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.
Reformers on both sides see failures as a matter of degree. DOGE focused on cutting what government does. But that does nothing to fix a poor school, or expedite public decisions. The abundance reformers on the left would prune the absurd duplication of processes that cause, say, a $200,000 public toilet to cost $1.7 million. Whatever red tape is left after pruning is still mandatory, however, and leaves no room for officials to make tradeoff judgments.
The failure of modern American government is not just a matter of degree—say, too much red tape, but of flawed governing philosophy. American government was rebuilt after the 1960s on the explicit premise of supplanting human authority. Governing would be like a software program. Thick rulebooks would specify exactly how to run a school, or have a safe workplace. Public processes would require officials to prove by objective evidence the wisdom of their choices.
This governing system fails because, as Edison reminds us, nothing any good works by itself. Governing without human judgment is like wearing a blindfold. The proper role of law is not to supplant human judgment but to define a framework that empowers human judgment, including oversight by other people to safeguard against poor choices. Without the power to exercise judgment, responsibility is meaningless.
What America needs is a switch in governing philosophy. Just as Progressives abandoned the legal philosophy of laissez faire in favor of public oversight of health and safety, so too must Americans abandon the philosophy of what might be called mindless legal micromanagement.
A working democracy requires simpler frameworks that allow Americans to take back control of schools, infrastructure, healthcare, defense procurement, and every other public choice. These structures are not as hard to design because they are intrinsically adaptable—open frameworks that allow trial and error, not legal assembly lines dictating every choice. I describe what these structures look like in my new book, Saving Can-Do.
The inability to deliver by American government represents a serious threat to the future of our noble democratic experiment. Institutional paralysis is also a reason politics has become pathetically performative—politicians point fingers for failures instead of sitting down to work out how to move forward. Witness the current budget shutdown.
America’s public operating systems, almost all created after the 1960s, are designed to fail. The public wreckage is impossible to ignore. Area by area, these must be replaced, not reformed, so that Americans are empowered to make democracy work again.
– Philip
The American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin reviewed Saving Can-Do for The Wall Street Journal, writing: “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.”
George Will centered his latest Washington Post column around the book, writing: “In his new book ‘Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America,’ [Howard] 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.”
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich interviews me about Saving Can-Do on his Newt’s World podcast.
I wrote about how Americans’ sense of powerlessness has fueled our current polarization for John Ellis’s News Items.
On Wednesday, October 8, I’ll discuss Saving Can-Do with George Will and Philip Wallach at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Click here to attend in person or watch online.