John Carmack on government
I have a number of problems with this essay, but I want to focus on this idea that people work and earn money, and that money is <i>theirs</i>, and them the government tax man comes around and takes their money. This has to be one of the biggest fallacies of the modern era. I hear it echoed in various forms by people of all different stripes. The notion that there is an independent, absolute concept of wealth or money or cash apart from the laws and government we put in place is so injurious to a healthy understanding of self-governance that I often can't take people seriously after I see them start to go down that road of argument. Implicit in that dollar you have in your pocket, in your paycheck, is a whole set of social and political conditions that allowed you to work, safely, without discrimination or abuse, or threat to your health, to get that dollar in the first place.<p>This idea of "my money" is willfully ignorant of the tax payer-funded or -secured bounty that allows these same people to have such a high standard of living and a platform upon which to spout their anti-government, every-man-for-themselves arguments. The sheer scale of the background conditions that these people take for granted -- roads, sewers, police & emergency responders, airwaves, parks, clean water, the military, etc., etc., etc., -- is so enormous, encompassing, and enabling that, for people like Carmack decry the very system that made them so wealthy, the disingenuousness and hypocrisy is staggering.<p>It's time -- lord, long past time -- for smart hacker types to leave behind the immature, naïve libertarianism that pervades their industry and engage with a real, honest politics that, at least implicitly, acknowledges and owns-up to the great wealth and resources already afforded them. /You didn't get here on your own, and you never would have otherwise./