Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…And lucky for us, the founders saw this and figured out a way to, given that there’s going to be a ruling elite, how to create a balance of power among that elite so it doesn’t get out of hand. And it was very clever. Some of this was based on earlier experiments. By the way, these were very, very smart people. And so they knew tremendous amounts of Greek and Roman history. They knew the Renaissance history. The Federalist Papers, they argued this a great length. You can read it all. They ran one of the best seminars in world history trying to figure this out. And they went through all this. So they thought through it very carefully, but just, I’ll give you an example, which continues to be a hot topic. So one way they did it just through the three branches of government, executive, legislative, and judicial. Balance the powers. But the other way they did it was they echoing what had been done earlier I think in the UK Parliament, they created the two different bodies of the legislature. And so the House and the Senate. And as you know, the house is a portion on the basis of population, and the Senate is not. The small states have just as many senators as the big states. And then they made the deliberate decision to have the house get reelected every two years to make it very responsive to the will of the people. And they made the decision to have the Senate get reelected every six years so that it had more buffer from the passions of the moment. But what’s interesting is they didn’t choose one or the other. They did them both. And then to get legislation passed, you have to get through both of them. And so they built in a second layer of checks and balances. And then there’s a thousand observations we could make about how well the system is working today and how much does it live up to the ideal, and how much are we actually complying with the constitution? And there’s lots of open questions there, but this system has survived for coming on 250 years with a country that has been spectacularly successful. But I don’t think, at least … I don’t think any of us would trade the system for any other one. And so it’s one of the great all time achievements. Yeah. It’s incredible. And we should say they were all pretty young relative to our current set of leaders.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.