With the caveat that being really smart and having uber-engine programming skills doesn't mean your political philosophy is inherently superior I recently read a short blurb by Carmack on his political philosophy, and as it mirrors basically my own beliefs I thought I'd share it.

Link to source

Quote:
John Carmack on 10-28-2010



Almost everything that I write publicly is about technical details in software or aerospace, and the points are usually not very contentious. I’m going to go out on a limb today and talk about a much more banal topic -– government. This is sort of an open letter to my mother and stepfather, who are intelligent people, but we don’t see eye to eye on political issues. A couple brief conversations a year during visits doesn’t really establish much, and I have wanted to make a more carefully considered set of points.



I had nearly disqualified myself from discuss politics by not bothering to cast a vote for almost 20 years after I was legally able to. I was busy. I paid millions of dollars of taxes without any dodges, and just focused on my work. Listening to political speeches full of carefully calculated rhetoric is almost physically painful to me, and I diligently avoided it.



A couple things slowly brought me around to paying more attention. A computer game company doesn’t need to have much to do with the government, but a company that flies rocket ships is a different matter. Due to Armadillo Aerospace, in the last decade I have observed and interacted with a lot of different agencies, civil servants, and congressmen, and I have collected enough data points to form some opinions. The second thing that has changed for me is becoming a father; with two young sons, I think more about how the world might look in twenty or thirty years when they are adults.



I am an optimist on almost all fronts. 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.



However, trends do matter. Small, nearly painless losses accumulate over the years, and the world can slowly change into something you don’t want while you weren’t paying attention. It doesn’t take a cataclysmic crash, just a slow accretion of over regulation, taxation, and dependency that chokes the vibrant processes that produce wealth and growth. Without growth, you get a zero sum game of fighting over the pie that breeds all sorts of problems in government and society.

basic premise.

Quote:
My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious. This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services, but that the cost of having the government provide them is much higher than you would tolerate from a company or individual you chose to do business with. For almost every task, it is a poor tool.



So much of the government just grinds up money, like shoveling cash into a wood chipper. It is ghastly to watch. Billions and billions of dollars. Imagine every stupid dot-com company that you ever heard of that suckered in millions of dollars of investor money before leaving a smoking crater in the ground with nothing to show for it. Add up all that waste, all that stupidity. All together, it is a rounding error versus the analogous program results in the government. Private enterprises can’t go on squandering resources like that for long, but it is standard operating procedure for the government.



Well, can’t we make the government more efficient, so they can accomplish its tasks for less, or do more good work? Sure, there is room for improvement everywhere, but there are important fundamental limits. It is entertaining to imagine a corporate turnaround expert being told to get the federal house in shape, but it can’t happen. The modern civil service employment arrangement is probably superior to the historic jobs-as-political-spoils approach, but it insulates the workforce from the forces that improve commercial enterprises, and the voting influence of each worker is completely uncorrelated with their value. Without the goal and scorecard of profit, it is hard to even make value judgments between people and programs, so there are few checks against mounting inefficiency and abject failure, let alone evolution towards improvement.



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.



So, the federal government is essentially doomed to inefficiency, no matter who is in charge or what policies they want it to implement. I probably haven’t lost too many people at this point – almost nobody thinks that the federal government is a paragon of efficiency, and it doesn’t take too much of an open mind to entertain the possibility that it might be much worse than you thought (it is).



Given the inefficiency, why is the federal government called upon to do so many things? A large part is naked self interest, which is never going to go away -- lots of people play the game to their best advantage, and even take pride in their ability to get more than they give.



However, a lot is done in the name of misplaced idealism. It isn’t hard to look around the world and find something that you feel needs fixing. The world gets to be a better place by people taking action to improve things, but it is easy for the thought to occur that if the government can be made to address your issue, it could give results far greater than what you would be able to accomplish with direct action. Even if you knew that it wasn’t going to be managed especially well, it would make up for it in volume. This has an obvious appeal.



Every idealistic cry for the government to “Do Something” means raising revenue, which means taking money from people to spend in the name of the new cause instead of letting it be used for whatever purpose the earner would have preferred.

again, this seems like a reasoned approach to me.

Quote:
It is unfortunate that income taxes get deducted automatically from most people’s paychecks, before they ever see the money they earned. A large chunk of the population thinks that tax day is when you get a nice little refund check. Good trick, that. If everyone was required to pay taxes like they pay their utilities, attitudes would probably change. When you get an appallingly high utility bill, you start thinking about turning off some lights and changing the thermostat. When your taxes are higher than all your other bills put together, what do you do? You can make a bit of a difference by living in Texas instead of California, but you don’t have many options regarding the bulk of it.



Also, it is horribly crass to say it, but taxes are extracted by the threat of force. I know a man (Walt Anderson), who has been in jail for a decade because the IRS disagreed with how his foundations were set up, so it isn’t an academic statement. What things do you care strongly enough about to feel morally justified in pointing a gun at me to get me to pay for them? A few layers of distance by proxy let most people avoid thinking about it, but that is really what it boils down to. Feeding starving children? The justice system? Chemotherapy for the elderly? Viagra for the indigent? Corn subsidies?



Helping people directly can be a noble thing. Forcing other people to do it with great inefficiency? Not so much. There isn’t a single thing that I would petition the federal government to add to its task list, and I would ask that it stop doing the majority of the things that it is currently doing. My vote is going to the candidates that at least vector in that direction.

Here he's just bringing it home. So the upshot is that Carmack might have a hard time maintaining a decent rating here on GDNet [smile]

It's really odd that so many of the quality hackers I meet in real life are largely classical liberal and the general bent here is more socialist. That's part of what I love about this venue.

I'm sure most of it is where I live and the country I live in.

The government is inefficient, so...?

He didn't say anything!

Quote: Original post by Dreddnafious Maelstrom
Here he's just bringing it home. So the upshot is that Carmack might have a hard time maintaining a decent rating here on GDNet [smile]

It's really odd that so many of the quality hackers I meet in real life are largely classical liberal and the general bent here is more socialist. That's part of what I love about this venue.

I'm sure most of it is where I live and the country I live in.

I don't think what he stated was either liberal nor conservative. I think this is where many people get it wrong. Many Democrats and liberals will agree that the government is extremely inefficient, while many Republicans are quick to drive this country further into debt. I'd agree that chances are everyones taxes could probably be cut if we made the government run more efficiently. But by running more efficiently, I'm not talking privatizing it, but rather, cutting out all the BS red tape. My limited time working in the government saw issues such as even trying to purchase pens and paper for work purposes to be expensed having to go through at least 5 different people for approval. And then, we had to purchase at least a certain amount of computers from specific small companies. I don't think one man, or even if we completely replaced the entire federal government with first termers will solve this problem. It will take years.

As for Carmack having a hard time maintaining a decent rating? I'm not sure. If he came on here and announced who he was, and if we believed it (or if it was verified), I'm pretty sure he'd be @1900 within a week, even if his only post was just saying hi, regardless of his views, political or otherwise. If he was on under a pseudonym, perhaps I could agree to an extent. Surely his technical knowledge would help drive his ratings up from the non Lounge section.

This is one thing that bugs me, in that people no longer appear to have the right to give an opinion, without drastic consequences. Free speech was meant to protect speech that we didn't want to hear, and not that which we agree with. Yes, you have Fox News for the conservatives, and CNN for the liberals, but if you don't go along with the core audiences ideals, you're ostracized.

I agree with Carmack.



Less well-fare, more farm work. You can't find american farm workers because they are now being fed, watered, and paid to sit around by our tax money. And we are forced to pay out not matter how we vote.

So to summarise, the government is inefficient and we'd be better off doing... ???

Quote: Original post by StarFoxNow
I agree with Carmack.



Less well-fare, more farm work. You can't find american farm workers because they are now being fed, watered, and paid to sit around by our tax money. And we are forced to pay out not matter how we vote.

You'll have to eliminate minimum wage then. Quite simply, it's not worth it to pay somebody $7 an hour to pick tomatos. Hence why illegals who are happy to get what they can do it. Shit, I've worked minimum wage doing trail maintenance on the AT and farmwork back home, and as strenuous and demanding as it was, I don't think it was worth what they paid me; it baffles me that you would pay someone $7, $8 an hour to stand at a counter and sell slushies.

You don't want efficient government. Governments are about people, the less technical they are, they better.

First thing an efficient government would do is put everyone into jail - for jay walking. No, really. It is an offense/crime/violation/whatever, and every single citizen has done it dozens or hundreds of times.

Meanwhile, powers that be, would continue to go about their business, funneling billions of tax-evading dollars via different countries to maximize private profits. Just like the do now. None of them even remotely violates any regulation or laws (opposite of violation does not mean being in accordance or acting-in-spirit).


As for at-will government participation. Another thing you don't want. The only thing that binds someone to government and vice-versa is citizenship. Don't like a law? Turn in your citizenship. Now imagine being unemployed - but in this case you have no country. Better hope you find another one. Oh, you also wanted your country to protect you? Sure - service guarantees citizenship.

Study history. The modern concept of countries and benefits they bring is fairly recent, in some cases it only goes back 50 years or so. The mere concept that every citizen is equal is revolutionary and in many cases still unaccepted in many places in the world.

For example, imagine that you are given the option to stop paying taxes - in exchange for your vote. And the next law that gets passed says: "In order to receive medical treatment, use public transportation or use government services, a voter's card is required". This is nothing new - this is precisely how things always worked. Multi-caste system, either determined by blood, money, power or other means determine who got what. And it has been only since recently that people have been given the options of moving between castes. Less than 100 years. Before it took at least one generation and a lot of effort.

Governments waste money and are inefficient. People just don't realize what would happen if they changed their current modern form. Some would be better off - but it would be the same people as now.

I respect Carmack as much as anybody.

But.

"Government is a poor solution to everything, thus I will suggest absolutely nothing useful in comparison." That is apparently the standard libertarian line nowadays -- everything's screwed up, stop trying to ask government to fix it! What should we do instead, you ask? Well government is the problem! The solution is...government is the problem!

Thanks for the update. You're goddamn geniuses.

Ok, so the government is inefficient and private corporations handles things more efficiently. So let businesses provides services not government. Well for one, corporations are for shareholders and government is for the people. Two, we've already seen what happens when government lets the market run without oversight. Also Carmack made a comment about quality of service from a corporation is superior to a government counterpart. That's only because there is government oversight. Corporations will pass low-quality products for a high price if they can get away with it. Regulation (ie. anti-monopoly) creates competition which in turn creates advances in quality and performance. Corporations by nature look to profit first, not progress.

Everyone knows that government is inefficient. That its citizens can be sheep. And change does not come unless the mob is enraged. But a government can be dictated to by the population with a vote. The corporation can be efficient. Its customers can be lulled and turned into zealots. Change can come by supporting the corporation's competitor. The corporation can only be dictated to by the shareholder.

"Government is the problem," is a pretty trite statement. It doesn't examine the problem or express any nuance about what is valid and what is not. In my viewpoint, such an un-nuanced statement is usually paired with a belief that the optimal plan of action is to blanket-oppose government initiatives, and to axe government programs without any sort of plan to phase them out. Worries that this will cause trouble are dismissed -- it will all work out eventually, we are assured.

Carmack hasn't said anything that we haven't already heard many times before. I wonder if he thinks that government regulation of rocketry, designed to prevent his test rockets from ending up in my living room, is not needed.

I really prefer a smaller federal government, which is not to say that I oppose government programs, but I would rather see them implemented at a state level in most cases. I'll still reject any argument on its face that makes sweeping generalizations concerning government inefficiency and insists that I never consider it a viable avenue for implementing solutions. For every complex problem, there's an answer that's simple, neat, and wrong.