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.”