Eric Schmidt Quotes
If you're going to make a law, make a law that actually works. It's extraordinarily difficult.
Schmidt, Eric. Interview at Le Web Conference. Paris, France, 2011.
There seem to be many unintended consequences to most new legislation and reform legislation is almost always breaking new ground.
Professor Neustadt had served on the staff of President Harry S Truman so he had a practical perspective from which he spoke in addition to his scholarship.
This was the President’s original role regarding legislation. However, in the 20th century, Presidents have become more active and suggest laws and often initiate the process and then end it by signing the law that he suggested and shepherded through the Congress. But this was never the vision of the Founding Fathers, but since it is not addressed in the Constitution is not an unconstitutional process.
He was referring to the President of Egypt in the midst of the Egyptian soft revolution of 2011. Wisner had been asked by the President to tell the corrupt and dictatorial President of Egypt to step down quickly. A few days later, Wisner gave a speech calling for the 30 year Egyptian dictator to finish out his term so he could “steer the changes”. He claimed that he was not speaking for the administration in this speech but it was a personal view. However, the speech created much world confusion as to what the US administration policy actually was. The quotation illustrates one of the problems of conducting diplomacy in a free democracy. A president asks a citizen to represent him; he does, and then turns around and undercuts the very position he was supposed to take. In many counties such an disloyal act would be considered treason but in America there is nothing the administration could do about it, other than to say that the Munich speech was contrary to US policy.
He was discussing “Stand Your Ground Laws” which were enacted to solve one problem, but then effected many other things negatively. The law, once passed, is the law regardless of whether it has adverse consequences that the legislators never anticipated. This is one of the reasons that drafting legislation is such a difficult skill.
Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American technology businessman and software engineer. He is known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. He is Chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project. He is a co-author, with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher, of The Age of AI: And Our Human Future.
