The Death of Common Sense

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Summary: it was great
Review: loved it it is tru

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Summary: Lots of news, little substance, no real solutions
Review: Mr. Howard fills this book with many irritating, frightening, and maddening examples of how strict adherence to the letter of the law can lead to idiotic decisions. It's kind of like watching a "Real Cops" or "Amazing Videos" show on TV. If this is what you enjoy, buy this book and indulge yourself.

This book also appeals to government bashers. If you enjoy reading about how stupid laws can be, you don't mind ignoring all the good laws can do, and you like reading people slam the government, this is a good choice.

But, if you really care, you won't want to waste your time with this book. Howard offers no practical solutions. I can summarize his proposed remedies with two words: Benevolent Dictator. Howard calls for laws as general principles with justice metted out by wise "judges". This type of system, rife with corruption since man first walked the earth, concentrates power in the hands of a few and leaves the common man without recourse.

Sure, our legal system is too big. Yes, we have too many laws. But the solution should be reform, not a backward revolution.

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Summary: Orwell was just a few years early
Review: New York City laws forbidding Mother Theresa from opening a two-story homeless shelter unless she installs an elevator. A 33 page manual describing the qualifications and uses of a hammer. Contract bidding procedures that unintentionally but blatantly encourage corruption.

These snippets sound like lines from a Letterman or Leno monologue, but discouragingly they are all actual government dictates documented in this chilling expose. Phillip Howard does an admirable job of identifying the consequences when good-hearted bureaucrats create well-intentioned regulations, and government services get caught in a stranglehold.

Perhaps even more bilious than these splenetic monuments to red tape, are the huge work forces of administrators who are imprisoned by this uncontrollable system. Howard employs some macabre humor in redacting the plight of one troublesome government employee who purchased a lawn mower with his own money rather than navigate the labyrinth of paperwork necessary to order a replacement. For this breech of procedure, he earned a formal demerit.

Although the subject matter is serious and in deed frequently depressing, Howard often utilizes jocular techniques to make his point. His step by step specifications of NYC's contract bidding ritual would be the envy of any stand-up comic. Unfortunately, the laughing stops upon the realization that this vapid inefficiency is pandemic throughout all levels of our government. It's scary to see just how big Big Brother has become.

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Summary: Ammunition for those who love to hate "the system"
Review: One would think someone about to enter law school in the fallwould be disturbed by Howard's bashing of the very institution he willsoon become a part of. On the contrary, I was convinced it was a well-deserved bashing. Unlike the many self-proclaimed political critics who decry the era of big government without providing a single concrete example of what it is they're spouting off about, Howard illustrates just how ludicrous laws can be, and how those with power manage to hide behind them.

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Summary: Thought Provoking yet.......
Review: Overall, I think this book is fairly interesting and thought provoking. Yet it is not for the light hearted, it is pretty dense and is not casual reading.
Howard's thesis is simple: American Law is so meticulous that is fails to carry out the intended purpose and becomes rather silly and bothersome. The law gives power to those regaurdles of who it tramples. His points of interst include those about how "rights" is now just a term for people abusing power. In the end, Howard suggests that although it might seem scary, America would be "smarter" in its regulation if the laws gave people more responsibility and room for interpretation. Regulations do not work for every instance, and the founding fathers were ambiguoius with the constitution for a reason.
The book contained many examples and statistics that were organized and shocking. At the end of the book, I felt dissapointed with the legal system. The way Howard puts it, it feels that unless all the people of a higher legal standard suddenly have an epiphany, our laws will continue to be riduculous and unproductive. Overall the book was not engaging, but interesting.

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Summary: outline
Review: Part I "The Death of Common Sense"
Using several cases (see other reviews) details the harm of rationalist philosophy applied to law -- the misguided notion that laws can be made "self-executing".
Part II "The Buck Never Stops"
The abstractly laudable desire to maintain absolute impartiality creates an absolute nightmare of red tape -- the focus in this section is on Process spawned by mistrust and the bureaucratic reflex to avoid responsibility for decisions.

Part III "A Nation of Enemies"
Vocal, assertive minorities are able to control government policy-making. Rights over responsibilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the prime example here (see other reviews for details).
Part IV "Releasing Ourselves"
We must have law that allows thinking. Modern law wants to legislate away uncertainty with ever-thicker rulebooks, but uncertainty, risk, is exactly what drives various parties to work together, in the real world. Don't fear gov't authority. Don't think in extremes. Bureaucracy is the enemy of real democracy. Legislation cannot save us from ourselves. In the end, we must rely, as always, on common sense.

Note: rating lost a star because author kept using one example (Glen-Gery Brick Company) again and again, when fresh examples would have been more compelling. Also, as other reviewers have noted, the last section, on what we as citizens can concretely do to help change the situation, was vague and thin.

If this book interests you, you might also be interested in the political writings of Noam Chomsky. He has written an enormous, readable, extremely well-researched corpus of work that concerned, open-minded citizens can use to consider for themselves where they stand on various issues. If we were to hazard a label, Chomsky would be a "libertarian socialist". Try "Manufacturing Consent"... you might not look at your morning paper quite the same way.

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Summary: What shall we do?
Review: Philip Howard's book the The Death of Common Sense is both an enlightening and disturbing look at the inner workings of American government. Less than half of Americans vote because politicians never come through on their promises. Howard tells us why politicians seem impotent. The laws of the land are smuthering us all. Their is a "How to" guide for the right way of everything. Even though the "right way" may be flawed or lengthy, it must be followed.

For example, OSHA labeled sand as a hazardous material. The same sand as we see at the beach is hazardous. Not beacause it produces cancer or anything, but becuase sand contains trace amounts of silica. Silica is a dangerous element on its own. OSHA also found the very brick that built your house to be hazardous. If a brick is broken, it kicks up dust. We breathe this dust into our lungs. Long term damage could be caused. This is absurd! All because the government wants to head off lawsuits before they start.

How about construction on the highway. Bidding often takes foru years. Bidding has to be opened to everybody. And the bureaucrats have to take their time to make sure the process is fair. This "how to" maanual is in both houses of congress too. All the steps have to be followed to make everybody happy or the process will be blocked.

The bottom line is Howard has exposed bureaucrats to be a cancer in the American government. How do we start Americans in motion to reverse this tide?

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Summary: Law has replaced humanity and process supercedes reason.
Review: Philip Howard's insights help us understand why government appears arbitrary, almost never able to deal with real-life problems in a way which reflects an understanding of the situation. Peppered with pointed anecdotes about absurd regulatory inflexibility and the lack of the use of judgement, Howard's book reveals that we have concocted a system of regulation that "goes too far while it does too little."

In the decades since WWII, specific legal mandates designed to keep government in check have proliferated. The result is not better government, but more and poorer government. In a free society, we are supposed to be free to do what we want unless it is prohibited. But highly detailed regulations proscribing exactly what to do turn us toward centralized uniformity, Howard says, where law has replaced humanity. Detailed rules and uniform procedures have nonuniform effects when applied to specific situations.

Our old system of common law recognized the particular situation and invited the application of common sense. Common law evolved with the changing times and its truth was relative, Howard tells us, not absolute. But in this century statutes have largely replaced common law, and in recent decades regulations have come to dominate the legal landscape. Howard observes that the Interstate Highway System (still the nation's largest public works program) was authorized in 1956 with a 28-page statute. Now, we attempt to cover every situation explicitly. He cites one contract lawyer who received a proposed definition of the words and/or that was over three hundred words in length. (Let alone the more recent and prominent lawyer who parsed carefully over the definition of what the word "is" is.)

Howard traces the growth of this regulatory "rationalism" from Max Weber - the German sociologist at the turn of the century who said that "Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is 'dehumanized'" - to Theodore Lowi - who in The End of Liberalism in 1979 saw greater regulatory specificity to be the antidote to special interest groups. But in truth, Howard shows us, the more precise we try to make the law, the more loopholes are created.

Centralized rules have caused us to cast away our common sense. Furthermore, "Coercion by government, the main fear of our founding fathers, is now its common attribute. But it was not imposed to advance some group's selfish purpose; we just thought it would work better this way. The idea of a rule detailing everything has had the effect of reversing the rule of law. We now have a government of laws against men."

The second section of Howard's book explains how the ritualization of bureaucratic process has brought us to the point where people argue, not about right and wrong, but about whether something was done the right way. He sees the agency as mainly a referee to the process, not a decision maker. He beautifully describes how the bureaucracy surges and falls, en masse, onto a decision. Even Sherlock Holmes wouldn't be able to identify an actual decision maker! The process decided.

In this maze of centralized, detailed regulation - a system designed to discourage individual responsibility - many have lost sight of what government is supposed to be doing. Howard argues that process is a defensive device; the more procedures, the less government can do. The paradox is that we demand an activist government while also demanding elaborate procedural protections against government. "The route to a public goal cannot be diverted through endless switchbacks of other public goals, for example, without losing sight of the original destination." He tells us that responsibility, not process, is the key ingredient to action. If responsibility is shared widely, then like the extreme where property is shared widely, it is like there being no responsibility at all.

Effective government, Howard suggests, is one which attracts the best people and gives them leadership responsibility. But we have created the opposite system, based on defensive formalisms, driving away good people who cannot abide the negativity of the process.

The last section of Howard's book explores the "rights revolution," where government has become "like your rich uncle under your personal control" and everyone now gets to be a part of a legally-mandated, discriminated-against minority. As rights weaken the lines of authority in our society, the walls of responsibility - such as how a teacher manages a classroom - have begun to crumble. We want government to solve social ills, but distrust it to do so. Congress has resolved this dilemma by using rights to transfer governmental powers to special interest groups. The result has not been bringing excluded groups into society, but rather has become the means of getting ahead in society. Howard makes the distinction that, "The rights that are the foundation of this country are rights against law. In James Madison's words, the Constitution provides for 'protection of individual rights against all government encroachments, particularly by the legislature.' Rights - freedom of speech, property rights, freedom of association - were to be the antidote against any new law that impinged on those freedoms."

In this way, Howard finds that we have confused power with freedom. These new legislative rights aren't rights at all, no matter how righteous they sound. "They are blunt powers masquerading under the name of rights." He says we need to consider how these new rights impinge on what others consider to be their own freedoms. The flip side of the coinage of the new rights regime is called coercion.

Howard suggests that our loathing of government is not caused by its goals, but by its techniques. "How law works, not what it aims to do, is what is driving us crazy." Decision making must be transferred "from words on a page to people on the spot."

His book brings us closer to a place where what is right and reasonable, not the parsing of legal language, dominates the discussion. His thoughts shine needed light on the path to common sense and responsibility in government.

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Summary: Required reading for all Americans
Review: Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America (Random House, 1994)
by what little justice there is on this planet

I don't think there's a single person in America outside Capitol Hill who doesn't realize that the more laws you have, the more loopholes the laws contain, and the more subject to abuse those laws are. But just in case you need a quick refresher course on how Washington is helping the abusers do their thing and giving the rest of us the middle finger, Howard's book stands as a fine testimony to what doesn't work, why it doesn't work, and the bleedingly simple solution to the whole stupid mess.

In three long, painful chapters, Howard takes critical looks at the Congressional love of process and how that love has led us to the conclusion that process is more important than result. Looked at as a simple sentence, it's a pretty absurd belief, isn't it? Look around. Process rules. Howard points out, in multiple places, two of the recent high-profile projects that circumvented process (the rebuilding of the freeways after the California Earthquake of 1992, and the refurbshing of a major new York bridge in time for its centennial ceremony), and compares and contrasts them to numerous examples of process in action, highlighting the idiocy of process while taking a hard look at the overly liberal viewpoints that spawn it. There won't be too many people who like Howard's easy and obvious solution-- if too many laws are the problem, then get rid of as many of them as necessary to fix it. But logic leads us back to that conclusion time and again.

As important a book, and as deserving of a place on the shelf reserved for sacred writings, as Stanton Peele's The Diseasing of America. **** 1/2

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Summary: Common sense is over rated
Review: Sorry folks, after reading this book, I must say, "common sense" is over rated, since in appealing to "common sense" we have already formed a general concept of what it means to think.