Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left

In this book Philip Howard takes an unflinching look at America’s legal and bureaucratic complex and points us to an uncomfortable truth: it is an ever-expanding, intrusive and increasingly dysfunctional burden on the people it is supposed to serve, and it is broken beyond repair. The real-life examples of regulatory unreason and excess contained in the book are dishearteningly familiar to anyone who has sought a building permit, tried to start or run a business, or attempted to sort their garbage in accordance with their town’s voluminous garbage-sorting instructions. Howard provides a well-researched and persuasive, if depressing, account of the impact our rules-obsessed institutions have on the nation’s progress and efficiency, affecting as they do things as crucial as our infrastructure, our schools and our will to make them better. The book’s headline assertion – that this labyrinth is impervious to reform under our current two-party system of government – is supported by the reform initiatives that have been advanced over the years, only to perish in the face of the vested and special interests that exert such power over our political parties and the government officials they produce.The book would be less interesting if Howard’s proposed solution to this gridlock were deregulation. Instead, he suggests a kind of re-regulation, a system in which the dense volumes of (often outdated) rules that control regulator and regulated alike are replaced by regulatory objectives (clean drinking water; safe work places; orderly and effective schools). Reliance on regulatory principles leaves room for human judgment, flexibility and ingenuity in achieving them, assets we are badly in need of at the moment. Decision makers are judged under this proposed system by the results they achieve or fail to achieve, as well as by the officials who are tasked with overseeing them through a chain of command, leaving identifiable people, not rigid rules, to credit or blame.The book’s diagnosis is hard to quibble with. At first blush, its call for the formation of a third political party that can tackle these needed reforms (set forth in some detail at the end of the book) seems harder to fathom. But as Howard observes, so was Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency, which Howard notes was animated by the same rejection of the status quo that is needed to effect real and lasting change in the way we are governed. The desire is there; whether we can remake government in the image of the humans it is intended to serve is a matter of will.

Advisor to Presidents, Congress, and civic groups, as well as a lawyer by trade, Howard has had a front row seat to The Government That Does Not Work.This summary of what he sees is chilling--one small business buried by not dozens but thousands of regulations and the paper work to go with them, a union-soaked California school system of 277,000 teachers where only two (not 2%) are removed each year for doing something horrible, a justice system that is both a crushing burden and horribly unpredictable, and a Congress that has no clue of the mountain ranges of rules and regulations it sits on and has no desire or incentive to "serve" the American people but only to protect its members and their cronies.Howard details how "correctness" in and of everything insisted on by rule makers and judges stifles sensible decisions. He explains how lack of accountability and lack of personal responsibility for anyone in government allow obsolete or foolish laws to strangle modern-day enterprises and law-makers and their staffs to make one stupid decision after another. Perhaps most important, he outlines that a basic sense of integrity for the group coupled withThe Golden Rule for each member is the glue that holds society together, that allows each of us to trust others. He explains we have sacrificed that on the altar of anything goes and "who are you to judge"?Other countries do much better. Germany regularly removes outdated laws and regulations and has local centers where all permitting agencies can process applications in one place.This work is only a summary and deserves a deeper analysis, but it should serve an important beginning to turning things around. For readers who want to dig deeper it is well annotated and indexed.

Succinct and highly readable, Try Common Sense describes the origins and evolution of “correctness” in American law and government. Correctness was born of the best intentions. In the wake of the civil rights movement, legislators and jurists sought to ensure equality under the law by reducing the potential for capricious subjective judgments. The means of achieving this has been an ever expanding and ever more intricate framework of rules and regulations that attempt to provide an objective decision for any circumstance.This correctness movement has become a self-propelling juggernaut. Long past the point of usefulness, it has reached absurdity, which Howard illustrates with a series of tragicomic anecdotes. We have abdicated individual responsibility to a flawed algorithm, and the disastrous consequences are compounding.Despite this disheartening current appraisal, Howard ends the book on an optimistic note. The plague of correctness is not intractable. In his appendix, “Ten Principles for a Practical Society,” he offers practicable approaches to restore logic and individual agency to America’s governance. These mostly center on empowering individuals and small groups with greater authority and responsibility. Another intriguing idea is to move certain government functions out of Washington in order to reinvigorate our ossified federal bureaucracy.This is an important book whose ideas will interest any concerned citizen. Moreover, it should be required reading for the slate of 2020 presidential candidates.

"Try Common Sense" is a great source of good ideas. Enjoyed reading it and agree with most of it, but it doesn't go far enough and execution is going to be extremely difficult.