No one is immune from human nature after all.
What if the state of CA regulated Quality Controls and Error rates on Software produced? What if there is a regulation to prove that a Video game does not impair congnitive skills of 1% of people who play it etc.
The tech world is so lefty because, its "byte world" is nearly unregulated but the Aerospace, manufacturing etc. "atoms world" is regulated to death. That is the problem. If there is a person without depth, its is likely to be you than John Carmack.
Edit: As usual flagged, but if this was a testament to the group think article from the atlantic or new york times, this would have a couple hundred upvotes and a massive policy discussion. My respect for John Carmack has increased even further, he like many practitioners is an empiricist.
The old chestnut about "how can it be fair to extract money with the threat of jail" is also a huge warning sign. The government only has two methods of enforcement, one being fines and the other being prison. If you buy into that idea, you are left without any means to collect any taxes and therefore the concept of "government" no longer makes any sense. That leads you into Ayn-Rand-la-la-land which is a nice idea for a 14-year old to entertain but not a serious option to organise a society.
I'm also sceptical of his claims of government inefficiency, considering Armadillo Aerospace doesn't exactly strike me as a paragon for the magic efficiency of private enterprises.
One of the major reasons that the semiconductor and software industry took off is because of agencies like DARPA, where program managers are rotated (never permanent). If we continue to have careerists in charge then, unlike DARPA, we're bound to have inefficiencies develop. We would benefit from a reorganized government, where only small term-limited crack teams are kept in civil service and rotated to address gaps and challenges. This is how the Obamacare website was changed from a dysfunctional site being developed by a politically connected contractor selected/overseen by civil service to a more robust site developed by a volunteer crack team from SV. So, I disagree with Carmack in that it's possible to reformulate government to make it more effective and have government fund risks that private sector is unlikely to take due to short-term profit perspectives.
Despite the perceived waste in defense and other tech centers, I would guess the waste in the state department dwarfs everything. Not sure what to do about this area.
Your comment about the US tax rate is misguided though. While we might technically pay less than some European countries (not much less, in some cases), we also receive a lot less in return.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth...
A vast amount of US tax dollars go towards social security--a creaky, shuddering retirement plan that many expect will collapse before they ever benefit from it--and defense. When ~32% of your paycheck evaporates with no clear benefit like those enjoyed in European countries, it makes sense to complain.
The argument is that the tax rates (and control over resulting revenues) should be more of a local decision. It's an orthogonal concern to what government, at all levels, should take responsibility for. And therefore how revenue is collected is also an orthogonal concern.
In most other countries people pay higher taxes, in the US people pay less in taxes, therefore I can't see why taxes should be lower.
How about reasoning from first principles?
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.
That's not really correct: those structures are the direct result of politicians creating them, in response to a perception that markets (unfree markets …) failed to do one thing or another.
Was it a mistaken perception that rivers were catching on fire in the 60's, leading to the EPA? I guess we should have left that to the free market too.
Government and business can work together, but we must acknowledge that the goal of business is to drive profit, not human welfare. The goal of the government is to drive human welfare, not profit. The two should be seen as litigants in a court of law; combative yet civil, with an agreed upon set of values. The opposition of these two forces creates a dynamic far preferable to one extreme or the other.
nailed it.
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).
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.
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.
