Carmack on government

Dreddnafious Maelstrom · 2010-11-12T21:59:30

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.

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Started by Dreddnafious Maelstrom October 28, 2010 07:27 PM

218 comments, last by trzy 14 years ago

owl

376

October 31, 2010 01:45 PM

Quote: Original post by way2lazy2care
Quote: Original post by owl
Wouldn't you agree that this unjustified war driven by the prior administration is the real cause of many of the economical troubles the US is facing right now?

why do you think this? We are spending money in Iraq that we don't need to spend, but government spending is not a reason for an economy failing. If anything it should be helping our economy.

I'm not an economist, but from my own experience, the money I expend in one thing is money I don't have for another. And that's all I got to sustain my argument.

How did, according to your understanding, the war on Iraq help the economy of the United States? Do you have the numbers?

[size="2"]I like the Walrus best.

way2lazy2care

793

October 31, 2010 03:18 PM

Quote: Original post by owl
I'm not an economist, but from my own experience, the money I expend in one thing is money I don't have for another. And that's all I got to sustain my argument.

How did, according to your understanding, the war on Iraq help the economy of the United States? Do you have the numbers?

It only really put us in a position where it made it more difficult for us to respond to our broken economy. It certainly wasn't what broke the economy in the first place though.

The war didn't suddenly get people to start defaulting on their mortgages.

Of course, when you have 5 people shitting in a pile it isn't always easy to figure out which shit came from where.

Alpha_ProgDes

6,963

October 31, 2010 03:31 PM

Well at least there's proof that corporations are definitely adding to the shit pile.

I hope whether you're Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, that the article I linked to at least will piss you off. And at most, get you angry enough to act like a Frenchman whose retirement age just went up!

Unfortunately, more news coverage will be on Stewart/Colbert rally than on the article. How sad [sad]

Beginner in Game Development? Read here. And read here.

daviangel

604

October 31, 2010 03:48 PM

Quote: Original post by ChaosEngine
So to summarise, the government is inefficient and we'd be better off doing... ???

Yes as they say it is easy to be a critic when you don't offer alternatives LOL!

[size="2"]Don't talk about writing games, don't write design docs, don't spend your time on web boards. Sit in your house write 20 games when you complete them you will either want to do it the rest of your life or not * Andre Lamothe

Promit

13,404

October 31, 2010 06:43 PM

Quote: Original post by owl
I'm not an economist, but from my own experience, the money I expend in one thing is money I don't have for another. And that's all I got to sustain my argument.

But government scale economics doesn't work anything like the economics we know day-to-day. If I need more money, I have to take a loan or earn it. If a bank needs money, it can move a few numbers around to make up reserves. If a government needs money, they can flat out invent it.

SlimDX | Ventspace Blog | Twitter | Diverse teams make better games. I am currently hiring capable C++ engine developers in Baltimore, MD.

owl

376

November 01, 2010 03:04 AM

Quote: Original post by Promit
Quote: Original post by owl
I'm not an economist, but from my own experience, the money I expend in one thing is money I don't have for another. And that's all I got to sustain my argument.
But government scale economics doesn't work anything like the economics we know day-to-day. If I need more money, I have to take a loan or earn it. If a bank needs money, it can move a few numbers around to make up reserves. If a government needs money, they can flat out invent it.

So that's it. The US just needs to invent more money and solve all it's economical problems. I wonder why it is taking them so long. I mean, with free money you can give 1st class healthcare, education and tax-cut for everyone and keep your troops wherever you want without worrying...

[size="2"]I like the Walrus best.

Promit

13,404

November 01, 2010 09:23 AM

Well no. Inventing it apparently creates a deficit, so we have to discontinue social security and declare war on Iran to counteract that. That's what I'm told, anyway.

SlimDX | Ventspace Blog | Twitter | Diverse teams make better games. I am currently hiring capable C++ engine developers in Baltimore, MD.

Ryan_001

3,477

November 01, 2010 10:12 AM

I agree with Carmack. A smaller government is a better one, regardless of whether its liberal, conservative, or other.

owl

376

November 01, 2010 10:39 AM

Quote: Original post by Ryan_001
I agree with Carmack. A smaller government is a better one, regardless of whether its liberal, conservative, or other.

Usually when a country fails, it's not because of the size of the government but for the level of corruption it has. A small corrupt government can do more damage to a country than a big decent one.

Corrupt government: A government that prioritizes everything over population welfare be it in the long or short term.

[size="2"]I like the Walrus best.

smr

2,468

November 01, 2010 11:16 AM

Quote: Original post by StarFoxNow
nothing funny about being sent to prison if you choose not to participate in a pyramid scheme.

I am so weary of people calling Social Security a pyramid scheme. Does NO ONE know what an actual pyramid scheme is? People who have paid into SS /actually/ get money out of Social Security. If it weren't for Social Security my grandmother would be a pauper. She was born into a poor family, married into a poor family, and will die with little to her name. But at least she has a roof over her head and can afford to eat on her own. All because she invested in Social Security. If she had invested her and my deceased grandpa's meager incomes into the stock market conventionally she'd have nothing.

Do my grandma a favor and, before you knock Social Security, get your facts straight first.

Carmack on government

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Carmack on government

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