A new article in The Economist looks at the U.S. regulatory system and asks what went wrong. As they explain on their website:

This week's cover package is on over-regulation in America. Our cover leader draws on the ideas of Philip Howard, a passionate advocate for simpler laws. For readers who want to read more, here's an essay Mr Howard wrote in December on "Results-Based Regulation". And here's a column we published a couple of years ago on his book "Life Without Lawyers".

The article makes the case for a simpler, less expensive, more effective approach to regulation--exactly what we at Common Good have been fighting for:

Democrats pay lip service to the need to slim the rulebook—Mr Obama’s regulations tsar is supposed to ensure that new rules are cost-effective. But the administration has a bias towards overstating benefits and underestimating costs (see article). Republicans bluster that they will repeal Obamacare and Dodd-Frank and abolish whole government agencies, but give only a sketchy idea of what should replace them.

America needs a smarter approach to regulation. First, all important rules should be subjected to cost-benefit analysis by an independent watchdog. The results should be made public before the rule is enacted. All big regulations should also come with sunset clauses, so that they expire after, say, ten years unless Congress explicitly re-authorises them.

More important, rules need to be much simpler. When regulators try to write an all-purpose instruction manual, the truly important dos and don’ts are lost in an ocean of verbiage. Far better to lay down broad goals and prescribe only what is strictly necessary to achieve them. Legislators should pass simple rules, and leave regulators to enforce them.

Read the full piece here.

Let's cross our fingers that no traffic accidents occur while drivers squint at the sign, trying to figure out whether it's 8:20 or 8:24.

When a rule becomes too specific, it can be nearly impossible to follow. Obeying this sign would be so much of a hassle that it's hard to imagine drivers going to the trouble. Instead, they'll use their judgment--slowing down if it's pick-up or drop-off time, if they see a traffic cop, or if there are children about. The sign won't help inform drivers about when to drive slowly, for the simple reason that no driver will be able to read it.

Simple guidelines would be more effective and reliable. But in a society obsessed with legal fear, sadly, speed limit signs aren't the only example of specificity gone awry. Our laws and regulations balloon to thousands of pages, trying in vain to address every possible contingency. Instead, they gum up our businesses and courts, costing billions of dollars and countless hours. Many of those pages do about as much good as this sign.

The second panel featured Ryan McConaghy of Third Way, Jim Maxeiner of the University of Baltimore, Don Elliott of Yale, and William Galston of the Brookings Institution:

In this clip, Common Good chair Philip K. Howard introduces the problem and sets the stage for the forum:

More after the jump...

Another unneeded mandate

Red tape and mandates continue to swamp Rhode Island’s local communities, as part of America’s propensity to turn everything into a law.

This year, state Rep. Peter Petrarca seeks a state law dictating to local schools a policy on student texting, even though many (most?) schools already have their own policies on cell-phone use. And Sen. John Tassoni, who last year failed to pass a statewide ban on students using cell phones during school hours, wants a similar bill in the Senate.

Are they acting this way so that they can boast to constituents they are doing something at the State House? There are far more pressing issues for our elected officials to confront, such as continuing services for the most needy, dealing with unsustainable spending on public-employee benefits and improving public education and one of America’s worst business climates (caused in part by excessive red tape).

According to Mr. Petrarca, studies indicate that 40 percent of students acknowledge that they text during class, and politicians may be able to win over some voters by boasting they are doing something about that scary statistic.

In the real world, though, such mandates add burdens to our already struggling cities and towns, which must enforce them. And it is by no means clear that a one-size-fits-all state policy would work better than individual districts’ efforts to control the problem. Districts, after all, are there on the ground, fighting cell-phone misuse first-hand. It’s their responsibility.

Rather than impose more unessential mandates, the General Assembly should focus on getting rid of some of the costly mandates that exist.

Bloomberg View illustration

Yesterday, Bloomberg's editors joined the chorus calling for an end to wasteful farm subsidies. The industry doesn't need them, the editorial argues, and we can't afford them. Every five years Congress writes a new farm bill, and every five years the subsidies are preserved, in one form or another. Now, Bloomberg says, the price tag is $25 billion a year.

Despite bipartisan support for scaling back the federal subsidies (including calls by President Obama and Senator Tom Coburn), special interests ensure that any decreases in one subsidy are balanced by increases in a different subsidy:

With direct payments at risk, the agriculture industry last year began pressing for more federal support for crop insurance. It’s already one of the fastest-growing benefits for the agriculture industry, with subsidies for insurance premiums rising to more than $7 billion in 2011 from a little more than a $1 billion in 2000.

It's like a multi-billion-dollar game of Whack-A-Mole. And Bloomberg's editors aren't too optimistic about the prospect of eliminating the subsidies altogether:

Eliminating agricultural subsidies altogether isn’t realistic, given how much sway the industry has in Washington. Spending on research and development is crucial, as are programs to encourage people to take up farming. But whatever Congress decides in the next farm bill, it should resist swapping one farming gravy train for another.

We can only hope that a bipartisan spirit of fiscal responsibility is enough to cut back on this particular waste.

Seeking to help the state's small businesses, the Missouri House voted Wednesday to require periodic reviews of certain state regulations.

State agencies would need to evaluate whether a new administrative rule is necessary, obsolete, duplicative and could be more narrowly tailored while accomplishing the same purpose. Existing rules would expire on a rolling schedule that starts in 2015, and a similar calculus would be required if a state agency wants to renew its expiring regulations. Every state administrative rule would need to be examined at least once per decade.

In addition, state agencies now be required to respond within 60 days when someone requests a rule be adopted, altered or repealed. State departments would have to explain how the rule complies with the new requirements.

State Republicans, who support the bill, present it as a boon for small business, while Democrats worry about the potential for uncertainty and protracted debate around regulations. We can’t say for certain how effective the bill would be if adopted, but we’re glad to see a real commitment to fighting outdated regulation.

The State of the Union address is a long speech that covers many topics. Nevertheless, we were excited when one of the topics President Obama tackled last night was the outgrowth of outdated regulations. The President sketched (albeit briefly) a regulatory philosophy that resonates with Common Good themes—up-to-date, simple rules that serve a clear public benefit:

There is no question that some regulations are outdated, unnecessary, or too costly. In fact, I've approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his. I've ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don't make sense. We've already announced over 500 reforms, and just a fraction of them will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years. We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill - because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.

I'm confident a farmer can contain a milk spill without a federal agency looking over his shoulder. But I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago. I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury pollution, or making sure that our food is safe and our water is clean. I will not go back to the days when health insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men.

The basic message Common Good is trying to spread with our Start Over campaign is simple: People, not rules, make things happen.

The regulatory philosophy of the U.S. makes the flawed assumption that more specific rules lead to better results. That’s why our country now has 140 million words of federal law, or thirty thousand words for every word in the Constitution.

In reality, more specificity leads to more loopholes, unintended consequences, and most importantly, the elimination of human judgment. Instead of entrusting individuals with the responsibility to make prudent decisions based on principles established by law, our legal and regulatory system expects bureaucrats to follow the letter of the law without deviation. And lawmakers are likely to step on their own toes by creating inflexible regulatory structures that can’t keep up with changing times.

Eighteen months ago, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act, a statute of some 2,300 pages intended to prevent financial sector abuses of the kind that led to the 2008 crisis. Its core strategy is to empower federal regulators to control the promulgation of risky financial instruments like derivatives. But, as David Skeel wrote last year, “the legislation merely provides a framework for achieving these objectives. It leaves nearly all of the details to financial regulators, who will be required to promulgate more than five hundred new rules.” And New York Times columnist Joe Nocera recently warned against “complexity risk,” arguing that “contradictory regulations, however well meaning, simply don’t make the system safer.”

The Dodd-Frank approach presents an opportunity and a risk. The opportunity is to show that individuals entrusted with regulating the financial sector can work most effectively when the law gives them a broad objective and the proper tools. The risk is that the law expects these regulators to achieve the objective not through careful deliberation and analysis, but by writing hundreds of new, specific rules.

Skeel observes that the new rules will work best if they are “simple and straightforward.” Let’s hope the regulators take note. But it’s hard to imagine a scheme of five hundred new rules being truly simple and adaptable. Contrast that with Britain’s Financial Services Authority, which sets out seven basic principles to guide regulators’ decisions. The principles are succinct, clear, and intuitive, and they establish a basic philosophical approach that regulators and businesses can easily understand and apply. For example, one of the principles, “Proportionality,” reads in its entirety:

The burdens or restrictions we impose on the industry should be proportionate to the benefits that are expected to result from those burdens or restrictions.

In making judgements in this area, we take into account the costs to firms and consumers. One of the main techniques we use is cost-benefit analysis of proposed regulatory requirements. This approach is shown, in particular, in the different regulatory requirements we apply to wholesale and retail markets.

Similarly, the FSA lays out eleven principles of proper business conduct in the financial sector. They include:

• “Integrity: A firm must conduct its business with integrity,”
• “Financial prudence: A firm must maintain adequate financial resources,” and
• “Relations with regulators: A firm must deal with its regulators in an open and cooperative way, and must disclose to the FSA appropriately anything relating to the firm of which the FSA would reasonably expect notice.”

Sometimes more specific rules are necessary, but for the FSA, maximizing granularity is not the default. Does that make it more difficult for the agency to ensure fairness? Well, as Clive Briault, FSA’s former managing director of retail markets, put it: “Our Principles are rules. We can take enforcement action on the basis of them; we have already done so; and we intend increasingly to do so where it is appropriate to do so.”

It’s hard to imagine those words coming from an American bureaucrat. Yet at a time when Americans are all too accustomed to regulatory failure, surely we ought to think about regulatory approaches that serve individuals and the economy instead of chasing after subsections and clauses.

In 2008 the Tennessee Supreme Court, in a decision captioned Hannan v. Alltel, narrowed the ability of defendants to pursue “summary judgment,” a procedural device allowing judges to dismiss cases at early stages in the proceedings if certain requirements are met. Hannan clarified the previously very confusing standard. In Tennessee, to succeed on a motion for summary judgment, a defendant must now produce some affirmative evidence that contradicts the plaintiff’s claim. One cannot rely on the more defendant-friendly “put up or shut up” system in place in most other jurisdictions (including the federal courts), under which the defendant need only show that the plaintiff does not have any evidence supporting their claim. The difference is stark. For claims in which evidence on both sides is flimsy, this system limits defendants’ ability to avoid significant litigation costs.

Hannan infuriated Tennessee’s business community, which feared that a tightened summary judgment standard would allow more frivolous cases to proceed to costly trials. Tennessee legislators have now attempted to overturn Hannan via legislation, which passed easily, leading to the current showdown over whether this maneuver is even constitutional.

This brouhaha stems from a common refrain in American politics: the need to reform our civil justice system to lower the costs (both monetary and social) of frivolous lawsuits. But it also reveals how no one seems to understand what’s really at stake, or how to improve the system we currently have. In Tennessee and elsewhere, the battle is about the character of the rules: who needs to produce what evidence when, what sorts of caps can be placed on damages. But rules, by their very nature, can never perfectly conform to social expectations. No matter where the summary judgment line is drawn, some meritorious cases will get dismissed and some frivolous cases will proceed to trial—and tort reform only shifts stakes, not costs.

More than rules, what really should be at issue is the effect of civil litigation on American life—and the role judges should play in a free society. For years, Common Good has argued that judges should see their role not as some neutral arbiter between two opposing sides—to simply call balls and strikes, if you will—but rather as a gatekeeper who makes value judgments on behalf of society about whether a particular claim should proceed. As Philip K. Howard has written:

America needs a new judicial philosophy. Instead of focusing on enforcing ‘rights’ and avoiding ‘activism,’ judges should look to the effects of lawsuits on the functioning of society, and see their job as drawing ‘boundaries’ and achieving a ‘balance’ between competing interests of freedom and individual grievances. Judicial rulings that keep claims and defenses reasonable should be encouraged, not avoided. . . . Only by judges continually asserting reasonable community values can citizens enjoy the protection of the rule of law.

Changes in summary judgment rules are meaningless if technically meritorious suits can shut down playgrounds while negligent defendants can hide behind procedural devices. To ensure that the interests and expectations of society at large are served, judges must be empowered to consider and protect them as appropriate. Tennesseans are right to be concerned about the state of their civil courts, but if it’s true justice they want, they’d be better off throwing out the rule book and starting over.

Common Good and the Bipartisan Policy Center invite you to attend a morning forum on the problem of obsolete law on Tuesday, February 7 in Washington, DC.

(Click to download the agenda and flyer as pdfs.)

Agenda:

8:30 – 9:00 AM:  REGISTRATION AND BREAKFAST

9:00 – 9:05 AM:  WELCOME

Philip K. Howard, Common Good

9:05 – 9:35 AM: MODERATED DISCUSSION

Senator Mark Warner, D-Virginia

John C. Fortier, Bipartisan Policy Center (moderator)

Stuart Taylor, Jr., author and journalist (moderator)

9:40 – 10:40 AM:  PANEL ONE

Julie Barnes, Bipartisan Policy Center

Richard R. Buery, Jr., The Children’s Aid Society

Philip K. Howard, Common Good

Maya MacGuineas, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

Alan B. Morrison, The George Washington University Law School

John C. Fortier, Bipartisan Policy Center (moderator)

10:45 – 11:30 AM:  MODERATED DISCUSSION

Representative Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee

William A. Galston, The Brookings Institution (moderator)

11:35 – 12:15 PM:  PANEL TWO

E. Donald Elliott, Yale Law School

William A. Galston, The Brookings Institution 

James R. Maxeiner, University of Baltimore School of Law

Ryan McConaghy, Third Way

Philip K. Howard, Common Good (moderator)

As government officials and candidates in the 2012 election talk about ways to cut government spending, trim deficits, create jobs, control healthcare costs, and improve education and infrastructure, the role played by obsolete law needs to be addressed.  Forum participants will discuss how laws, regulations, and mandates from years past prevent officials and everyday Americans from making choices for today.  Panelists will also consider proposals for reform, including sunset provisions. 

When:

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

8:30 AM to 12:00 PM

Discussion begins promptly at 9:00 AM.

A continental breakfast will be provided.  

Where:

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20036

To RSVP, please e-mail your name, position, affiliation, and contact information to rsvp@commongood.org. If you have any questions, please contact Andrew Park of Common Good at apark@commongood.org.

This event is the first in a Common Good series titled: “Start Over 2012: A Bipartisan Forum Series”

Why does complexity risk matter? One reason is that the more complex the rules are, the greater the likelihood that smart bankers will find ways to game them. Another is that contradictory regulations, however well meaning, simply don’t make the system safer.

...

[Karen] Petrou [managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics] offers a series of solutions, revolving around simpler regulations, a reliance on market discipline and transparency. She also calls for the regulators themselves to be held accountable, something that is nowhere to be found in Dodd-Frank, despite their obvious shortcomings in the years leading to the financial crisis.

However you feel about banks — and I know that many people harbor enormous, justifiable anger at what they did — our economy can’t function without them. And they needed to be regulated. But three years ago, overly complex securities were one of the root causes of the crisis. So why, then, do we have faith that overly complex regulations will prevent the next crisis? Sad but true: they won’t.

It's good to see writers across the political spectrum recognizing the point Common Good has long made: In order for law and regulation to be effective, it needs to be understood. Read Nocera's full column here.

Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.

Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.

If you’ll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It’s not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.

Make the tax code simple. Make job training simple. Make Medicare simple. Every week choose a rent-seeker to hold up for ridicule and renunciation. Change the Congressional rules. Simplify the legal thickets that undermine responsibility.

Brooks understands that in order to restore trust in government, reform efforts need to focus on how government operates, not just on what government does. Effective governance depends on restoring responsibility to individuals—but that’s impossible within the complex and convoluted “legal thicket” we’ve created.

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.

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.'

…

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.

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.

…

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features an op-ed column in which William McGurn examines the case of a New Jersey soup kitchen now barred from distributing certain donated foods.

According to McGurn, a local bureaucracy determined that the kitchen must be classified as a retail establishment. The consequences are broad:

Most obvious is the higher cost: at least $150,000 more a year. To meet this increase, the kitchen is asking each participating church to up its own contribution. Some congregations don't have the money. For those that do, it will mean less for some other need.

It turns out that retail establishments are prohibited from giving out homemade food donated by volunteers. Now that the kitchen qualifies as "retail," that means a whole lot less support for the needy. Do the new restrictions really serve the public interest? McGurn is skeptical:

[N]o one opposes reasonable measures to improve cleanliness. The question is whether this is a solution in search of a problem. In the 26 years this kitchen has been open, there seems to be no case of food poisoning. Maybe Morristown officials would do better to seek out those who actually eat there, and put to them this question: Do you feel safer and better off now that we've protected you from home-baked apple pie?

Read the whole story here. What part of this makes sense? When we rely on rules to make our decisions instead of people, the victim is common sense--and, in this case, the hungry.

Isn’t it time to Start Over?

One of the participants was Philip Howard, Chair of Common Good, who starts speaking at 16:40:

“There is a complete absence of decision-making among leaders in the government. If prompt action is not taken, the country will face a setback. You must appreciate how serious it is.”

No, those words weren’t directed at the United States—they were spoken by the chairman of a large Indian technology company about his own country. But, as Thomas Friedman points out, they’re just as true here as across the Pacific.

In his New York Times column on Tuesday, Friedman addressed the question: “Who’s the Decider?” In the absence of decision-making, he notes, it’s hard to move forward:

At a time when, from India to America, democracies have never had more big decisions to make, if they want to deliver better living standards for their people, this epidemic of not deciding is a troubling trend. It means that we are abdicating more and more leadership to technocrats or supercommittees—or just letting the market and Mother Nature impose on us decisions that we cannot make ourselves. The latter rarely yields optimal outcomes.

Friedman argues that around the world, political expediency is used to justify a dearth of leadership. But in America, bureaucracy and the accretion of law hamstring even those willing to make needed choices. When we rely on rules to make choices instead of people, it’s hardly surprising that people find it difficult to use common sense. Teachers are restricted by stifling rules, regulators are bound by absurdly complex code, and government officials are handcuffed by budget mandates enacted by long-dead politicians.

As long as we’re complacent, this bureaucratic morass will only grow more convoluted and decision-making will become even more rare. Anyone think it’s time to Start Over?