Last night Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, delivered the first Joseph K. McLaughlin Lecture at the Cato Institute. He talked about the vision, history, organization, and impact of Wikipedia, and the influence of F. A. Hayek and his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” on his own initial conception of a crowdsourced encyclopedia. He also discussed Wikipedia’s occasional influence on public policy decisions, such as the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012. But I was particularly struck by this line (about 43:00 in the video):

Far too often lawmakers propose laws, and it’s fairly clear that they do not even have the most rudimentary understanding of how the internet works.

It reminded me of something Bill Clinton said at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2010:

Do you know how many political and economic decisions are made in this world by people who don’t know what in the living daylights they are talking about?

That’s a lesson policymakers ought to keep in mind whenever they contemplate legislating about health care, marriage, minimum wage laws, net neutrality, banking regulations, overtime pay, or anything else. Do they really understand how the particular market or industry works? Do they really understand how the impact of a new law or regulation will ripple through affected industries? In most cases they don’t, as Aaron Powell wrote about the lessons of SOPA:

SOPA was not the exception to the rule. Instead, it was just how things are done in Washington.