Replace It, Don’t Reform It

“Nothing that’s any good works by itself…You got to make the damn thing work.”
 
This practical wisdom of Thomas Edison applies to most meaningful life activities. Teachers, doctors, waiters, plumbers, ministers, inspectors, all confront situations where they have to decide what to do next. Even with miraculous technological tools, judgments are still needed to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, make tradeoffs, take risks, and make choices that are considered fair.
 
Americans broadly agree that government is broken. Our inability to modernize infrastructure, or provide quality education, or produce defense weaponry, presents an existential threat in a world threatened by totalitarian regimes that are not institutionally paralyzed.

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NewslettersAndrew Park
George Will: America’s Can-Do Spirit Needs Liberation from Can’t-Do Regulation

Philip K. Howard, a graduate of Taft prep school, Yale and the University of Virginia School of Law, says he never wore “white bucks.” This 1950s campus fashion waned before he matriculated. Those buckskin shoes were popular among young blades destined to become “white-shoe lawyers” at prestigious “white-shoe law firms,” such as Covington & Burling, where Howard, 76, is senior counsel.

He also is a genteel inveigher against the coagulation of American society, which is saturated with law. In his new book “Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America,” he argues that law’s proper role is preventing transgressions by authorities, not micromanaging choices so minutely that red tape extinguishes individual responsibility and the social trust that individualism engenders.

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Yuval Levin: ‘Saving Can-Do’ Review: How to Stop Dragging Feet

This brief, accessible and powerfully persuasive book assesses the symptoms of our ailing polity and concludes that we are suffering from a widespread loss of agency, the lifeblood of any free society.

That loss begins and ends with a lack of trust. Some mid-20th-century activists and regulators worried that both government and the private sector in America were running needless risks that endangered individual rights and public health and safety. So they set about constraining the range of choices available to private and public decision makers, replacing individual discretion with legal frameworks that would make uncertain tradeoffs less necessary. “The post-1960s complex of rules, processes, and rights,” Mr. Howard argues, “has been designed with one overriding operational premise—to preempt human judgment.”

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Essays & ReportsAndrew Park
Saving Can-Do.

Americans increasingly feel like rats in a maze. Do this. Don’t say that. Did you comply with the rules? Is your paperwork in order? Can you fill out more and more of it for no discernible reason?

Governing systems were remade after the 1960s to replace human judgement (and authority) with a kind of legal software program. The origin story displays the best of motives--to preclude any more abuses such as racism and pollution. Because humans can make poor judgments, the theory went, it’s better to strain choices through a legal sieve of prescriptive rules, processes, and rights.

But it doesn’t work. Instead of enhancing freedom, law replaced freedom. Americans no longer feel free to do what they think is right or sensible. Doctors and nurses spend half the day filling out forms, teachers have lost control of the classroom, and employers no longer give job references or candid reviews.

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Essays & ReportsAndrew Park
Use Your Judgment

I have a new book, out this week, Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America. One reason America is fraying, I argue, is because of a root flaw in post-1960s law: the idea that law should make or validate correct choices. Law is everywhere—in thick rulebooks, years-long procedures, self-interested people pounding the table for their alleged rights ….
 
America’s energy comes from individual ownership of choices and values—not tiptoeing through the day with a little lawyer on our shoulders. The proper role of law is to define the scope of free choice by setting outer boundaries—no crime, no pollution, and so forth—not by extruding daily choices through the eye of a legal needle. Law is supposed to protect freedom, not replace freedom.

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NewslettersAndrew Park
NEW BOOK: Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America

In Saving Can-Do, Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard unlocks the quandary of populist resentment and also of broken government.

America is flailing in legal quicksand. The solution is a new governing framework that allows Americans to roll up their sleeves and take responsibility. We must scrap the red tape state. What’s required is a multi-year effort to replace these massive failed bureaucracies with simpler codes that are activated by people using their judgment. As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the revolution, it’s time to reclaim the magic of America’s unique can-do culture.

Saving Can-Do was published by Rodin Books on September 23, 2025.

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Andrew Park
The Flaw of Post-1960s Liberalism

American exceptionalism is rooted in individual initiative. Americans have a cultural belief in self-determination. America is the place where people can make the best of themselves.
 
Over the past few decades, America’s can-do culture has been corroded by a sense of futility. The failures are clearly visible in institutional ineptitude—say, the inability to modernize infrastructure or to fix poor schools. But the cultural rot is more pernicious. Americans no longer believe we can make a difference, or build a better future. We feel disempowered. Watch what you say. Just follow the rules. Instead of striding towards our goals, Americans increasingly feel like rats in a maze. Many turn to MAGA.

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NewslettersAndrew Park
Breakneck versus Paralysis?

China’s autocratic society comes to life in Breakneck, the new book by Dan Wang. Nothing gets in the way of public works. Subways go through buildings. High-speed rail lines are built seemingly overnight. Industrial dominance in solar panels and electric cars is the result of deliberate policy.
 
Breakage is common. Top-down mandates can’t adapt to unforeseen circumstances and market realities. Cities of apartment buildings remain empty. One provincial czar had a kind of genius for idiotic mega-projects, including a giant ski resort in a place without snow.
 
What’s most breathtaking, to me, is the state’s intrusion into personal lives.

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NewslettersAndrew Park
The Missing Vision

Maybe it’s me, but the news cycle seems both terrifying and tedious. We’re treated to a steady diet of crises followed by reactions which create new crises. It’s as if we’re in a straitjacket, bouncing off today’s emergency instead of making deliberate choices that might lead to a coherent future.

In a thoughtful New York Times column, Ben Rhodes explains how “short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives.” He characterizes Trump as seeking “short-term ‘wins’ at the expense of the future”—for example, ignoring unsustainable national debt, climate change, and other existential perils. But Rhodes says Democrats too are trapped in short-termism—“spend[ing] more time defending what is being lost than imagining what will take its place.”

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NewslettersAndrew Park
Code Red

Politics now has a dizzying quality. The roller-coaster of Trump policies―now we do this, now we do the opposite―is being matched by wild swings in the Democratic positions, led by socialist Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral primary. Just imagine, as liberal columnist Joe Klein mused, the staggering inefficiency of a municipal grocery store operating under union work rules: "Sorry, I only restock on Thursdays."

Centrist democrats are trying to mobilize an Abundance agenda to cut through red tape to build housing and infrastructure. That's a step in the right direction, but pruning the red tape jungle doesn't work by itself. Officials must have authority to make tradeoff judgments.

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NewslettersAndrew Park
The Aaron Renn Show: Why America Can't Build Anymore

Aaron Renn sits down with Philip Howard to discuss the crippling bureaucratic red tape stifling America’s ability to build and innovate. From the New Deal’s rapid achievements to today’s endless legal labyrinths, Howard proposes a bold solution: a framework rooted in human responsibility and accountability to restore America’s can-do spirit.

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It's in the Air

The world today feels like a rowboat in a storm, with leaders directing their powers towards destruction and disruption. There's no line of sight towards a strong and stable American government.
 
There's growing consensus, however, that paralytic bureaucracy must be replaced. But replaced with what? DOGE is swinging its wrecking ball without a new governing vision. Democrats seem almost catatonic, calling weakly for more government instead of effective government.

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NewslettersAndrew Park
The Day After DOGE

So far Elon Musk's DOGE initiative has focused on cutting programs and terminating civil servants, not reforms to improve public performance. But there's broad public and expert opinion that government operating systems are overdue for overhaul.

This forum will focus on the operational failures of the current state, and will include proposals to empower common sense solutions, make government more manageable, and clarify the role of oversight by courts.

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NewslettersAndrew Park
April 2025 Forum: The Day After DOGE

So far the Trump administration’s DOGE initiative has focused on cutting programs and terminating civil servants, not reforms to improve public performance. But there's broad public and expert opinion that government operating systems are overdue for overhaul.

This forum focused on the operational failures of the current state, and included proposals to empower common sense solutions, make government more manageable, and clarify the role of oversight by courts.

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AppearancesAndrew Park
A Philosophy Problem

America is bogged down in red tape. This is not a secret. Common sense is nowhere, because common sense is illegal.

A brigade of worthy new books is sounding the alarm, and are summarized by David Brooks in his column this week: “We Can Achieve Great Things.” Other public intellectuals calling for a better way of governing are IT expert Jennifer Pahlka, law professor Nicholas Bagley, and political scientist Francis Fukuyama.

What's missing is a discussion of the philosophical flaw underlying the modern state.

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NewslettersAndrew Park