from Hacker News

John Carmack on the Government

by badmon on 1/27/17, 4:11 PM with 39 comments

  • by justicezyx on 1/27/17, 4:17 PM

    A tech god start talking about topic he does not understand well enough, and the article is full of descriptions without much data to back.

    No one is immune from human nature after all.

  • by aphextron on 1/27/17, 5:28 PM

    Carmack is a highly focused, driven, successful individual that believes in meritocracy. Combine that with being a tech focused white male, and of course he is a libertarian. How could he possibly see the world in any other way?

    What gets me the most about libertarian rants though, is how the person writing is always so completely convinced that they have come up with some novel solution to the world's problems. As if the only thing standing between us and a techno-utopia is the EPA and the FCC. They do not acknowledge that the structures in place are a direct result of the failure of free markets to handle basic human needs on a wide scale.

  • by soheil on 1/27/17, 4:46 PM

    > 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?

    nailed it.

  • by unwind on 1/27/17, 4:20 PM

    Considering recent changes in the US government's leadership, this really needs a (2010) in the title.

  • by funkysquid on 1/27/17, 5:13 PM

    "Helping people directly can be a noble thing. Forcing other people to do it with great inefficiency? Not so much."

    Just because scaling a process results in inefficiencies doesn't mean there's no need to scale it. If you feel like you personally can help every person directly, please do, disrupt taxes! But until you, we're not tearing down the system that works (however inefficiently).

  • by antisthenes on 1/27/17, 5:10 PM

    Nothing more to see here than the regular libertarian, economically illiterate drivel:

    Need less government, government is bad, regulation is bad, taxes are theft.

    There, I just saved you 10 minutes. I apologize for the snark, but for an outsider (someone who's not part of the tech bubble, and not a libertarian), these rants from libertarian tech people are comically identical to each other, yet none of them ever amount to anything, because all fail to take human nature into account.

  • by kbenson on 1/27/17, 5:22 PM

    > 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.

    Well, since we are stating theses, mine would be that while the government delivers poor value for services it consumes in some areas, the private sector sometimes provides very poor value for the services it consumes because it is incentivized to do the opposite.

    Believing one is better than the other without actually looking at the economics involved leads to things like privatized prisons (where the incentive is to keep people in and returning to prison, not to rehabilitate them), and large public lending systems (Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac) which are susceptible to being brittle under economic stress.

    Any time you think you believe something strongly enough that it falls under a 90/10 rule, it's probably worth really looking into that 10% and understanding it. You might find your 90/10 rule is more accurately a 70/30 or 60/40 rule, and that's really a different thing.