A Fail-Safe Society Is Sure to Fail (Michael Barone)

[Valin]

The Jewish World Review

Michael Barone

April 12, 2024

When are we going to trust our fellow Americans again? When are we going to allow qualified individuals with responsibility to make decisions without consulting detailed rulebooks and formal procedures?

Those are questions New York lawyer and author Philip K. Howard (one of whose books is called, simply, "Try Common Sense") asks in his latest mini-tome "Everyday Freedom." The freedom he is writing about is not the freedom of eccentric individuals to demand special treatment and punctiliously pronounced pronouns, but the freedom of individuals in positions of authority to make decisions — and actually get things done.

The book, fully titled "Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society," comes just as the federal government is grappling, under the glare of national publicity, with the need to replace the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which fell into the main channel of Baltimore's harbor after being hit by a 984-foot-long container ship bereft of electric power.

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The 1960s-70s "legal revolution," Howard argues, produced prescriptive rulebooks, formal procedures and new litmus tests of individual rights. Some of this reflected a mistrust in segregationist Southerners, although the mandates — like the Supreme Court's 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which effectively banned aptitude tests for job applicants — came down just as elite Southerners were giving up on barring Black people from jobs, schools and voting.

Environmental legislation, in the process of vastly reducing unhealthful particulate emissions, required environmental impact statements, which these days can run to hundreds of thousands of pages, to be litigated and relitigated in unpredictable courts.

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This is what Pete Wilson, former Republican governor of California, did after the Northridge earthquake destroyed Los Angeles' Interstate 10 in 1994. He ditched the rules and provided penalties for late work and premiums for finishing ahead of time. The project, estimated to take two years, was completed in two months and two days.

And it's what Josh Shapiro, Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, did when a truck accident destroyed an overpass on Interstate 95 in Philadelphia. Shapiro suspended all regulations that "would in any way prevent, hinder, or delay necessary action." The highway was reopened in 12 days.

The obvious importance of the I-10 and I-95 arteries in Los Angeles and Philadelphia made the two governors' decisions widely popular. But unbeknownst to the public, the legal thicket created in the '60s imposes enormous opportunity costs every day on a society that doesn't have the public infrastructure or private developments its officials and entrepreneurs want to provide. In "Everyday Freedom," Howard tells us we can do better.