The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government
Philip K. Howard
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0393350754
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The secret to good government is a question no one in Washington is asking: “What’s the right thing to do?”
What’s wrong in Washington is deeper than you think.
Yes, there’s gridlock, polarization, and self-dealing. But hidden underneath is something bigger and more destructive. It’s a broken governing system. From that comes wasteful government, rising debt, failing schools, expensive health care, and economic hardship.
Rules have replaced leadership in America. Bureaucracy, regulation, and outmoded law tie our hands and confine policy choices. Nobody asks, “What’s the right thing to do here?” Instead, they wonder, “What does the rule book say?”
There’s a fatal flaw in America’s governing system―trying to decree correctness through rigid laws will never work. Public paralysis is the inevitable result of the steady accretion of detailed rules. America is now run by dead people―by political leaders from the past who enacted mandatory programs that churn ahead regardless of waste, irrelevance, or new priorities.
America needs to radically simplify its operating system and give people―officials and citizens alike―the freedom to be practical. Rules can’t accomplish our goals. Only humans can get things done.
In The Rule of Nobody Philip K. Howard argues for a return to the framers’ vision of public law―setting goals and boundaries, not dictating daily choices. This incendiary book explains how America went wrong and offers a guide for how to liberate human ingenuity to meet the challenges of this century.
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(hardcover) 1. Constitutional law—United States. 2. Law reform—United States. 3. Democracy—United States. 4. Representative government and representation—United S tates. I. Title. KF4552.H69 2014 340'.11—dc23 2013041183 ISBN 978-0-393-24211-9 (e-book) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT.
Will be people who do what’s right and sensible in the circumstances. Their record is probably not perfect, since they’re human, but they achieve credibility not only by their skill, but by their dedication to joint goals, and by the appropriate way in which they deal with others. The complexity of these types of moral traits can never be legislated, but is the glue holding together any healthy enterprise and society. Day to day, moral choices are essential to fair law, effective government, and.
Thousand ways to do anything, but they almost always require choices made in the particular situation. “No scientist has chosen a spouse or bought a house,” as historian Jacques Barzun put it, “using scientific methods.” Does it make sense to pull the tree out of the creek right away? Or to suspend the seventh-grader when she immediately rejected the contraband pill? How much environmental review is sufficient? Judges and officials must “look to custom,” Justice Cardozo observed, “to determine.
Opinion by Judge J. Skelly Wright in the Calvert Cliffs case: These cases are only the beginning of what promises to become a flood of new litigation—litigation seeking judicial assistance in protecting our natural environment. Several recently enacted statutes attest to the commitment of the Government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material “progress.” But it remains to be seen whether the promise of this legislation will become a reality. Therein lies the judicial role.
Dogged by the fact that laws are not self-interpreting or applying.” 113 “mere obedience to a rule”: Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Growth of the Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1924), 87. 113 “No scientist”: Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 162. In The Moral Life of Schools, Professor Philip Jackson and colleagues emphasized the intangible factors that distinguished good from bad teachers; Jackson, Boostrom, and Hansen, Moral.