What Can Be Done To Make Government More Effective?

A New Book By Philip Howard Offers Some Answers

I am not a Libertarian.

I believe that government can do good. I think the expansion of legal gambling is going to be disastrous, and I am opposed to drug legalization.

At the same time, I also think that governments in the three most productive regions of the earth – Europe, the United States and China – are engaged in acts of strangulation.

Each is doing this in its own way.

In Europe, the strangulation is of corporate initiative. It’s difficult to start new companies and hard for existing ones to adapt. The value of all the shares in Home Depot runs to a little over $400 billion. That exceeds the combined value of every company founded in Europe during the last fifty years. U.S. companies created in that period have a market capitalization of over $30 trillion. Among the American giants that have emerged are Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Facebook and Nvidia.

This is because European countries have complex rules that make it hard to incorporate new enterprises, and they have laws that make it difficult to fire and replace recalcitrant and incompetent employees. In addition, European financial regulations, along with its high taxes, discourage risky investments.

As we all know, in China the strangulation is more literal. The government can kill anyone it wishes, and everyday life is oppressive. The government monitors each keystroke of every person on the internet, and then it rates every person for his loyalty as a “netizen.” Religious minorities are sent to re-education camps and stripped of their assets. Some awake in hospital beds to find that organs have been removed from their bodies and sold. The supposedly “classless” society sets people in parts of cities where they must face curfews that leave them little freedom of movement save for the time that they are employed in dangerous factories.

In America, the strangulation has come not from the acts of elected officials and the Congress but from the courts and the administrative agencies that interpret the laws. The odd result is that, while businesses flourish, the government cannot perform its basic functions. Big-city schools are dangerous and feckless, roads and highways are falling apart, and government construction projects are interminable and inordinately costly.

Author and critic Philip Howard.

This dysfunction is not new, of course, and it is a big part of the reason why so many Americans look favorably upon a number of questionable recent proposals that have emanated from the White House. They look at the wholesale ineptitude of the Obama and Biden administrations at performing the ordinary task of defending the U.S. border and the dubious decisions of radical judges, and they conclude that some expansion of executive authority in dealing with these problems is overdue. They see the open-air drug dealing in our big cities and the homeless encampments, and they wonder why local elected officials are so passive when courts place impediments before them in dealing with these issues.

Philip Howard has written about these problems more persuasively than almost any other American writer, and it’s the subject of his latest book, Saving Can-Do: How To Revive The Spirit of America. An attorney by trade, he has necessarily taken a particular interest over the years on the way in which lawsuits and courts can jam up the works.

However, in this brief, pointed book, he is equally attentive to the unreasonable growth of administrative power, the decline of personal accountability within the realm of the government agencies, the role that unions play in usurping competent governance, and the extraordinary increase in the absolute number of laws.

His examples are astonishing. For instance, he cites a case in San Francisco in which the city government wished to build a public toilet. Although its planned construction cost was $200,000, the city set aside $1.7 million to pay for it. The bulk of the funds were for dealing with all the regulatory hurdles that were anticipated for a project which the government itself was building.

As an example of judicial overreach, Howard observes that, “In 2024 the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a liquified natural gas facility on the basis that the environmental review did not sufficiently study the ‘environmental justice’ of a facility located near a low-income neighborhood. Another court blocked off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico because the effect on Rice’s whales was insufficiently studied.”

In order to demonstrate how schools are unduly burdened by specific and exacting regulations, Howard notes that California now has 746 pages of requirements for sex education – a subject which it’s not at all clear should be taught in schools in the first place. (A number of studies have suggested that sex education classes actually have no effect on student behavior. They would appear to be neither helpful, nor harmful, but simply a waste of time and money.)

What does Howard suggest we can do about all this?

In the case of school reform, Howard points to the successful re-making of the New Orleans school system after Hurricane Katrina. By turning to charter schools, the city liberated the system from excessive micromanagement by the state and absurd work rules imposed by the teachers unions. Howard also argues persuasively that steps must be taken against judges who abuse their authority. More broadly, he argues for giving school principals, mayors and governors greater freedom to make decisions and then to accept the credit or blame for the results.

Although Howard’s critique in this new volume takes up not even one hundred pages, his proposals are specific and practicable. This is an important book, which is also highly readable.