There’s a consensus among U.S. policymakers and public officials — an increasingly rare sight — that America is being suffocated by red tape.

“Abundance” advocates want to cut through zoning and permitting laws to build housing and infrastructure more quickly. Researchers such as Stanford professor Daniel Ho are using artificial intelligence to identify obsolete rules in the more than 3 billion words of legal code in the United States. And President Donald Trump, of course, brought in Elon Musk to wield the DOGE chainsaw.

But why does America have so much red tape? Society might work better if people understood what was expected of them and had room to use their judgment. The U.S. Constitution has 7,591 words. The difference between the modern red-tape state and the Constitution is operational philosophy.

Mary Parker Follett was a seminal thinker in management theory. In the early days of large industrial organization, when Frederick Winslow Taylor was preaching the gospel of “scientific management,” Follett emphasized the social aspects of any group enterprise. Taylor was not wrong—improving efficiency remains an ongoing goal of successful manufacturers. But his efficient workplace could result in mind-numbing repetition. Follett understood that workers had human needs—for variety, for agency, for mutual understanding.

Follett originated the idea that, in the words of former Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, “organizations perform best when they operate on the basis of shared responsibility and not . . . command and obedience.”