Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…How have the last five years or so of your experience with the internet caused you to revise your self-described libertarianism, if at all? Is it working? It’s a very good question. I’m always very cautious about the label libertarian just because I find the Libertarian Party to be quite questionable on many things. I guess where I come down is, I would say, on many, many issues, I like the concept that we have in US law around the First Amendment of strict scrutiny. Look, if we’re going to have the government intervene in something, we need to be very thoughtful about that because we know very well from economics that many interventions don’t work the way most people think they work, and they actually can cause a lot more harm than good. Something very simple, like the classic example, would be, “Let’s raise the minimum wage to $40 an hour.” I think most people get that actually probably isn’t a great idea. That isn’t actually going to help poor people very much at all. Maybe a few of them, but mostly not. I guess, through my life, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more a centrist or a gradualist. When I was 21, I might have been, “Crush the state and eliminate all this, and freedom is fantastic.” Now, I’m really saying, “Look, if you’re going to get anywhere, and you’re going to improve the state of the world, and you’re going to avoid authoritarian tendencies, and you’re going to avoid overreach by government, you’re going to have a prosperous society, you need to be very thoughtful about how you change rules, very thoughtful about how you get somewhere.” My classic example would be zoning laws. If you overnight eliminate all zoning laws, I’m not sure you would get to the same place you would have gotten to had you had a more market-oriented solution from the beginning because zoning laws, in some ways, roughly replicate what a more market-oriented system might’ve come to. I don’t know, I guess I’m a gradualist in that sense. So you’ve become more Hayekian, you might say.…

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