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John Carmack on 10-28-2010
Fresh!
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
Carmack exhibits a lack of historical understanding in regard to these conditions. The items of friction, regulation, taxation, and dependency, that he identifies as working against the positive inertia, have been declining for the last 30 years. While during that time the overall economy has grown and productivity increased, the benefits were concentrated at the top rather than spread around. Zero sum games are games of greed, but if you're going to talk about games then you've got to talk about rules and who makes the rules and frankly speaking these days it's the people at the top who make the rules.
The Golden Rule: He with the most gold make the rules. This has been especially true the last 30 years. At any rate, for a programming guru slash engineer, when it comes to the political economy Carmack doesn't seem adept at gathering evidence and performing research before forming conclusions.
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
He doesn't grasp the core fact that Government is not a business and should not be operated as one. He also fails to support his thesis with evidence even as he branches off to make corollary assertions about society. He's not a sociologist. He also seems blissfully unaware of the fact that markets fail and when they do only government can step into fill the void. He deems this ambition and says government should have less of it. In other words, government should not intervene when markets fail and society would be better off with streets full of millions of starving homeless people.
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
Here is where he demonstrates his lack of understanding of the workings of fiat currency with a reserve banking system. It's so ghastly to watch paper burning!
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
Blame the civil service? For once I'd like to see one of these grand diatribes start their attack on government by singling out military bureaucracy for criticism. That never happens because behind the whole government inefficiency mantra always lurks a blindness to market failure and desire to blame those failures on the victims rather than an honest examination of the problem.
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
The government was explicitly designed to be inefficient and that is wise, but pay no attention to what I wrote in my last three paragraphs!
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
Market failure? No it couldn't be! Not the impossible!!!
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
Kum ba ya, my lord, kum ba ya, Oh Lord, kumbaya Oh you starry eyed hippies!!!
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
Do something less the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud!!! Was that an idealistic cry or a scheming manipulation meant to take money from people to spend in the name of a new-old cause instead of letting is be used for whatever purpose the earner would have preferred?
What about taking money from non-earners?
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Original post by Dreddnafious Maelstrom
again, this seems like a reasoned approach to me.
Approach to what - story telling?
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
A special few see tax day as the beginning of redistribution season, from the workers up to to the corporate bosses! Great trick there! If corporations and shareholders were required to pay their fair share of taxes everyone else wouldn't be so mad that they aren't getting as much back for their taxes. Funny how when you frame taxes as utility bills, the first response is to cut back rather than to demand better service. It would seem that Carmack at least already thinks about government as a service provider, but instead of demanding better services, he directs his ire inward denying himself the use of services. It would seem he thinks that government services aren't there for corporeal citizens to use. We can only guess whether he also thinks that way for corporate citizens.
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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?
Sorry, but Carmack has the facts about
Walter Anderson totally wrong. The man was arrested in 2005, so he could not have been in jail for a decade. Seg Fault! Moreover, he plead guilty to "hiding $365 million in income by using aliases, shell companies, offshore tax havens, secret accounts and drop boxes in the Netherlands. ... Among other things, Anderson admitted earning more than $126 million in 1998, a year that he claimed an income of $67,939 on his federal tax return. He paid $495 in taxes that year, authorities said."
Telecom Mogul Guilty of Tax Scam). Fuck that guy. He got less than what he deserved.
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Original post by John Carmack on 10-28-2010
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.
Allowing a select few people to reap the bulk of the benefits of civilization without paying their share of the cost for it isn't noble either. It's foolish.
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Original post by Dreddnafious Maelstrom
So the upshot is that Carmack might have a hard time maintaining a decent rating here on GDNet [smile]
Probably not. He's probably smart enough to rack up points in the technical forums while staying out of the lounge.
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Original post by Dreddnafious Maelstrom
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.
Is it really that odd? When they read, they probably read technical manuals rather than sociological tracts and the rest they pick up from the society around them.
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes." - the Laughing Man
