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Comment by omegaham | Hacker News Reader

Oh god yes.

I'm currently a relatively junior flunky in the Marine Corps, and the GS civilians who work here are hilarious. "We need to cut the fat!" We work at a minor airbase in the middle of nowhere... oh. Oops. Whatever we are, it sure as hell ain't muscle.

"Government spending is out of control" while talking about how they exploit the DTS system to get as much per diem as possible.

"Those lazy people who expect everything to be handed to them, and that Muslim in charge is just giving it all away" while sitting in their chair bitching whenever a Marine disrupts their Freecell session to ask about equipment repair.

I don't even talk to them about it, mostly because the fact that they are capable of this caliber of doublethink indicates that they're beyond saving.

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From a young AF lieutenant here: Taxes are theft!

My response: But you're paid with those taxes.

His response: Oh, right. <subject change>

I live in a military town, 20k people work directly for the base (there are only 120k people in the county, 250k in the counties most of the employees live in). They rail against the fat, then when furloughs happened last year railed against that. No shit, you want the government to spend less, you've got to take a pay cut or a program has to get cut. You're consistently late on delivering equipment and completing jobs, you're the ones that'll get cut. And the safety record, the morons think it's government interference (damn OSHA!) to insist on PPE [edit: personal protective equipment], and don't wear it so their kids end up with heavy metal poisoning when they carry the crap home on their clothes.

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Personal protective equipment (PPE) refers to protective clothing, helmets, goggles, or other garments or equipment ... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_protective_equipment )

Sorry about that, I live in acronym land.

Thanks for that.

Taking advantage of the existing situation for maximum personal gain doesn't indicate doublethink. It only indicates that they care more about themselves than they care about "the greater good" - which, in my opinion is how it should be.

Somebody's going to be getting paid for doing nothing - it might as well be me.

But then don't bitch about it.

It's doublethink or hypocrisy to complain about people getting fat off the government dole while getting fat off the government dole.

If someone is going to get paid it might as well be me. People that support positions only because they personally benefit or who can't change their minds because it would cost them, are far more worrying. As another comment pointed out, those people have a personal stake in the issue. Accepting they are wrong has an actual cost to them.

Not necessarily. If I worked for the TSA or something, because that was the best paying job that was available, I wouldn't see it as remotely hypocritical to be concerned with politicians, who swore an oath to the Constitution, specifically passing bills to line their pockets.

It's easy to say that a truly just person would not work in an industry that benefitted from tax dollars they would rather not have paid, but considering that the government tends to overpay, it is often the best position for one to be in.

> Not necessarily. If I worked for the TSA or something, because that was the best paying job that was available, I wouldn't see it as remotely hypocritical to be concerned with politicians, who swore an oath to the Constitution, specifically passing bills to line their pockets.

If you worked for the TSA, you would also have sworn an oath to the Constitution.

> It's easy to say that a truly just person would not work in an industry that benefitted from tax dollars they would rather not have paid, but considering that the government tends to overpay, it is often the best position for one to be in.

So, some people who have sworn an oath to the Constitution should optimize their personal income even when that means benefitting from things they see as a contrary to the Constitution, while others shouldn't?

Bad example on my part, perhaps. I did not believe that TSA contractors swore such an oath. I agree that in the example I gave, that would be hypocritical.

I believe my point still stands for all those federal contractors who have not sworn such an oath, but are similarly suckling off of the federal teat.

> I did not believe that TSA contractors swore such an oath.

Contractors don't.

> I believe my point still stands for all those federal contractors who have not sworn such an oath, but are similarly suckling off of the federal teat.

Its not necessarily incoherent (but, still, IMO, somewhat odd) to argue that it is immoral to choose to benefit from violations of the Constitution only if you have sworn a special oath. That argument isn't about the Constitution, just the binding nature of oaths.

It's just on the topic of hypocrisy. Feeling one way and doing another is kind of a default in the human condition, and is often required for success.

The oath of office is perhaps a thinner line than I'm making it out to be, but there's a larger point to be made there about the role of the federal government, the incentives of office, etc.

That said, I'm high (low?) on Valium at the moment, so I'm in no shape to argue it at the moment.

If they argued for bigger government because it directly benefits them, they'd be criticized for that too.

How does one gain a first-hand knowledge of a corrupt system unless one has experienced it himself?

It's quite possible to be the user of the system due to the lack of other alternatives and oppose it in principle. People with mortgages or shares do not necessarily support corrupt Wall Street practices and financial institutions getting "too big to fail", yet benefit from low mortgage rates or bullish runs in the stock market.

It turns out experiential knowledge is not the only way we can learn things.

Why have the silly laws protecting the whistle-blowers then?

The complaint is about the system that allows to do that. While the system is in place, somebody's going to be the beneficiary. If the system were to be destroyed, then nobody - including the people complaining - would get fat off it. It's like if you just took your money out of your wallet and threw it on the street, I'd tell you it's not a sound financial behavior. Would then it be hypocritical for me to take some of that money laying in the street? I personally would be reluctant to work for government unless having no other option, but I understand people who do while still thinking government should be less invasive.

So am I a bad person for advocating exercise and a healthy diet despite generally failing to observe my own recommendation?

Not at all, that's only loosely comparable. To really make it a fair comparison: You'd be a bad person if you thought that obesity was a sign of moral failings, and looked down on those people. All while stuffing your face with your third cake of the day, washing it down with your second liter of coke. If, in that situation, you couldn't recognize yourself as obese and consequently suffering from the same "moral failings" as those you denounce, then you'd be a hypocrite or engaged in doublethink.

Ok, so exercise and diet generally isn't a moral issue these days (sloth and gluttony aside). So what about things that are widely considered virtuous, like keeping promises and appointments, being honest/genuine, not being selfish, not being a dick, etc.? I fail at those things a lot as well, but still consider violations to not be virtuous. Perhaps I don't actually look down on people (at least until they make those violations their norm), but I would still advocate these virtues despite failing at them myself.

Do you acknowledge that it's a personal failing of yours even when you also find it undesirable in others? Then you're being at least somewhat fair and reasonable.

Do you shun others when they fail at it? Do you respond poorly when someone calls you out for having the same problems? Then you're somewhere in that hypocrisy/doublethink territory. (from what you've written it sounds like you're in the first group, not the second.)

It's really a lot about the degree and self-awareness of the individual. A federal employee is not a hypocrite for wanting smaller government. A federal employee is a hypocrite/doublethinker for failing to acknowledge that they want a smaller government, their program is too large or wasteful (F-35!) and that they should be affected by cuts.

JTSummers: I don't think it's doublethink to complain about a situation you personally benefit from. (Actually, it gives you more credibility, because you have a personal stake in the problem: You yourself would be hurt by the change you propose.)

But it is doublethink if you hold other people in contempt for getting benefits from tax revenue, or if you think they are immoral for doing so.

For example, I think Ayn Rand's position was not just that "looting" is bad for the country, but that it is immoral and that doing it makes you a bad person. A Randite who made special efforts to get any kind of money from the government would either have to think of themselves as a looter, or make a special exception for themselves.

Ayn Rand withdrew Social Security checks (to get back what the government took.) There is nothing necessarily wrong with that.

When you claim Social Security money, you aren't "getting back" what you put in/was "taken" from you. Your contribution is already gone, disbursed to current recipients. When you ultimately collect, that money is similarly coming out of someone else's pocket.

You never get your money back out of a bank; you get somebody else's money, if there ever even was physical money involved. And you never step in the same river twice. I think that's all splitting metaphysical hairs.

In this case, it's actually not hair-splitting; see my reply to your comment's sibling. You both demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how Social Security works.

I may well misunderstand how Social Security works. However, the point of my comment is that it's hardly the only system to which one might contribute funds, incurring some future obligation of (re)payment on the part of that system, which is later discharged using funds that were most recently in "someone else's pocket".

Either it's a trivial point that applies pretty broadly outside of SS, or you meant something more significant and I'm interested in knowing what that is.

Your misunderstanding is, at least in part, in thinking that contributing to SS incurs an obligation to you on the part of the program. Technically, it doesn't even have an obligation to current recipients, let alone future ones.

It doesn't matter though. If social security were made of your actual money the end result would still be the same -- your money would go towards investments in the past, and you'd get paid back by people benefiting from those investments.

It's the same with the bank deposits - would you expect do get exact same dollar bills with serial numbers you've deposited every time you use an ATM?

Are you then looting somebody every time you make a cash withdrawal?

No, in fact, it's not the same with bank deposits. Of course you don't get back the same dollar bills; frankly, that's an offensively specious false analogy. But when you deposit money into a bank account, you still own that money; if you were to close your bank account tomorrow, you'd get a cheque for the balance.

Social Security, on the other hand, is a "pay as you go" program. When you contribute money into the Social Security trust fund, it is used to satisfy payments to current recipients. If it's still solvent and operating when you retire or become disabled, then you can expect to receive benefits similarly (though, technically, retirement/"old age" and disability benefits come from different funds).

Moreover, if the fund were to go insolvent — or Congress were to shut the program down — tomorrow, you would have no recourse. (Whereas with bank deposits, you have recourse at least up to the FDIC insured maximum.) If you renounce your US citizenship, or decide to fund your retirement yourself, you don't somehow magically get back the money you contributed, and you're still subject to payroll taxes in the latter case.

I hope you enjoyed the irony of invoking the FDIC to justify why people "own" money that they've deposited in checking accounts as much as I enjoyed reading it. Banks used to shut down all the mfing time without making their depositors whole. The reason that's more or less stopped (in the US) is not because of some moral awakening that somehow missed the social security administration. It's because we regulate banks better.

PS: congress is just as capable of shutting down the FDIC as the SSA

> If it's still solvent and operating when you retire or become disabled, then you can expect to receive benefits similarly

That's now how it works. The reason you get those annual pamphlets from Social Security Administration is to know exactly what you're entitled to. It's highly dependent on your rate and consistency of contributions.

> or decide to fund your retirement yourself, you don't somehow magically get back the money you contributed

Not sure what you're saying. When you reach proper age, you're entitled to Social Security payouts as long as you've contributed into the system the way that was intended. A lot of people fund their own retirements through 401(k), annuities or personal savings, that does not disqualify them from Social Security.

That is true, but it is not how it is marketed. SS is marketed as "insurance" (official name is Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance) - so you pay the premium and then get the benefits. The fact that it is not actually insurance but a combination of tax and welfare program is true, but it's hardly the fault of the person who has no choice in paying the tax. If you already are forced to pay the admission price, you may as well enjoy the benefit of what is being sold, even if you are forced to buy it and prefer not to. E.g. many places force people to buy car insurance. Would it be hypocritical for somebody to object to the fact that it is mandatory and still buy it and use it when accident happens? I think only person not understanding the difference between voluntary and coerced transactions would claim such thing.

Right. That confusion is what causes some people to think that a tax cut is the same as government spending.

Yes, but this is not really related to what I said.

Ayn Rand, and any other person who has become independently wealthy in a way that has nothing to do with the government, can despise looters and be consistent. Government workers in particular cannot.

Given the enormous benefits of taxpayer funded defence/political stability/regulatory frameworks/crime prevention/an educated wokforce etc, 'independently wealthy' is perhaps an impossibility.

What if they're highly employable in private industry anyways, and choose a government job not out of fear of dying of hunger, but for better paycheck, closer commute, or work environment?

Or someone like John Kerry - both independently wealthy and a government worker?

Not the same. You can't opt out of paying into SS. You can choose not to take a government job.

Murder is terrible

brb gotta murder someone.

One of the things I find curious is the dichotomy between rhetoric and intent.

"We need to shrink the government!"

Sequestration happens

"Well not those specific things I like!"

Doesn't that imply then that those bits that shouldn't have been shrunk are therefore not part of what they think is "the government"?

Considering that the list of things that usually people who want to shrink the government think should be exempted usually includes the military, I find that particularly troublesome.

> Doesn't that imply then that those bits that shouldn't have been shrunk are therefore not part of what they think is "the government"?

No, what you are doing is demonstrating the fallacy of division. The proposition "we should shrink government" is not equivalent to, and does not imply, the proposition "we should shrink every individual component of government".

There is a legitimate case to be made that many people who would assert the need to shrink government in aggregate haven't actually considered things sufficiently and would not maintain that position if they considered things program by program, by it is quite wrong to argue that not wanting some particular programs to be cut, by itself, contradicts wanting the government cut in aggregate.

Yeah, you are right. My thinking is a fallacy. Rationally, shrinking even a single program is "shrinking government".

But practically "shrinking government" is used to mean "shrinking the civilian parts of government".

> There is a legitimate case to be made that many people who would assert the need to shrink government in aggregate haven't actually considered things sufficiently and would not maintain that position if they considered things program by program,

This reminds me of an extended conversation I had with a local county politician who ran on a "shrink federal government" platform. I asked him what we should shrink. There are certainly parts of the federal government I'd be in favor of shrinking or cutting. He resisted, he wouldn't answer. I found a high level list of agencies and programs and asked him to run down the list and specify what his platform was.

He refused.

He'd get up and give a speech about the excesses of government and the deficit and all that. So I put together a list of what I'd like to see cut or what I thought would be okay to cut. I was able to provided a rough budget that cut the deficit in half and calculated out a small tax increase that would end the deficit and provide a small surplus that would simply be used to pay down the debt and then simply be returned as tax returns every year.

He refused.

Finally somebody pulled me aside and explained that he needed the support of the national party to help fund his campaign, and they hadn't publicly specified their platform for cuts yet. So he couldn't specify his support for specific cuts. Which meant the conversation never got beyond "shrink government" as a principle, but not any specifics.

A while later, the same national party put in place an across the board, every department gets the same cut, policy that for a while drove our news reporters to the brink of madness and was deeply deeply unpopular among much of the political spectrum.

So in terms of how the rhetoric "shrink government" gets transformed into specific policy actions, it seems that yes, cutting it across the board is not what's intended, but the hard work of establishing a specific platform hasn't been done yet...probably because intra-party politics means there's no consensus of what that should actually look like.

> But practically "shrinking government" is used to mean "shrinking the civilian parts of government".

Uh... I think I know what you want to mean, but this makes it seem like you have no idea about the principle of civilian authority over the military.

This is standard political bull. Everyone is convinced the government wastes huge amounts of money, and therefore the solution to the problem is to cut this waste. Hence this "cut the fat" rhetoric goes over well.

However as soon as you actually identify a specific programme or department to be cut, you energize a constituency to oppose you. If you identify a couple of dozen things to cut you have a couple of dozen constituencies opposing you. Now they will hire consultants, do soundbites and pay for attack ads to try to take you down. So you don't do it.

People rail against things they don't see, be it identified as anything. "I don't like immigrants, except you, you're one of the 'good ones' " etc. Maybe the fact that there are so many "good ones" in that classification you hate would make you realize that you're hating on the wrong thing. But it seems like that's not always the realization.

Well, the Republicans did their homework: railing against spending in the abstract is very popular, railing against specific sending is not. So they do as much as they can of the former, none of the latter.

That the people who listen to their media outlets parrot the talking points shows how effective the strategy is.

My anecdotes differ from yours. Most of the people I have met that are living that dichotomy are very aware of it, and just think "well this is the system we live in, so I have to play along until it changes". Many of them are really bummed about it. Sometimes being the change you want to see in the world is impractical, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have to change your mind about it.

BRB, having another child.

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DTS = Defense Travel System. The online system through which official DoD government travel is arranged.

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