Blog — Government

Posted 1/4/12 by Benjamin Miller

Today’s Read: Lenore Skenazy on “Overhyped Panics”

Lenore Skenazy, author of FreeRangeKids.com, wants us to ask ourselves: Are we overreacting to life's rare and improbable threats? And in attempting to protect ourselves and our children against remote risks, do we incur greater societal costs?

In an op-ed in last week's Wall Street Journal, Skenazy argues that the answer to both questions is a definite "yes." She describes an incident in April 2011 in which an Applebee's waiter inadvertently served an alcoholic drink to a toddler. Instead of being resolved with a simple apology and recompense, the incident ballooned into a lawsuit, a national retraining of Applebee's staff, and a media frenzy. What's wrong with that? As Skenazy writes:

This collective decision not to distinguish between rare screw-ups and systemic dangers is turning us into neurotic Nellies who worry about, warn against and, finally, outlaw very safe things.

This reactionary instinct is all too visible in the way we treat our children, eliminating monkey bars and dodgeball because they might cause an accident. But the attitude is pervasive across society. We write laws and regulations to address rare or one-time events, instead of defining our principles and objectives and using common sense to resolve specific issues accordingly.

No matter how many rules we think up, accidents will happen. When they do, let's remember to use common sense, not irrational panic, to fix them.

Posted 12/20/11 by Common Good

Howard on Havel

Writing on his blog on TheAtlantic.com, Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard draws from a series of speeches Vaclav Havel gave in the 1990s to relate the former activist and Czech president’s critique of western bureaucratic structures:

Western governments, he said, are organized on a flawed premise not far removed from the Soviet system that had just collapsed. 'The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief,' he said, 'that the world ... is a wholly knowable system governed by finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct ... objectively describing, explaining, and controlling everything.'

These bureaucratic structures are profoundly dehumanizing, Havel believed, striving to control choices that should be left to human judgment and values. This 'era of systems, institutions, mechanisms and statistical averages' is doomed to failure because 'there is too much to know' and it cannot 'be fully grasped.' The drive towards standardization is fatally flawed, Havel believed: 'life is nonstandard.'

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In a society where authority is embodied in complex bureaucratic systems, no one can take responsibility to do what seems right. Modern societies are suffering what he called a 'profound crisis of authority and resulting general decay of order.' What does that mean? 'Politicians seem to have turned into puppets that only look human and move in a giant, rather inhuman theatre; they appear to have become merely cogs in a huge machine, objects of a major automatism of civilization which has gotten out of control and for which no one is responsible.'

The solution, Havel believed, is to reclaim human control over daily choices. We must 'get to the heart of reality through personal experience ... in short, human uniqueness, human action, and the human spirit must be rehabilitated.' Let communities too be different: 'There is no need at all for different people, religions and cultures to adapt or conform to one another. ... I think we help one another best if we make no pretenses, remain ourselves, and simply respect and honor one another, just as we are.'

Havel’s analysis of western governments, Howard notes, is as relevant today as when it was written—and it also aligns well with the message of Common Good's Start Over campaign. Read Howard’s essay in full and leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Posted 12/19/11 by Common Good

Today’s Read: Jeb Bush Calls for Results-Based Regulation and Sunsets

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Common Good Advisory Board member and former Florida governor Jeb Bush makes the argument that “results-based regulation” (or “outcome-oriented rules”) and sunsets are necessary for Americans’ economic freedom:

We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

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The right to rise does not require a libertarian utopia to exist. Rather, it requires fewer, simpler and more outcome-oriented rules. Rules for which an honest cost-benefit analysis is done before their imposition. Rules that sunset so they can be eliminated or adjusted as conditions change. Rules that have disputes resolved faster and less expensively through arbitration than litigation.

In Washington, D.C., rules are going in the opposite direction. They are exploding in reach and complexity. They are created under a cloud of uncertainty, and years after their passage nobody really knows how they will work.

Read Gov. Bush’s op-ed in full (subscription required) and leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Posted 12/14/11 by Benjamin Miller

Interview: Dr. Robert Costrell on Public Employee Unions

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Robert M. Costrell, an expert on teacher pensions and author of two Wall Street Journal op-eds from the last year ("Oh, To Be a Teacher in Wisconsin," February 25, 2011, and "Collective Bargaining Weakens Cities," November 23, 2011). In addition to writing extensively about the challenges posed by union-negotiated public employee benefits, Dr. Costrell has direct experience trying to address these challenges as an economic and education adviser to three governors of Massachusetts. Dr. Costrell kindly agreed to answer some of my questions about public unions, collective bargaining, and the manageability of government. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows below:

Benjamin Miller: Your recent op-ed draws a distinction between state versus local unions. You argue that local governments are in a much weaker bargaining position relative to state and national public unions.

Robert Costrell: The evidence of it is in the results: more expensive health care benefits in particular. In at least some states, particularly the three I wrote about [Ohio, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts], they were more expensive at the local level than they were for state employees, for a number of reasons.

I’ll give you a clear example that I learned from my seven years at the state house in Massachusetts. In each state you typically have two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives, and the House obviously has smaller districts. In each of those districts one of the most active groups is the [union for] teachers and other school employees. They’re all under the umbrella of one of the two state teachers’ unions, affiliated with the NEA [National Education Association] or the AFT [American Federation of Teachers]. So they’re very powerful and influence both Democratic and Republican legislators.

State employee unions are very influential as well, and many states will have to sit down and collectively bargain with them. But the state employees are concentrated in or around the state capital. So they do not have the type of influence district by district as the teachers’ unions.

BM: This discrepancy between the state and local influence of these organizations has significant fiscal effects. You say that in Massachusetts, the health insurance benefits on the local level were 37% higher than on the state level?

RC: The estimate by the Massachusetts Municipal Association—which is aligned more closely with the Democrats than the Republicans—was that the new law would save as much as $100 million a year, by allowing the localities to change the design of their health plans. Mostly by setting copayments and deductibles to match those offered in the state plans.

BM: It’s clear that a lot of these contracts with public employee unions on both the local and state level have stood in the way of the governments trying to make necessary fiscal choices, because they precommit large portions of their budgets that then can’t be adjusted when public needs change.

RC: You’re getting close to what I think is a critical distinction to be made between bargaining over wages and bargaining over benefits. When you’re bargaining over wages, you’re bargaining over a known dollar quantity. When you’re bargaining over benefits, you’re bargaining over plan design—co-payments, deductibles, and so on—and you have only limited control over what the actual cost trajectory of those benefits is going to be.

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Posted 12/12/11 by Common Good

Daniel Kahneman on Leadership

Philip Howard recently hosted a conversation with psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, whose most recent work is Thinking, Fast and Slow. According to Kahneman, humans rely on two separate modes of thinking--System 1 and System 2--which have disparate effects on the choices we make. Take a look at the clips below in which Kahneman describes the two systems and their implications on leadership, loss aversion, and risk:

Posted 12/12/11 by Common Good

What do values have to do with it?

Faith and Leadership, the online magazine of the Duke Divinity School, recently interviewed Philip K. Howard, Chair of Common Good, to explore the relationship between law, regulation, values, and personal responsibility. Howard observed:

What I’ve found is that [Americans] at every level of responsibility can’t do what they think is right because the legal system has become either so dense and thick, in the case of bureaucratic structures, or so random, in the case of litigation-related structures, that people more or less tiptoe through the day looking over their shoulders with their noses in rule books rather than striding forward to try to accomplish what they think they should be doing in their lives.

Read the whole transcript here, and watch a video excerpt below:

Posted 12/2/11 by Common Good

Philip Howard on the Need for Results-Based Regulation

In an essay excerpted in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard makes the case for results-based regulation. Read the full, unabridged version below:

Results-Based Regulation: A Blueprint for Starting Over

By Philip K. Howard

This past summer county officials closed down a children’s lemonade stand near the U.S. Open golf championship in Bethesda, Maryland—because the children didn’t have a vendor’s license. Officials decided not to compel the children to go to court, and issued a summons instead to their parents. Local television crews were soon on the crime scene, interviewing the kids who had organized the enterprise as a way to raise money for pediatric cancer. The incident was too ridiculous not to garner national attention, and the bureaucracy soon backed down. But the retreat was tactical, not a sincere acknowledgment of bureaucratic overkill. The regulations, after all, have no exception for young vendors. Indeed, the incident prompted a wave of sidewalk shutdowns over the summer by diligent officials in Georgia, Massachusetts and several other states.  

Regulation promises to be a central theme in the 2012 election. Americans instinctively know that it’s hard to invigorate a weak economy when almost any activity has regulatory risk. Approvals often require trips and applications to multiple agencies with inconsistent requirements. Farmers and factory foremen spend hours filling out forms that no one will ever read. Small businesses get nicked by inspectors who have no sense of proportion or priorities—for no reason other than that’s what the rule requires. Government looms over the most ordinary activities, a hydra-headed dragon repelling common sense solutions with disgusting bureaucratic breath.

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Posted 12/2/11 by Common Good

John Stossel Interviews Philip Howard

On December 1, Philip K. Howard, the Chair of Common Good, appeared on the John Stossel show to discuss the impact of public unions on the management of government. While public unions emerged with the goal of addressing a real problem, they've in turn created a slew of problems that we now have to address. Read the partial transcript and share your thoughts:

PHILIP HOWARD, COMMON GOOD: Government's become virtually unmanageable. The combination of civil service rules as affected by union demands, public union demands means that you cannot hire people sensibly, you can't reassign them. That's based on rigid seniority. You can't tell them what to do. There are all these rigid classifications and work rules. And you can't fire them at all unless they commit a crime.

STOSSEL: But before we talk about that, let me give the union's argument. They said we got to unionize to replace the spoils system. It used to be the new politicians would come in and bring in their cronies, and they were awful.

HOWARD: Right. We're supposed to get rid of spoils where people treated public jobs as property. Now what's happened is the idea of civil servants, which is supposed to be the merit system, people hired and keep their job based on how good they do at their jobs, now it has become like public property again. It has sort of turned into the evil it was intended to create. You can't, once you get a job, you can never get rid of anybody, sometimes if they don't even show up for work.

STOSSEL: We've all heard those stories. And new to me though were some of these work rules. You say in New York City, there are 1,000 job classifications?

HOWARD: Right. There are 1,000 job classifications, and for example, the person who has the job classification of putting the numbers in a ledger is not allowed to actually add them up.

STOSSEL: And if you ask someone to fill in or help out in some other part of the office, they can say, not my job.

HOWARD: Absolutely. Not my job. … It is incredibly important for somebody to be happy in their job for them to feel that their co-workers are all pitching in. And one of the tragedies of the modern public union system is it generates exactly the opposite feeling. People view their jobs and even what they do hour to hour as an entitlement rather than helping everyone around them.

STOSSEL: And they don't love the entitlement. They are grouchy at work.

HOWARD: It is horrible, it's horrible for everyone within the system.

STOSSEL: Another unintended consequences, you have these last-in, first- out rules. So what happened to this teacher in Wisconsin? She was voted the best teacher. She was new.

HOWARD: Best teacher of the year and she got laid off immediately after getting the award, because of budget cuts. They had to do layoffs, and there is no discretion under the union rules. You have to fire the people hired most recently even if they are the best people at the job.

STOSSEL: You argue there is a culture of fraud in government unions?

HOWARD: Well, there is this incredible incident that came to light recently where it turned out that 90 percent of a Long Island railroad workers had been retiring on disability. Even people with desk jobs. Well, of course they were not disabled. And it involved fraudulent doctors. But the question was not how the fraud happened. You know, you can - you have a fraudulent doctor, but that everyone thought it was all right. There was a culture of fraud, and it turned out in California, 82 percent of the senior state troopers retire on disability. Most people in public unions now consider sick days to be an entitlement, whether or not you are sick. They retire at the age 45 or 50 or the early fifties when they have no intention of retiring. So all these words have become meaningless, disability, retirement, sick days. They have become completely artificial because of what union leaders, by promising campaign funds, have been able to get from political leaders over the years, and political leaders, to get elected this year, make promises that cost the public decades out.

Posted 11/29/11 by Common Good

Dirk Olin and Jim Maxeiner on Civil Justice

Common Good is committed to improving the reliability and fairness of civil justice, and too few people in the U.S. are talking about substantive ideas for improvement. At a recent event in New York, Philip Howard, Chair of Common Good, spoke with two authors and scholars who have provided lucid observations and analyses of our justice system and possible improvements.

Dirk Olin is the co-author, with Rebecca Kourlis, of Rebuilding Justice: Civil Cours in Jeopardy and Why You Should Care. Jim Maxeiner is the author of Failures of American Civil Justice in International Perspective. Watch the clips below to hear how they believe we can move forward:

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Posted 11/28/11 by Common Good

Start Over Endorsement

For the second time, The Oklahoman newspaper has editorialized in support of Common Good reforms. Noting that bureaucracy has become unmanageable and often nonsensical, the editors write:

An exception is Philip K. Howard, author of “The Death of Common Sense” and chairman of Common Good, an organization with the seemingly sisyphean task of overhauling government using the tenets of individual responsibility, “reliable law” and accountability. Howard has made a powerful case that public service today lacks competence, dignity and purpose and, as he put in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this month, “America must bulldoze the current system and start over.”

More people across the country are coming to understand that the first step to sensible government is to give individuals responsibility, let them make choices, and hold them accountable. Join The Oklahoman and Common Good in working to Start Over right now.