Sangeet Paul Choudary on the real shift from Web1 to Web2 to Web3: “While it’s now undisputed that there was a significant shift from pipelines to platforms, I believe we are now in the early innings of a similar shift from platforms to protocols. Much like the arrival of platforms didn’t signal the end of pipelines, the emergence of protocols will not end the era of platforms. Instead, pipelines, platforms, and protocols, will co-exist as different mechanisms to organize and configure value in the economy. Some parts of the economy will be best managed through platforms, while other use cases will lend themselves to decentralized protocol-based management.”
Donald Boudreaux on the ill-effects on minimum wage legislation: “In the absence of a minimum wage, workers whose skills are so low that they cannot produce hourly value as high as, say, $10.00 per hour would cloak their low skills by offering to work at wages low enough to make them profitable to employ. Given that no employer will knowingly fail to employ any worker willing to work at a wage that’s not in excess of the hourly value produced by that worker, workers with very low skills – when they have unimpeded access to money’s cloaking property – will have no trouble finding employment. But because the minimum wage prevents such cloaking, many low-skilled workers remain unemployed and unemployable.”
Randall Holcombe: “Citizens and voters anchor on political identity. It might be a party, a candidate, or an ideology. Most of their political preferences are then derivative of that identity. People don’t think: I support a woman’s right to have an abortion, I support more gun control, I believe the government should be more involved in health care, and I think impediments to voting should be relaxed. Therefore, I am a Democrat. The reasoning goes the other way. People identify as Democrats; therefore, they support a woman’s right to have an abortion, more gun control, and so forth. Citizens and voters adapt their public policy preferences from the political elite–the people who actually determine public policy. One implication is that citizens and voters have less influence over public policy than a romantic notion of democracy would suggest. The political elite tells voters what to think, and they fall in line behind their leaders.”
