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The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America
This concise and eloquent manifesto shows how the excess of government regulations does not protect Americans but instead acts as legal quicksand, stifling growth and creating paralyzing overbureaucratization. Using blood-boiling examples of government regulations run amok, Howard reveals a society in which rules have replaced thinking--allowing law to infiltrate the nooks and crannies of everyday life.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 13, 1995
125 people are currently reading
1864 people want to read
About the author
Philip K. Howard
16 books43 followersPhilip K. Howard, a lawyer, advises leaders of both parties on legal and regulatory reform. He is chair of Common Good and a contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Philip K. Howard is a well-known leader of government and legal reform in America. His new book, The Rule of Nobody (W. W. Norton & Company, April 2014), has been praised by Fareed Zakaria as “an utterly compelling and persuasive book that, if followed, could change the way America works.” His TED Talk has has been viewed by almost 500,000 people.
Philip is also the author of the best-seller The Death of Common Sense (Random House, 1995), The Collapse of the Common Good (Ballantine Books, 2002) and Life Without Lawyers (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).
In 2002, Philip formed Common Good, a nonpartisan national coalition dedicated to restoring common sense to America. Philip writes periodically for The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and The New York Times, and has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, PBS NewsHour, Today, Good Morning America, Charlie Rose, and numerous other programs.
The son of a minister, Philip got his start working summers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner and has been active in public affairs his entire adult life. He is a prominent civic leader in New York City and has advised national political leaders on legal and regulatory reform for fifteen years, including Vice President Al Gore and numerous governors. He is a Partner at the law firm Covington & Burling, LLP. He is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School, and lives in Manhattan with his wife Alexandra. They have four children.
Philip K. Howard is a well-known leader of government and legal reform in America. His new book, The Rule of Nobody (W. W. Norton & Company, April 2014), has been praised by Fareed Zakaria as “an utterly compelling and persuasive book that, if followed, could change the way America works.” His TED Talk has has been viewed by almost 500,000 people.
Philip is also the author of the best-seller The Death of Common Sense (Random House, 1995), The Collapse of the Common Good (Ballantine Books, 2002) and Life Without Lawyers (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).
In 2002, Philip formed Common Good, a nonpartisan national coalition dedicated to restoring common sense to America. Philip writes periodically for The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and The New York Times, and has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, PBS NewsHour, Today, Good Morning America, Charlie Rose, and numerous other programs.
The son of a minister, Philip got his start working summers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner and has been active in public affairs his entire adult life. He is a prominent civic leader in New York City and has advised national political leaders on legal and regulatory reform for fifteen years, including Vice President Al Gore and numerous governors. He is a Partner at the law firm Covington & Burling, LLP. He is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School, and lives in Manhattan with his wife Alexandra. They have four children.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 162 reviews
January 11, 2009
I know that this book looks like it would be mind-numbingly boring but it is actually a great read and only takes a few hours. If all of the stories weren't frustratingly true then this could be comedy. This book makes a journey through government regulation that is supposed to save us from ourselves but instead makes government the masters of us, shackled by either bureaucratic stupidity or power trips. For example, in NYC the city government sold two buildings, abandoned after being gutted by fire and sitting for years, to a Catholic charity for $1 each, after which the church spent over $500,000 renovating the buildings and turning it into a shelter that would take 64 homeless men off the street, give them a clean room and job training so that they can re-enter society as productive members. After two years a building inspector told them that because the building code requires all renovated multi-story buildings to have an elevator, they must either install one (at a cost of $100,000 to them) or shut the building down. Not having the money to do that, the building was shut down and the men put back on the street. This short book does a perfect job of showing us why we have to regain control of a tyrannical government.
March 25, 2013
As I read this book, I nodded my head along with the author’s points on almost every page. He describes specific examples of the red tape and bureaucratic insanity we have all experienced firsthand throughout our lives. Though it is somewhat a depressing read, considering that bureaucracy and paperwork have increased by an order of magnitude since this edition was published two decades ago, it was worth picking up anyway. For a book focused on webs of laws and bureaucrats, it was a surprisingly smooth read. My only major criticism is that the author was long on problems and short on practical and specific solutions.
I came across this book the old fashioned way. I pulled it off the shelf while browsing my local library, which is why I read the 1994 edition rather than the more recent version. Howard pulls example after example out of the darkness of overstuffed file cabinets and into the light. He shows plain the tyranny of a government which has grown so burdened by regulation that it staggers under its own weight. The immovability of bureaucracy and process which were intended to make government fairer have had the opposite of the intended effect, and instead have astronomical time and productivity costs which harm both individuals with a direct stake and the public at large.
Howard puts a name to many of the frustrations we all have with government but never thought about the root cause or full extent of the problems. Whether you work for the government yourself, you have a child in public schools, or you simply want to register your car or use public transportation, you are affected by suffocating laws and the regulations which stem from them.
We all continue to face the immovable monolith of government, and as described by Philip K. Howard in The Death of Common Sense, the obstructions and senselessness of the modern U.S. Government, from the federal down to the municipal level, affect each one of us in more ways that we have ever imagined.
I came across this book the old fashioned way. I pulled it off the shelf while browsing my local library, which is why I read the 1994 edition rather than the more recent version. Howard pulls example after example out of the darkness of overstuffed file cabinets and into the light. He shows plain the tyranny of a government which has grown so burdened by regulation that it staggers under its own weight. The immovability of bureaucracy and process which were intended to make government fairer have had the opposite of the intended effect, and instead have astronomical time and productivity costs which harm both individuals with a direct stake and the public at large.
Howard puts a name to many of the frustrations we all have with government but never thought about the root cause or full extent of the problems. Whether you work for the government yourself, you have a child in public schools, or you simply want to register your car or use public transportation, you are affected by suffocating laws and the regulations which stem from them.
We all continue to face the immovable monolith of government, and as described by Philip K. Howard in The Death of Common Sense, the obstructions and senselessness of the modern U.S. Government, from the federal down to the municipal level, affect each one of us in more ways that we have ever imagined.
November 29, 2011
This is the first book in a long time that has really challenged my beliefs. Howard shows with clarity how we need smarter regulations, not more or less regulation. His call to bring back law as guiding principle rather than rule book or manual resonated with me. Government employees can't act in the best interest of the people if their hands are tied by legal processes that don't make any sense in most circumstances. I had a hard time with his take on rights, but in the end this is where he really changed my thinking. Now I'm interested to explore better ways to deal with inequality and social problems than inventing open-ended rights. On one hand I don't think Jim Crow would have ever ended in the South without government intervention, on the other I can see where open-ended rights creates another kind of tyranny, insanity, and maybe doesn't address the original problem so well to begin with.
May 23, 2013
This is one of those books written from the modern American conservative viewpoint that does a very good job of opening the reader's eyes to a serious problem caused by modern statism, but whose solutions are problematic. The author argues that America is choking on legalistic bureaucracy run amok, a legalism that is sapping the ability of government to actually do anything. His solution is to say that government officials and employees should be allowed more flexibility to make decisions using their own judgement. I agree with him about the problem, but think the solution is wrong. American government was traditionally a government of laws, not men, meaning that government agents were allowed to act only as the law authorized them to. This was intended to be a defense of liberty, because it prevented goverment officials from exercising arbitrary power. However, this system can only work when government is quite limited in the functions it performs. What has been happening since the time of Roosevelt is that government has been rapidly expanding its role in society, involving itself in more and more areas of life. The current choking legalism is a result of this expansion of government combined with an attempt to retain the government of laws approach. Howard's solution is essentially to say that we should relax the requirement of having a government of laws. Instead he prefers to allow goverment officials to have more latitude in exercising their powers. To my mind this is exactly the wrong answer. The answer is not to allow officials more freedom to exercise arbitrary power, it should be to roll back the powers of government. But like most modern conservatives, Howard seems to have abandoned or forgotten the old conservative principle of limited government, and instead seeks only to make the modern statist state more efficient.
April 21, 2022
Big ideas:
1. As a land of laws and not of men, there is superficial appeal to the idea that every wrong should be prohibited in writing and “correct” answers to legal questions knowable to all citizens. No citizen should be subjected to the arbitrary whims of some government bureaucrat. With a sufficiently detailed set of laws, there would be no unfairness toward citizens because bureaucrats would be interchangeable cogs in the legal system executing the will of the people.
2. The utopian ideal has not panned out. Instead, it has killed common sense and yielded absurd results. Several factors have killed common sense in the United States:
a. too many laws and regulations (the laws are unknowable and often ineffective),
b. an overreliance on due process combined with the removal of judgment from individual government actors (letting everyone articulate their concerns is time-consuming and can be abused),
c. abdication of responsibility by individual government actors (following predefined rules means no one is exercising judgment or held accountable), and
d. the creation of too many legal “rights” (that often conflict with each other and leave no room for compromise).
3. The death of common sense has created a bloated, expensive, and ineffective government on one hand, and an increasingly disillusioned, helpless, and combative citizenry on the other.
4. Howard provides many examples of the negative consequences of the death of common sense:
a. OSHA failing to protect workers and wasting money,
b. the EPA failing to protect the environment and wasting money,
c. the FDA failing to approve lifesaving drugs and wasting money,
d. teachers unable to remove disruptive students from class,
e. New York City unable to complete infrastructure projects within a reasonable time or budget,
f. exploding deficits and debts at the national, state, and local levels, and
g. citizens suing each other for violations of various “rights” like those expounded in the ADA and nondiscrimination laws.
5. Howard suggests we restore the right and responsibility of government actors to make judgments based on their expertise and then hold them accountable for their decisions. Specifically, we should:
a. Implement sunset provisions on all legislation so that it expires after 10 or 15 years. This would prevent the cancerous growth of laws and regulations.
b. Stop making laws as detailed as possible. Instead, radically simplify the law and let the enforcers of the law use their judgment and take responsibility for their decisions.
c. Government employees should not be insulated from their decisions but instead held accountable for them. Bad employees should be more easily fired.
d. Lawsuits must be bounded by social norms rather than “rights.” Rights originally meant freedom from negative government activity, not entitlement to positive government benefits like healthcare, education, or contracts.
Revealing Quotes
Almost no one who builds new houses knows why the requirement is there. Nor do bureaucrats. They abide by it because they have to. It’s the law.
The rule was almost perfect in its failure: It maximized the cost to Amoco while minimizing the benefit to the public.
We seem to have achieved the worst of both worlds: a system of regulation that goes too far while it also does too little.
This paradox is explained by the absence of the one indispensable ingredient of any successful human endeavor: use of judgment.
About 50 percent of all OSHA violations across the nation are for not keeping the forms correctly.
OSHA inspectors, in the words of everyone who has to deal with them, are “just traffic cops” looking for rule violations.
In a communist society people were not allowed to act without explicit authorization. In a free society, by contrast, the presumption is the opposite: We are free to do what we want unless it is prohibited. The idea that highly detailed rules will tell us exactly what to do changes the presumption back again: We can’t do what we want because the law details our course.
Statutes began to replace the common law in importance at the turn of the century, when the Progressive movement began to try to bust industrial trusts and curb exploitation of child labor.
The words of law expanded far faster than the new areas of law. The Federal Register, a daily report of new and proposed regulations, increased from 15,000 pages in the final year of John F. Kennedy’s presidency to over 70,000 pages in the last year of George Bush’s. The Interstate Highway System, still the country’s largest postwar public works program, was authorized by a 1956 statute that ran 28 pages.
In 1982, Bayless Manning called for “radical simplification” of law.
MAKING LAW DETAILED, the theory goes, permits it to act as a clear guide. People will know exactly what is required. But modern law is unknowable. It is too detailed.
Several million small employers operate pursuant to their own moral code, comfortable only in the assurance that they could never figure out the letter of the law if they tried. This is a predicament one witness before Congress termed the syndrome of “involuntary noncompliance.”
Precise rules, most people believe, “close off loopholes.” It happens to be the other way around. Loopholes only exist because of precise rules.
When law is too dense to be known, too detailed to be sensible, and is always tripping us up, why should we respect it?
How can anything good happen, Hayek asked, if individuals cannot think and do for themselves? Rules preclude initiative. Regimentation precludes evolution. Letting accidents happen, mistakes be made, results in new ideas. Trial and error is the key to all progress. The Soviet system of rules and central planning is doomed to failure, Hayek stated with confidence fifty years ago, because it kills the human faculty that makes things work.
Words, even millions of them, are finite. The range of possible future circumstances is infinite.
The jury system does not produce results like a scientific theorem; it is more akin to a roll of the dice. But a jury is impartial, and it can weigh all the circumstances. That’s the best we can do.
Pesticides give us apples without worms and the most productive farms in the world.
“Objectivity,” at least in the broader world, only implies decisions based on facts. Objectivity does not preclude judgment or intuition that flows from facts.
The FDA will not take the chance that it might be criticized for approving a drug that has an unknown side effect. Administrators believe, perhaps correctly at this point, that American citizens will tolerate no risk. But in the meantime people are dying because they don’t have the benefits of the new drugs.
The average research cost of every new drug, two thirds of which goes to meeting FDA requirements, is $230 million.
“Liberty for the wolves,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted, “is death for the lambs.”
It is as if some diabolical hater of government set all the reformers loose to build a perfect government, and they were so enamored of the utopian notions of democracy—searching for the one true answer, making sure every interest is fully heard, requiring every act to be documented by a form—that they lost sight of what it is government is supposed to be doing.
Manipulation of process tends to become easier as the amount at stake goes down. Trying to get rid of an inept federal employee, for example, is so difficult that most supervisors don’t try.
Which is more important: the process or the result? In answering this question, it is useful to reexamine the core assumption that the primacy of process is essential to a fair and responsible government.
Is the modern ideal of procedural fairness fair to the common good? I don’t think so. Maybe it is “fair” to individuals who want to take advantage of government. But who does government think it’s working for, some unknown vendor or all the taxpayers? Maybe we should vote on it.
Almost every government act, whether allocating use of public property, creating new programs, or granting subsidies, benefits one group more than another, and usually at the expense of everyone else.
Whenever there is a perceived injustice, new rights are created to help the victims. These rights are different: While the rights-bearers may see them as “protection,” they don’t protect so much as provide.
Rights have a beneficent ring, as if they ensure justice without cost. But the cost becomes quickly apparent as rights are asserted.
Civil rights claims now account for 10 percent of the federal court civil caseload, proof that discrimination has, indeed, become an obsession.
The preoccupation with purging prejudice is producing a nation filled with more prejudice.
Handing out rights does not resolve conflict. It aggravates it. “Filing complaints is the keystone of the ADA,” said one advocate for the disabled. To another, passage of the law is a call to “man the barricades.” But against whom? The disabled lobby is waging warfare against every other citizen.
The ratio of funding of special education programs to gifted programs is about eleven dollars to one cent.
Rights for the disabled are particularly paradoxical, because what benefits a person with one disability may harm someone with another disability. Low drinking fountains and telephones are harder to use for the elderly or those with bad backs.
Zealots, we learn time and again, always push their “right” to its absolute limit and beyond. They go as fast as they can, the rest of us be damned.
The rights revolution, after all, sprouted from the same ideological seed as the Great Society.
The Bill of Rights did not ask government to provide services; it told government to stay away.
We have accepted the pretense that government services should be treated as a constitutional right. They are not; they are only benefits provided by a democracy.
Creating rights also invites a free-for-all as different groups’ entitlements begin to collide with one another and the rest of society.
“Rules dictate results, come what may,” the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin noted. “Principles do not work that way; they incline a decision one way, though not conclusively,” and permit a judgment that fits the situation. Principles allow us to think.
We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer. Law should articulate goals, award subsidies, allocate presumptions, and provide mechanisms for resolving disagreements, but law should almost never provide the final answer. Life is too complex.
Hard rules make sense only when protocol—as with the rules of a game or with speed limits—is more important than getting something done.
Moving to the promised land of individual responsibility requires leaving behind four sacred cows of current legal orthodoxy. These are beliefs, widely held, that (1) law is permanent, (2) regulation should be as detailed as possible, (3) public employees should be insulated from accountability, and (4) most disputes can be resolved as a matter of individual rights.
FIRST FALLACY: LAW IS PERMANENT. NEW PRINCIPLE: LEGISLATURES MUST ADJUST OLD LAW TO MEET CURRENT CHALLENGES.
There’s a difference between timeless principles of law—such as forbidding crimes, or enforcing contractual promises, or protecting free speech—and the statutes passed to provide government programs.
The presumption of legal permanence should be flipped: Every program should automatically expire after ten or fifteen years. This could be accomplished with a universal sunset law.
SECOND FALLACY: LAW SHOULD BE AS DETAILED AS POSSIBLE. NEW PRINCIPLE: RADICALLY SIMPLIFY LAW, LEAVING ROOM FOR REAL PEOPLE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.
Perhaps the four thousand rules that specify exactly what kinds of tools should be used could perhaps be condensed into one rule: “Tools and equipment shall be reasonably suited for the use intended, in accord with industry standards.”
THIRD FALLACY: GOOD GOVERNMENT REQUIRES INSULATING PUBLIC EMPLOYEES FROM ACCOUNTABILITY. NEW PRINCIPLE: INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY IS A CRITICAL ELEMENT OF RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT.
Life tenure for civil servants, we’re taught, represents the great triumph of progressives over the wicked spoils system. This is a myth. Civil service had nothing to do with firing. The core premise of civil service was to create neutral hiring, and thus to end the practice of handing out jobs as political spoils. Civil service was never intended to shield officials from accountability.
The union power over government has become as corrupt as the spoils system.
FOURTH FALLACY: LAWSUITS SHOULD BE RESOLVED AS A MATTER OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS. NEW PRINCIPLE: LAWSUITS MUST BE BOUNDED BY REASONABLE SOCIAL NORMS.
Litigation has radically changed the culture of America over the past few decades. Hardly any social interaction is free of legal anxiety.
The broad acceptance of the central premise of the book—that human judgment is essential to success in government, as with any other life activity . . .
1. As a land of laws and not of men, there is superficial appeal to the idea that every wrong should be prohibited in writing and “correct” answers to legal questions knowable to all citizens. No citizen should be subjected to the arbitrary whims of some government bureaucrat. With a sufficiently detailed set of laws, there would be no unfairness toward citizens because bureaucrats would be interchangeable cogs in the legal system executing the will of the people.
2. The utopian ideal has not panned out. Instead, it has killed common sense and yielded absurd results. Several factors have killed common sense in the United States:
a. too many laws and regulations (the laws are unknowable and often ineffective),
b. an overreliance on due process combined with the removal of judgment from individual government actors (letting everyone articulate their concerns is time-consuming and can be abused),
c. abdication of responsibility by individual government actors (following predefined rules means no one is exercising judgment or held accountable), and
d. the creation of too many legal “rights” (that often conflict with each other and leave no room for compromise).
3. The death of common sense has created a bloated, expensive, and ineffective government on one hand, and an increasingly disillusioned, helpless, and combative citizenry on the other.
4. Howard provides many examples of the negative consequences of the death of common sense:
a. OSHA failing to protect workers and wasting money,
b. the EPA failing to protect the environment and wasting money,
c. the FDA failing to approve lifesaving drugs and wasting money,
d. teachers unable to remove disruptive students from class,
e. New York City unable to complete infrastructure projects within a reasonable time or budget,
f. exploding deficits and debts at the national, state, and local levels, and
g. citizens suing each other for violations of various “rights” like those expounded in the ADA and nondiscrimination laws.
5. Howard suggests we restore the right and responsibility of government actors to make judgments based on their expertise and then hold them accountable for their decisions. Specifically, we should:
a. Implement sunset provisions on all legislation so that it expires after 10 or 15 years. This would prevent the cancerous growth of laws and regulations.
b. Stop making laws as detailed as possible. Instead, radically simplify the law and let the enforcers of the law use their judgment and take responsibility for their decisions.
c. Government employees should not be insulated from their decisions but instead held accountable for them. Bad employees should be more easily fired.
d. Lawsuits must be bounded by social norms rather than “rights.” Rights originally meant freedom from negative government activity, not entitlement to positive government benefits like healthcare, education, or contracts.
Revealing Quotes
Almost no one who builds new houses knows why the requirement is there. Nor do bureaucrats. They abide by it because they have to. It’s the law.
The rule was almost perfect in its failure: It maximized the cost to Amoco while minimizing the benefit to the public.
We seem to have achieved the worst of both worlds: a system of regulation that goes too far while it also does too little.
This paradox is explained by the absence of the one indispensable ingredient of any successful human endeavor: use of judgment.
About 50 percent of all OSHA violations across the nation are for not keeping the forms correctly.
OSHA inspectors, in the words of everyone who has to deal with them, are “just traffic cops” looking for rule violations.
In a communist society people were not allowed to act without explicit authorization. In a free society, by contrast, the presumption is the opposite: We are free to do what we want unless it is prohibited. The idea that highly detailed rules will tell us exactly what to do changes the presumption back again: We can’t do what we want because the law details our course.
Statutes began to replace the common law in importance at the turn of the century, when the Progressive movement began to try to bust industrial trusts and curb exploitation of child labor.
The words of law expanded far faster than the new areas of law. The Federal Register, a daily report of new and proposed regulations, increased from 15,000 pages in the final year of John F. Kennedy’s presidency to over 70,000 pages in the last year of George Bush’s. The Interstate Highway System, still the country’s largest postwar public works program, was authorized by a 1956 statute that ran 28 pages.
In 1982, Bayless Manning called for “radical simplification” of law.
MAKING LAW DETAILED, the theory goes, permits it to act as a clear guide. People will know exactly what is required. But modern law is unknowable. It is too detailed.
Several million small employers operate pursuant to their own moral code, comfortable only in the assurance that they could never figure out the letter of the law if they tried. This is a predicament one witness before Congress termed the syndrome of “involuntary noncompliance.”
Precise rules, most people believe, “close off loopholes.” It happens to be the other way around. Loopholes only exist because of precise rules.
When law is too dense to be known, too detailed to be sensible, and is always tripping us up, why should we respect it?
How can anything good happen, Hayek asked, if individuals cannot think and do for themselves? Rules preclude initiative. Regimentation precludes evolution. Letting accidents happen, mistakes be made, results in new ideas. Trial and error is the key to all progress. The Soviet system of rules and central planning is doomed to failure, Hayek stated with confidence fifty years ago, because it kills the human faculty that makes things work.
Words, even millions of them, are finite. The range of possible future circumstances is infinite.
The jury system does not produce results like a scientific theorem; it is more akin to a roll of the dice. But a jury is impartial, and it can weigh all the circumstances. That’s the best we can do.
Pesticides give us apples without worms and the most productive farms in the world.
“Objectivity,” at least in the broader world, only implies decisions based on facts. Objectivity does not preclude judgment or intuition that flows from facts.
The FDA will not take the chance that it might be criticized for approving a drug that has an unknown side effect. Administrators believe, perhaps correctly at this point, that American citizens will tolerate no risk. But in the meantime people are dying because they don’t have the benefits of the new drugs.
The average research cost of every new drug, two thirds of which goes to meeting FDA requirements, is $230 million.
“Liberty for the wolves,” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted, “is death for the lambs.”
It is as if some diabolical hater of government set all the reformers loose to build a perfect government, and they were so enamored of the utopian notions of democracy—searching for the one true answer, making sure every interest is fully heard, requiring every act to be documented by a form—that they lost sight of what it is government is supposed to be doing.
Manipulation of process tends to become easier as the amount at stake goes down. Trying to get rid of an inept federal employee, for example, is so difficult that most supervisors don’t try.
Which is more important: the process or the result? In answering this question, it is useful to reexamine the core assumption that the primacy of process is essential to a fair and responsible government.
Is the modern ideal of procedural fairness fair to the common good? I don’t think so. Maybe it is “fair” to individuals who want to take advantage of government. But who does government think it’s working for, some unknown vendor or all the taxpayers? Maybe we should vote on it.
Almost every government act, whether allocating use of public property, creating new programs, or granting subsidies, benefits one group more than another, and usually at the expense of everyone else.
Whenever there is a perceived injustice, new rights are created to help the victims. These rights are different: While the rights-bearers may see them as “protection,” they don’t protect so much as provide.
Rights have a beneficent ring, as if they ensure justice without cost. But the cost becomes quickly apparent as rights are asserted.
Civil rights claims now account for 10 percent of the federal court civil caseload, proof that discrimination has, indeed, become an obsession.
The preoccupation with purging prejudice is producing a nation filled with more prejudice.
Handing out rights does not resolve conflict. It aggravates it. “Filing complaints is the keystone of the ADA,” said one advocate for the disabled. To another, passage of the law is a call to “man the barricades.” But against whom? The disabled lobby is waging warfare against every other citizen.
The ratio of funding of special education programs to gifted programs is about eleven dollars to one cent.
Rights for the disabled are particularly paradoxical, because what benefits a person with one disability may harm someone with another disability. Low drinking fountains and telephones are harder to use for the elderly or those with bad backs.
Zealots, we learn time and again, always push their “right” to its absolute limit and beyond. They go as fast as they can, the rest of us be damned.
The rights revolution, after all, sprouted from the same ideological seed as the Great Society.
The Bill of Rights did not ask government to provide services; it told government to stay away.
We have accepted the pretense that government services should be treated as a constitutional right. They are not; they are only benefits provided by a democracy.
Creating rights also invites a free-for-all as different groups’ entitlements begin to collide with one another and the rest of society.
“Rules dictate results, come what may,” the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin noted. “Principles do not work that way; they incline a decision one way, though not conclusively,” and permit a judgment that fits the situation. Principles allow us to think.
We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer. Law should articulate goals, award subsidies, allocate presumptions, and provide mechanisms for resolving disagreements, but law should almost never provide the final answer. Life is too complex.
Hard rules make sense only when protocol—as with the rules of a game or with speed limits—is more important than getting something done.
Moving to the promised land of individual responsibility requires leaving behind four sacred cows of current legal orthodoxy. These are beliefs, widely held, that (1) law is permanent, (2) regulation should be as detailed as possible, (3) public employees should be insulated from accountability, and (4) most disputes can be resolved as a matter of individual rights.
FIRST FALLACY: LAW IS PERMANENT. NEW PRINCIPLE: LEGISLATURES MUST ADJUST OLD LAW TO MEET CURRENT CHALLENGES.
There’s a difference between timeless principles of law—such as forbidding crimes, or enforcing contractual promises, or protecting free speech—and the statutes passed to provide government programs.
The presumption of legal permanence should be flipped: Every program should automatically expire after ten or fifteen years. This could be accomplished with a universal sunset law.
SECOND FALLACY: LAW SHOULD BE AS DETAILED AS POSSIBLE. NEW PRINCIPLE: RADICALLY SIMPLIFY LAW, LEAVING ROOM FOR REAL PEOPLE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.
Perhaps the four thousand rules that specify exactly what kinds of tools should be used could perhaps be condensed into one rule: “Tools and equipment shall be reasonably suited for the use intended, in accord with industry standards.”
THIRD FALLACY: GOOD GOVERNMENT REQUIRES INSULATING PUBLIC EMPLOYEES FROM ACCOUNTABILITY. NEW PRINCIPLE: INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY IS A CRITICAL ELEMENT OF RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT.
Life tenure for civil servants, we’re taught, represents the great triumph of progressives over the wicked spoils system. This is a myth. Civil service had nothing to do with firing. The core premise of civil service was to create neutral hiring, and thus to end the practice of handing out jobs as political spoils. Civil service was never intended to shield officials from accountability.
The union power over government has become as corrupt as the spoils system.
FOURTH FALLACY: LAWSUITS SHOULD BE RESOLVED AS A MATTER OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS. NEW PRINCIPLE: LAWSUITS MUST BE BOUNDED BY REASONABLE SOCIAL NORMS.
Litigation has radically changed the culture of America over the past few decades. Hardly any social interaction is free of legal anxiety.
The broad acceptance of the central premise of the book—that human judgment is essential to success in government, as with any other life activity . . .
June 28, 2012
I had much higher hopes for this book but it was solid nonetheless. I found myself thinking that the anecdotes, while interesting (and appalling) may be the proverbial trees that are keeping me from really seeing the forest. I can't tell if his examples are truly indicative of what is really going on out there. I am also not certain that people are as susceptible to accountability as Howard suggests. While there is much to be said about over-regulation, there is also, I suspect, much to be said about under-regulation as well. There are probably many instances in which well-meaning government overdoes it but government allowing industries to act in the most reasonable way sounds an awful lot like what created the mess on Wall Street. Read on and make up your own mind.
May 17, 2025
Keeping up the 5-star reading streak with this one.
I would be fascinated to see how this book would be written with more contemporary examples and I can only imagine the head shaking the author would be doing nowadays concerning the argument he makes, which was surprisingly extensive considering the length of the book. There was a few times I felt a little lost; however, there were many quotes in the book that were absolutely perfect.
“Thinking in extremes might be our national disease”
“When accomplishment or understanding is important we have no choice: law can’t think and so law must be entrusted to humans and they must take responsibility for their interpretation of it.”
I would be fascinated to see how this book would be written with more contemporary examples and I can only imagine the head shaking the author would be doing nowadays concerning the argument he makes, which was surprisingly extensive considering the length of the book. There was a few times I felt a little lost; however, there were many quotes in the book that were absolutely perfect.
“Thinking in extremes might be our national disease”
“When accomplishment or understanding is important we have no choice: law can’t think and so law must be entrusted to humans and they must take responsibility for their interpretation of it.”
February 16, 2016
Started out strong, but really only gets 3 stars in my opinion. This is an excellent book if you need a collection of ways in which governmental law has killed common sense. It is entirely worthless if you want to actually dissect common sense. If that’s your goal, you’re going to have to take his examples and then do you own intellectual work and exploration. I was sadly looking for the latter. I want to understand what precisely is the mechanism of the death. Short of giving me the mechanism, all you’ve really described, is the lack of common sense in a myriad of areas all surrounding the government. Well, duh. There are so few areas in the world that there is common sense, such that it’s a rather priceless attribute. I wish the author had considered this as he thought about why in the world one would think that our government, who has largely failed to attract the best talent, might somehow have common sense.
November 4, 2011
I was very interested in reading this book after seeing the author on The Daily Show. Surprise surprise, a book about the perils of bureaucracy can be a bit dry. I found Howard's thesis compelling and am totally on board with his call for a new age of responsibility. However, I found this text long on problems and short on solutions. Example after example of bloated inefficiencies in government eventually had me saying "get to the point already!" When Howard finally does start proposing solutions I found them very broad. Still, if everybody in this country took the time to read this book and understand how our legal system is bogging everything down, perhaps change would be possible. These are important ideas, so be a good reader and take your medicine.
April 25, 2021
I'll be honest - I didn't finish the entire book (skipping some chapters in between). The author made his point - methodically - that I felt that I was being beaten over the head with the point I am convinced of now. Law has become so overwhelming, so detailed, so excessive that it no longer does what it aims to do and drives inefficiency (time, money, progress).
It's a decent read, but I think Philip Howard was in desperate need of a better editor.
It's a decent read, but I think Philip Howard was in desperate need of a better editor.
January 23, 2016
Great book and I am going to read it again, because the information is just as relevant today as it was a few years ago.
March 15, 2019
A sad but true commentary on the decay of the American system of laws.
December 30, 2021
Solid, late-afternoon read. Thought-provoking and confirming of personal thoughts on the subject.
Basic conclusion: the law is over complicated and is crippling our society.
“How detailed the Constitution should be was a matter of importance to the drafters. Alexander Hamilton, for example, argued that the Bill of Rughts was too specific. Enumerating any rights at all, he argued, would imply the absence of other rights. Today, we no longer remember that specificity is even an issue, or that words can impose rigidity as well as offer clarity.” -Howard, the Death of Common Sense
Almost no one even knows the law- if anyone. Thousands and thousands of pages of manuals that not even its enforcers truly know. Most are useless and defy common sense.
Many, many stories told of stupid instances of government stupidity. We have discarded common sense in favor of tons of confusing and unhelpful laws.
Crime and punishment has turned to a formula check the box and see what the machine spits out makes no sense - delivery driver who doesn’t know how much he is transporting gets life in prison, guy who sells heroin to a kid gets 2??
We have discarded the common law and basic common sense for stupidity and loopholes.
The more laws we have, the more loopholes we have.
36,000 page manuals are stupid and do nothing but confuse. Essentially no one follows all of these regulations.
All they do is create more legal issues, cause more money to be spent, and create more opportunities to sue and be sued. Yuck.
Not only this, but newfound “fundamental rights” create even more regulation.
“Why should this be? Rights sound so righteous. But the new rights aren’t rights at all: they are blunt powers masquerading under the names of rights. They have nothing to do with rights. The rights are forefathers died for or shield - government can’t tell me what to do it say - to preserve our freedom from others ordering us around. The new rights are a sword. They are hailed under the flag of freedom. But no one doing the saluting is looking at how these fights impinge on what others consider to be their own freedoms.” -The Death of Common Sense
Altogether good read. Some of the stories are an extreme pain to read, including the Mother Teresa story of the very beginning.
Basic conclusion: the law is over complicated and is crippling our society.
“How detailed the Constitution should be was a matter of importance to the drafters. Alexander Hamilton, for example, argued that the Bill of Rughts was too specific. Enumerating any rights at all, he argued, would imply the absence of other rights. Today, we no longer remember that specificity is even an issue, or that words can impose rigidity as well as offer clarity.” -Howard, the Death of Common Sense
Almost no one even knows the law- if anyone. Thousands and thousands of pages of manuals that not even its enforcers truly know. Most are useless and defy common sense.
Many, many stories told of stupid instances of government stupidity. We have discarded common sense in favor of tons of confusing and unhelpful laws.
Crime and punishment has turned to a formula check the box and see what the machine spits out makes no sense - delivery driver who doesn’t know how much he is transporting gets life in prison, guy who sells heroin to a kid gets 2??
We have discarded the common law and basic common sense for stupidity and loopholes.
The more laws we have, the more loopholes we have.
36,000 page manuals are stupid and do nothing but confuse. Essentially no one follows all of these regulations.
All they do is create more legal issues, cause more money to be spent, and create more opportunities to sue and be sued. Yuck.
Not only this, but newfound “fundamental rights” create even more regulation.
“Why should this be? Rights sound so righteous. But the new rights aren’t rights at all: they are blunt powers masquerading under the names of rights. They have nothing to do with rights. The rights are forefathers died for or shield - government can’t tell me what to do it say - to preserve our freedom from others ordering us around. The new rights are a sword. They are hailed under the flag of freedom. But no one doing the saluting is looking at how these fights impinge on what others consider to be their own freedoms.” -The Death of Common Sense
Altogether good read. Some of the stories are an extreme pain to read, including the Mother Teresa story of the very beginning.
March 18, 2017
One of many favorite quotes from the book:
"By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed its role from useful tool to brainless tyrant"
I agreed with so much in this book. It points to much of what is wrong in America today.
"By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed its role from useful tool to brainless tyrant"
I agreed with so much in this book. It points to much of what is wrong in America today.
dnf
January 8, 2025i got this book for free from a garage sale with full intent on using it for bookish crafts, and after reading "How Law is Suffocating America," i flipped open to an excerpt out of morbid curiosity and got:
wow. let me just repeat a small segment:
it's poor grammar and hilariously dumb examples! i might just read this after all and nominate it for the goodreads awards as part of the 'comedy' section. :.)
Columnist Russel Baker, pondering why all shopping malls seemed to be identical, concluded that it was probably one mall traveling around at the country at the speed of light. Modern law sis trying to mall-ize every regulated activity. The main victims are small enterprises, poorer segments of society, and the spirit of ingenuity on which this country achieved its greatness.
And why do you think the malls all look alike?
wow. let me just repeat a small segment:
around at the country at the
it's poor grammar and hilariously dumb examples! i might just read this after all and nominate it for the goodreads awards as part of the 'comedy' section. :.)
February 25, 2009
We read this for reading club last year and I had forgotten all about it until I heard the author interviewed about his new book on C-Span's Q&A. The book was OK, but seemed to overly rely on scary anecdotes to make larger judgments about the state of the legal world. As far as common sense, it seems to me that much of what we do and how we react has less to do with common sense than our experience and our reaction to anecdotes. So we tend to be more fearful precisely because we have heard the horror stories of rampaging lawyers, suit-happy parents, etc. Many of the rules and regulations, the author decries, result from our feeble attempts to legitimize what appears to be common sense at the time. It's the misapplication of the rules that then leads us into the messes he describes.
February 19, 2021
The entire book is lazy generalizations with no analysis or data. Written on a 3rd grade level. Last 10 pages of the book are the only ones worth reading. If you want to read a rich, white, privileged attorney’s biased complaints of how we’ve given too many legal protections to the poor, disabled, and minorities, then this is the book for you.
Did not offer a single solution based on evidence to any of the problems he identified. Lazy!
Did not offer a single solution based on evidence to any of the problems he identified. Lazy!
February 23, 2020
If you want to see why America has failed, read this book. The government today in the US is no different than that of Soviet communism. They rule by pulling strings of all, we rule be worthless laws that roadblock us at each step. Freedom is all but gone. This one is worth reading.
February 14, 2016
Easy read, engaging and difficult to put down.
August 14, 2017
This short book should be required reading for anyone seeking to enter politics or government service. The author, Philip K. Howard, is a practicing attorney in New York City. He argues that American administrative law is strangling the country and its economy, and must be radically reformed to allow us to re-insert common sense into the system.
Howard identifies three specific ways in which administrative law acts to banish common sense. First, comprehensive regulatory schemes often sound good in the abstract, but make little sense in the real world. Nevertheless, these regulations must be obeyed, no matter how pointless, unrealistic, or expensive they may be as applied to concrete circumstances. Second, in an effort to ensure every decision is perfectly fair, endless layers of study, review, and appeal have been created. As a result, it can take several years for a city to issue a relatively simple contract, and the permitting process for major projects often takes decades. Costs continue to mount throughout the process, and sometimes the effect of the delay is to ensure nothing at all gets done, even though no one would consciously choose that alternative. Third, many government benefits have been turned into "rights." These rights often conflict with the rights of others, and provide endless opportunities for accusations, litigation, and delay. The basic individual rights recognized under the United States Constitution - due process, equal protection under the law, freedom of speech and religion, protection of private property, and the like - certainly have an important place. Indeed, the American legal system would not be recognizable without them. However, when the government declares the power to require the government to provide something, or worse yet, the power to require another private person to provide something, to be a "right," litigation, bitterness, and skyrocketing costs are the almost inevitable results. This is so regardless of whether the "right" in question is the right to receive welfare, the right to force the owner of a building to make expensive alterations required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, or almost anything else.
The government also acts to destroy common sense in other ways. Most prominently, some government regulations are so overambitious - so long, complicated, and internally contradictory - that they are virtually impossible to understand, let alone apply. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform statute, together with its implementing regulations, is over fifteen times the length of War and Peace. No one with an actual job to perform can be expected to devote the time needed to study and understand this monstrosity while still performing his or her regular duties. Similarly, the Obamacare statute is over 1,000 pages in length - longer than Anna Karenina. It seeks to re-shape the entire medical business - nearly one-fifth of the economy - and much of its language is poorly drafted and internally contradictory. It should surprise no one that Obamacare has not delivered on any of the promises made by its backers.
Howard states his objective is not to argue for or against shrinking the scale of government. It is clear, however, that legislators and bureaucrats need to approach their tasks with a degree of humility often forgotten in the past. Legislators and regulators must realize they cannot successfully micro-manage life by imposing comprehensive, top-down laws and regulations. As Howard points out, the result of this conceit often is to require people at the ground level to check their common sense at the door. Once government gets involved in a subject, the responsible individuals must be empowered to make decisions, and held accountable for their actions. Although Howard does not acknowledge the point, since one of his prescriptions is to reduce the role of judicial and quasi-judicial review in day-to-day decisions, the government also must stay strictly within Constitutional bounds (as well as avoid creating new "rights") to avoid triggering such involvement. In this way, Howard's argument does require the government to shrink in scope.
Howard's argument is persuasive and well illustrated with countless real-world examples. Like I said at the top, this book should be required reading for anyone seeking to enter politics or government service. It is equally valuable for those who seek simply to arm themselves with the knowledge needed to become more effective, involved citizens.
Howard identifies three specific ways in which administrative law acts to banish common sense. First, comprehensive regulatory schemes often sound good in the abstract, but make little sense in the real world. Nevertheless, these regulations must be obeyed, no matter how pointless, unrealistic, or expensive they may be as applied to concrete circumstances. Second, in an effort to ensure every decision is perfectly fair, endless layers of study, review, and appeal have been created. As a result, it can take several years for a city to issue a relatively simple contract, and the permitting process for major projects often takes decades. Costs continue to mount throughout the process, and sometimes the effect of the delay is to ensure nothing at all gets done, even though no one would consciously choose that alternative. Third, many government benefits have been turned into "rights." These rights often conflict with the rights of others, and provide endless opportunities for accusations, litigation, and delay. The basic individual rights recognized under the United States Constitution - due process, equal protection under the law, freedom of speech and religion, protection of private property, and the like - certainly have an important place. Indeed, the American legal system would not be recognizable without them. However, when the government declares the power to require the government to provide something, or worse yet, the power to require another private person to provide something, to be a "right," litigation, bitterness, and skyrocketing costs are the almost inevitable results. This is so regardless of whether the "right" in question is the right to receive welfare, the right to force the owner of a building to make expensive alterations required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, or almost anything else.
The government also acts to destroy common sense in other ways. Most prominently, some government regulations are so overambitious - so long, complicated, and internally contradictory - that they are virtually impossible to understand, let alone apply. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform statute, together with its implementing regulations, is over fifteen times the length of War and Peace. No one with an actual job to perform can be expected to devote the time needed to study and understand this monstrosity while still performing his or her regular duties. Similarly, the Obamacare statute is over 1,000 pages in length - longer than Anna Karenina. It seeks to re-shape the entire medical business - nearly one-fifth of the economy - and much of its language is poorly drafted and internally contradictory. It should surprise no one that Obamacare has not delivered on any of the promises made by its backers.
Howard states his objective is not to argue for or against shrinking the scale of government. It is clear, however, that legislators and bureaucrats need to approach their tasks with a degree of humility often forgotten in the past. Legislators and regulators must realize they cannot successfully micro-manage life by imposing comprehensive, top-down laws and regulations. As Howard points out, the result of this conceit often is to require people at the ground level to check their common sense at the door. Once government gets involved in a subject, the responsible individuals must be empowered to make decisions, and held accountable for their actions. Although Howard does not acknowledge the point, since one of his prescriptions is to reduce the role of judicial and quasi-judicial review in day-to-day decisions, the government also must stay strictly within Constitutional bounds (as well as avoid creating new "rights") to avoid triggering such involvement. In this way, Howard's argument does require the government to shrink in scope.
Howard's argument is persuasive and well illustrated with countless real-world examples. Like I said at the top, this book should be required reading for anyone seeking to enter politics or government service. It is equally valuable for those who seek simply to arm themselves with the knowledge needed to become more effective, involved citizens.
November 14, 2019
This author has a substantial amount of experience from his occupation. I really enjoyed reading his mind.
However I found myself frustrated with how the content was organized. The content is divided up into 4 large sections, while there is nothing wrong with this style, me as a reader enjoys short topic driven chapters. I don't know what it is about short chapters, but when I finish a chapter I get a feeling of accomplishment. With this book it took forever to get through each section, which lengthened the time between my rewarding feeling of accomplishment. I know, it's weird. I also struggled with the contents organization in that it felt as if the author was all over the place. I really enjoy diving deep into a topic and not so much a light bounce around.
The topic of this book is one of deep interest to me as I have been directly effected by this issue. In reading I found myself wondering what the authors definition was for bureaucrat in order for me to wrap my mind around his ideas for solution and conclude for myself if his suggestions were sound when putting his ideas up against the test of principle. My experience has shown there can be language barriers, even when using the same language. Throughout the book I found myself feeling as if I was understanding what he was communicating and on the very next page feeling as if he was contradicting himself. My experience very well could have been the result of his understanding of a word and my understanding of a word to be conflicting, such is the battle of law. It's all about the understanding and interpretation of words found in law. I won't elaborate to much on the element of the toxic mentality of legal council, which the author describes as "such council is not to make sure the truth is ascertained but to advance his client's cause..."
There are quite a few one liners that I thought were very witty and clever. Here are a few:
"... regulation has become so elaborate and technical that it is beyond the understanding of all but a handful of Mandarins." "... every expert to elaborate and exorcise the demon of ambiguity. "
"Looming over us is a larger, more troubling paradox: the quest for protection through certainty results in arbitrary power. ... Only the paradox is perfect: if noncompliance can be found under any law, what protection do we think all this legal detail is providing?"
"Conquering human nature was not the idea when our founders devised a new nation around the freedom of each human. Avoiding coercion by making law into a detailed manual only assures another form of coercion. ... we only meant to make society better, law would lay everything out for us. But law cannot save us from ourselves. "
In regard to regulatory law enforced by unelected bureaucrats, "the irony cannot be allowed to pass: process was intended to make sure everything was done responsibly. It has instead become a device for manipulation, even extortion."
"Only because our devotion to process is so unquestioning have we been able to endure paradox that, like leeches on a weakening patient, steadily drain our vitality."
"By exiling human judgment in the last decades, modern law changed its role from useful tool to brainless tyrant." "... for the original point of bureaucracy was to have professional points of view..." but process, protocol, regulatory rule books detract from humans using good judgment without retaliation from those seeking to follow the letter of the law. "Ordinary decisions are subject to rigid formalities taken as seriously as the due process protection in a criminal trial. The actual goals of government are treated like a distant vision, displaced by an almost religious preoccupation with procedural conformity."
"Judgement is to law as water is to crops."
However I found myself frustrated with how the content was organized. The content is divided up into 4 large sections, while there is nothing wrong with this style, me as a reader enjoys short topic driven chapters. I don't know what it is about short chapters, but when I finish a chapter I get a feeling of accomplishment. With this book it took forever to get through each section, which lengthened the time between my rewarding feeling of accomplishment. I know, it's weird. I also struggled with the contents organization in that it felt as if the author was all over the place. I really enjoy diving deep into a topic and not so much a light bounce around.
The topic of this book is one of deep interest to me as I have been directly effected by this issue. In reading I found myself wondering what the authors definition was for bureaucrat in order for me to wrap my mind around his ideas for solution and conclude for myself if his suggestions were sound when putting his ideas up against the test of principle. My experience has shown there can be language barriers, even when using the same language. Throughout the book I found myself feeling as if I was understanding what he was communicating and on the very next page feeling as if he was contradicting himself. My experience very well could have been the result of his understanding of a word and my understanding of a word to be conflicting, such is the battle of law. It's all about the understanding and interpretation of words found in law. I won't elaborate to much on the element of the toxic mentality of legal council, which the author describes as "such council is not to make sure the truth is ascertained but to advance his client's cause..."
There are quite a few one liners that I thought were very witty and clever. Here are a few:
"... regulation has become so elaborate and technical that it is beyond the understanding of all but a handful of Mandarins." "... every expert to elaborate and exorcise the demon of ambiguity. "
"Looming over us is a larger, more troubling paradox: the quest for protection through certainty results in arbitrary power. ... Only the paradox is perfect: if noncompliance can be found under any law, what protection do we think all this legal detail is providing?"
"Conquering human nature was not the idea when our founders devised a new nation around the freedom of each human. Avoiding coercion by making law into a detailed manual only assures another form of coercion. ... we only meant to make society better, law would lay everything out for us. But law cannot save us from ourselves. "
In regard to regulatory law enforced by unelected bureaucrats, "the irony cannot be allowed to pass: process was intended to make sure everything was done responsibly. It has instead become a device for manipulation, even extortion."
"Only because our devotion to process is so unquestioning have we been able to endure paradox that, like leeches on a weakening patient, steadily drain our vitality."
"By exiling human judgment in the last decades, modern law changed its role from useful tool to brainless tyrant." "... for the original point of bureaucracy was to have professional points of view..." but process, protocol, regulatory rule books detract from humans using good judgment without retaliation from those seeking to follow the letter of the law. "Ordinary decisions are subject to rigid formalities taken as seriously as the due process protection in a criminal trial. The actual goals of government are treated like a distant vision, displaced by an almost religious preoccupation with procedural conformity."
"Judgement is to law as water is to crops."
September 1, 2023
While short it had compacted a lot of information on government process. I had to take breaks to really absorb what I read
It definitely explained a bit as to why things never felt done and why at times the actions of the government seemed archaic/antiquated and slow.
For the most part I did agree with most of what was said. Where I partly disagreed was when in regards to racial groups and other special interests
The author doesn’t take much consideration into the impact of previous actions and how that played in the inequities observed in some of those groups to begin with
I do agree that constant rules and only ends up putting one group over the other and it just spirals over.
The solution while simple and “common”, probably won’t be implemented in my lifetime if it ever does
Some of which that prevents us from following said is our overall individualistic nature that has been curated since almost inception of this county. Everyone is about the me and if it’s against one self then it’s a problem
The other issue is that people tend to tie themselves to said group it becomes part of their identity and since they were given some allowances albeit not constructive or at the behest of others If taken away or restricted would just be perceived as infringing of their rights, which may cause folks to not accept it
What baffles me is that there has been so many quotes of warnings given and I recall some that wasn’t included and yet nothing was done from what I recall to ensure that it is followed. Like they were smart enough to mention said falls but stupid enough to believe that the general public will withhold from falling into themselves. As is our nature to do so.
It definitely explained a bit as to why things never felt done and why at times the actions of the government seemed archaic/antiquated and slow.
For the most part I did agree with most of what was said. Where I partly disagreed was when in regards to racial groups and other special interests
The author doesn’t take much consideration into the impact of previous actions and how that played in the inequities observed in some of those groups to begin with
I do agree that constant rules and only ends up putting one group over the other and it just spirals over.
The solution while simple and “common”, probably won’t be implemented in my lifetime if it ever does
Some of which that prevents us from following said is our overall individualistic nature that has been curated since almost inception of this county. Everyone is about the me and if it’s against one self then it’s a problem
The other issue is that people tend to tie themselves to said group it becomes part of their identity and since they were given some allowances albeit not constructive or at the behest of others If taken away or restricted would just be perceived as infringing of their rights, which may cause folks to not accept it
What baffles me is that there has been so many quotes of warnings given and I recall some that wasn’t included and yet nothing was done from what I recall to ensure that it is followed. Like they were smart enough to mention said falls but stupid enough to believe that the general public will withhold from falling into themselves. As is our nature to do so.
December 8, 2017
Totally Amazing and Scary!
First, the scary part. This book was published nearly 25 years ago. The stories about the abuses condoned by are legal system are appalling, but they are old stories. What one has to wonder and worry about is how many more situations that have occurred in the last 25 years. You can be assured the legal system and people's state of mind hasn't improved (i.e. returned to normalcy) in that time.
The message is quite clear: our legal system is very sick, if not broken. The result is that no one wants to take responsibility for fear of being sued or inconvenienced. Plus, the definition of "rights" has been so badly distorted by legislation and court system that the social and actual costs to Americans is becoming intolerable. The direction we are all heading is only making the conditions worse. Something has to change, but how long are we willing to wait?
The politicians have us bouncing off the walls. Obama promoted change and now Trump wants to drain the swamp, but neither have addressed the source problem; the legal system needs to be renovated in the extreme. This book offers some ideas.
This book is still very timely about the situation. I highly recommend this book to anyone who about the health of the United States. I plan on reading more books by this author.
First, the scary part. This book was published nearly 25 years ago. The stories about the abuses condoned by are legal system are appalling, but they are old stories. What one has to wonder and worry about is how many more situations that have occurred in the last 25 years. You can be assured the legal system and people's state of mind hasn't improved (i.e. returned to normalcy) in that time.
The message is quite clear: our legal system is very sick, if not broken. The result is that no one wants to take responsibility for fear of being sued or inconvenienced. Plus, the definition of "rights" has been so badly distorted by legislation and court system that the social and actual costs to Americans is becoming intolerable. The direction we are all heading is only making the conditions worse. Something has to change, but how long are we willing to wait?
The politicians have us bouncing off the walls. Obama promoted change and now Trump wants to drain the swamp, but neither have addressed the source problem; the legal system needs to be renovated in the extreme. This book offers some ideas.
This book is still very timely about the situation. I highly recommend this book to anyone who about the health of the United States. I plan on reading more books by this author.
September 4, 2023
4
Very convincing diatribe against overbearing burden of uncountable (and growing) laws and regulation on everyday life and of tendency to assign unlimited rights (or rather entitlements) to every possible interest group on account of everyone else. The book was written in the 1990s and since then the situation became even worse. Lots of outrageous examples and convincing arguments for less regulation and more responsibility that made me somewhat reevaluate my views on the better governance ― though not exactly in the way the author proposes.
The biggest flaw of the book, as it's almost always the case with such works, is that author is very good at analyzing the problems but his solutions are unconvincing. Instead of dramatically limiting the scope of government regulations and giving people the right to decide for themselves, he proposes to give more leeway to bureaucrats. In some cases it's wise, but generally while solving one problem it will create another one and no less severe.
Also I didn't like the way in which author cited his sources. They all are listed at the end of the book without any obvious way to know which exact sources are behind the stories he tells.
Very convincing diatribe against overbearing burden of uncountable (and growing) laws and regulation on everyday life and of tendency to assign unlimited rights (or rather entitlements) to every possible interest group on account of everyone else. The book was written in the 1990s and since then the situation became even worse. Lots of outrageous examples and convincing arguments for less regulation and more responsibility that made me somewhat reevaluate my views on the better governance ― though not exactly in the way the author proposes.
The biggest flaw of the book, as it's almost always the case with such works, is that author is very good at analyzing the problems but his solutions are unconvincing. Instead of dramatically limiting the scope of government regulations and giving people the right to decide for themselves, he proposes to give more leeway to bureaucrats. In some cases it's wise, but generally while solving one problem it will create another one and no less severe.
Also I didn't like the way in which author cited his sources. They all are listed at the end of the book without any obvious way to know which exact sources are behind the stories he tells.
March 30, 2022
I should start by saying I generally support big government and having lots of government regulations. So I had to go into this book with an open mind.
I agree though, that there are many laws/regulations that need not exist, and do more harm than good.
So I was interested to see what I could learn from this book.
I tried to have some grace when it came to judging this book since it was written in the 90’s.
Obviously current technology could have afforded him better examples to use. Plus, outdated technology/practices makes many of his points moot.
Even with that in consideration, I still wasn’t overly impressed with the angle of attack. I understand the points he was trying to make, but I don’t feel like he ever really nailed it. I wasn’t 100% sold, especially because of my background in accounting, and my understanding of why many of the procedures he mentioned need/needed to exist.
I gave it a 3 simply because it was interesting to be able to look backwards to see a bit of how we got to where we are now.
I think I may need to read some of his more recent books to see how/if his perspective has evolved.
I’ll be glad I have this foundation going into it.
I agree though, that there are many laws/regulations that need not exist, and do more harm than good.
So I was interested to see what I could learn from this book.
I tried to have some grace when it came to judging this book since it was written in the 90’s.
Obviously current technology could have afforded him better examples to use. Plus, outdated technology/practices makes many of his points moot.
Even with that in consideration, I still wasn’t overly impressed with the angle of attack. I understand the points he was trying to make, but I don’t feel like he ever really nailed it. I wasn’t 100% sold, especially because of my background in accounting, and my understanding of why many of the procedures he mentioned need/needed to exist.
I gave it a 3 simply because it was interesting to be able to look backwards to see a bit of how we got to where we are now.
I think I may need to read some of his more recent books to see how/if his perspective has evolved.
I’ll be glad I have this foundation going into it.
July 26, 2022
Life in business would be so much easier if rules were simpler to understand and shortened so that everyone can read and comprehend them.
This book shows why red tape in the form of thick books of regulations that even the government itself doesn't know about and how common sense law is thrown out the window and how it stifles so many good intentions in all forms of industry by government bureaucracies that live to nitpick and lay fines for the most trivial transgressions.
Many examples in different industries are laid out in this book that highlight businesses frustrations and make one want to tear one's hair out .
How does one streamline the process?
Philip Howard does his best to explain how.
This book shows why red tape in the form of thick books of regulations that even the government itself doesn't know about and how common sense law is thrown out the window and how it stifles so many good intentions in all forms of industry by government bureaucracies that live to nitpick and lay fines for the most trivial transgressions.
Many examples in different industries are laid out in this book that highlight businesses frustrations and make one want to tear one's hair out .
How does one streamline the process?
Philip Howard does his best to explain how.
February 18, 2025
although this book was written before I was born, it touches on a lot of fundamental issues we still face today. the author does a phenomenal job of how the law isn’t practical and requires so many loops to jump through to get anything done. it illustrates the downfalls of over regulation in every aspect of our lives, from special education to zoning issues. however I found myself getting bored through the repetitive nature of the book - it was like a friend complaining about the same problem over and over (and over) but in different ways. I wish there was more to takeaway besides the general knowledge that our current state of affairs isn’t working. the review on the back of the book made me think it’d be a thrilling read - I was bamboozled!
April 30, 2025
Written nearly 30 years ago, Howard's focus is on the overarching rigidity and overreach of an overwhelming administrative legal system built in the last hundred years on the back of the vague generalities of the Constitution. While I have some issues with his analysis, overall Howard makes some very good arguments in describing the incredible inefficiencies of an administrative governmental structure that dispenses almost entirely with human judgment in the supposed interest of even-handed fairness for all, resulting in either incredible delays in decision-making, or no decisions at all, much of the time. A very thought-provoking read for this lawyer/teacher, even 30 years after it was written, and then given to me by a lawyer friend.
April 9, 2022
Not a bad book, it’s a bit dated in 2022 as it was written almost 30 years ago. Most of the material in the book is still played out today and is mainly relevant. It was interesting to see how much further we have plunged into the rabbit hole. It appeared to be heavily researched, but was short on how to go about changing the status quo.
While being political in nature the author did a decent job staying apolitical in his stances, at least from my point of view. I went in not knowing anything about the book it came up in a discussion at some point, I purchased it used from Abe Books for under $4 including shipping.
While being political in nature the author did a decent job staying apolitical in his stances, at least from my point of view. I went in not knowing anything about the book it came up in a discussion at some point, I purchased it used from Abe Books for under $4 including shipping.
November 8, 2017
Possibly the least polemical polemic you will ever encounter.
Howard makes a strong case against the American regulatory regime as we know it, but though his recommendations for recovery are (no surprise here) common sense, I for one am doubtful that much can be done to arrest the growth of the beast we have created.
Howard makes a strong case against the American regulatory regime as we know it, but though his recommendations for recovery are (no surprise here) common sense, I for one am doubtful that much can be done to arrest the growth of the beast we have created.
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