclusively, your argument might have some value. For an absolutist government, your argument would make a lot of sense.

But not for the rest.

(edited: my grammar sucks. i should get some sleep :/)

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

Well, you've kinda missed the point. The point is that this isn't a deserted island. It's a carefully structured system, one purpose of which is to give individuals the foundation to be as successful and innovative as Carmack has.

The parents implies there is not even an absolute concept of wealth.

This is sort of the elephant in the room. The only reason that you are given compensation for your work at all is because it theoretically motivates you to do more of it. The "rewarding hard work as an ethical value proposition" thing really only crept up in the past century. While I think it is a good theory, treating it as essentially the only parameter to an ethical decision is extremely simplistic.

You can argue for smaller government in ways that don't consist of counting dollars taken away from people at gunpoint. I find those sorts of argument much more compelling.

Dear sir,

Please send me your bank account deetz so I can spend some of our money.

kthx!

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