The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America

Distressing, disturbing, devastatingly detailed--this examination of how modern laws are diminishing America exposes the drawbacks of rule-bound government, tells why nothing gets done, reveals the phony pretensions of law, and shows why well-intentioned laws have actually devalued rights. In short, this book demonstrates how the buck never stops and how well-meaning laws are creating a nation of enemies.--From publisher description.

User reviews

LibraryThing member DarkWater

Dangers of bureacracy, excessive process, and lack of human oversight and judgment in human affairs.

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LibraryThing member melydia

This is not a good bedtime read. It's frankly aggravating, but I knew that coming in. This is, more or less, 287 pages of stating the obvious, but in ways that continue to amaze and infuriate anew. In short, there are too many laws, and more specifically, too many highly detailed universal

regulations that don't actually apply to anything in the real world. It was a little upsetting how this book reminded me of all the things I don't like about my job: the idiotic paperwork and endless mandatory procedure that goes along with basically everything. This book simply gave me more reasons to roll my eyes. Sure, I didn't quite see eye to eye with the author on everything - I am not quite as enamoured of the New Deal as he, for instance - but he makes enough valid points to give me plenty of food for (frustrating) thought. There is, luckily, a marginal amount of hope offered in the last chapter. I think the author's purpose here was mostly to point out the inanity of the current climate, to show us just how far down the slope we've slid. I doubt we are quite as close to the authoritarian, death-of-democracy dystopia as he implies, but there are unquestionably problems with the way things are being done. This is a book more people need to read, especially those who work as bureaucrats and special-interest advocates.

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LibraryThing member DBayn1

Very well done book. Mostly anecdotal (fewer studies than I would like) but the writing is conversational and very well done.

LibraryThing member shoomg

This is one of those books written from the modern American conservative viewpoint that does a very good job of opening the reader's eyes to a serious problem caused by modern statism, but whose solutions are problematic. The author argues that America is choking on legalistic bureaucracy run amok,

a legalism that is sapping the ability of government to actually do anything. His solution is to say that government officials and employees should be allowed more flexibility to make decisions using their own judgement. I agree with him about the problem, but think the solution is wrong. American government was traditionally a government of laws, not men, meaning that government agents were allowed to act only as the law authorized them to. This was intended to be a defense of liberty, because it prevented goverment officials from exercising arbitrary power. However, this system can only work when government is quite limited in the functions it performs. What has been happening since the time of Roosevelt is that government has been rapidly expanding its role in society, involving itself in more and more areas of life. The current choking legalism is a result of this expansion of government combined with an attempt to retain the government of laws approach. Howard's solution is essentially to say that we should relax the requirement of having a government of laws. Instead he prefers to allow goverment officials to have more latitude in exercising their powers. To my mind this is exactly the wrong answer. The answer is not to allow officials more freedom to exercise arbitrary power, it should be to roll back the powers of government. But like most modern conservatives, Howard seems to have abandoned or forgotten the old conservative principle of limited government, and instead seeks only to make the modern statist state more efficient.

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LibraryThing member jpsnow

America has traded individual common sense for "protection" via ridiculous laws and organizations. Reformers continually accelerated the scope of law's influence, some wanting to change it into a branch of psychiatry. It's a thoughtful premise backed by numerous examples.

LibraryThing member keylawk

The author is a practicing corporate lawyer. His research on legal regulations across a broad horizon finds that the detailed volume of law is un-read, expensive, and often defeats the stated purposes: "We seem to have achieved the worst of both worlds: a system of regulation that goes too far

while it also does too little." [11]

Without laying blame upon any particular individual or faction, the paradox is explained by the absence of the one indispensable ingredient of any successful human endeavor: use of judgment.

Noting that detailed laws are designed to reduce arbitrary human discretion, but they increase bureaucratic red tape. The rules interfere with common sense, make personal responsibility too remote, and have taken away citizens' power to make decisions--the core principle of freedom.

"We need to fundamentally change the rules." Make personal responsibility the law of the land and the goal of the law.

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LibraryThing member beaurichly

I have recommended this book to dozens of people and can't wait to dig it out of storage and re-read over the holidays. My big takeaway from the book was that at some point in the past, public servants went from being seen as bright competent people, who were given general guidance and asked to use

their good judgement to now, when laws and regulations assume public servants to be feckless, lazy, untrustworthy souls. Thus, laws and regulations assume no good judgement and prescribe what public servants should do in every eventuality. This impossible effort results in numerous tragically absurd acts committed in the name of following the rules, rather than applying common sense. A very quick read.

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LibraryThing member ecw0647

We read this for reading club last year and I had forgotten all about it until I heard the author interviewed about his new book on C-Span's Q&A. The book was OK, but seemed to overly rely on scary anecdotes to make larger judgments about the state of the legal world. As far as common sense, it

seems to me that much of what we do and how we react has less to do with common sense than our experience and our reaction to anecdotes. So we tend to be more fearful precisely because we have heard the horror stories of rampaging lawyers, suit-happy parents, etc. Many of the rules and regulations, the author decries, result from our feeble attempts to legitimize what appears to be common sense at the time. It's the misapplication of the rules that then leads us into the messes he describes.

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