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“ “There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.” ”
Marc Andreessen, the co-author of the first web browser and Facebook FB, +1.69% board member, issued a call to arms for major project spending in an essay as the deadly coronavirus exposes the West’s lack of preparation for the pandemic.
“We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials—including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns—as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America,” he said.
“We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and health care, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build,” he added.
The political right, he says, “is generally pro production, but is too often corrupted by forces that hold back market-based competition and the building of thing.” The left, meanwhile, needs to “stop trying to protect the old, the entrenched, the irrelevant; commit the public sector fully to the future.”
On social media, critics were quick to note that the venture-capital industry he participates in isn’t exactly rushing to back big projects in housing, health and infrastructure.
