For 25 years now, lawyer-author Philip K. Howard has led a righteous crusade. His goal: to reduce bureaucracy, regulations, and lawsuits that stifle innovation and improvement, to be replaced with renewed discretion and authority throughout public and quasi-public spheres. His crusade continues with Try Common Sense, another masterful summons on behalf of “a governing philosophy that re-empowers people to make practical choices.”
In this, his fifth full-length book, Howard evokes the title of his original 1994 best-seller, The Death of Common Sense. The themes are much the same, which is, alas, an indication that despite all his writing and the work of his nonpartisan Common Good coalition, “pretty much everything run by government [still] is broken.”
Public school teachers are hampered from disciplining students, and principals from disciplining poor teachers. Bureaucrats apply ever more complicated rules in senseless ways, to the detriment of reason and justice. Public sector unions protect bad employees rather than promote good ones.
Howard is great with pithy quotes. “Bureaucracy basically makes people stupid.” We suffer “the tyranny of mindless rules.” “[Surface-level] correctness has lobotomized government.” “We are creating a nation of wimps.”
And he’s very clear on what needs to replace these ills: “Real responsibility … is an active obligation to accomplish something concrete — a duty paired with authority to satisfy it.” Responsibility, he says, “means a person takes ownership of results.”
Sometimes, Howard’s generalities are too sweeping or just plain wrong. Completely missing the modern Left’s obsession with group-identity politics, for example, he ludicrously writes that “no concept is more sacred to liberals than individual rights.”
Yet these are mild, rare defects in a book otherwise engrossingly readable and wise. Howard leaves generalities behind to provide several strong lists of proposals to reorient stultified officialdom.
Space doesn’t here allow elucidation of those lists, which is all the more reason to read Try Common Sense for yourself. Or, better yet, demand that your elected officials read it — and act according to Howard’s advice.
Quin Hillyer is a Washington Examiner senior commentary writer.
