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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