Washington vs. 'Common Sense'
By Philip K Howard
‘Let’s try common sense,” President Obama said in the State of the Union address, provoking a spontaneous burst of laughter in the House of Representatives chamber. The unintended humor exposes an important truth about Washington: Everyone knows that won’t happen.
More troubling, however, was that the president’s speech revealed why common sense is nonexistent. Mr. Obama wants new laws to tell us how to do things better—when the need is to overhaul old laws to restore freedom of choice and individual responsibility. Up and down the chain of authority, the accumulation of law and entitlements precludes sensible decisions.
Mr. Obama seems to see law as social engineering, not as a framework to guide the choices of real people. In his speech, he advanced a series of reforms doomed to fail because humans don’t have freedom to use their common sense:
• Schools: “The idea is simple,” Mr. Obama said. “Instead of rewarding failure we will only reward success.” His main idea is to add a bureaucratic carrot, the billions in the “Race to the Top” program, to the bureaucratic stick of the “No Child Left Behind” law.
But teachers aren’t trying to fail. They’re frustrated all day long by the types of bureaucratic programs and incentives that Mr. Obama wants to pile even higher on them.
The solution is not to tweak the bureaucracy, but to abandon it. Charter schools succeed because the people in them are free to use their common sense all day long—to maintain order and to instill values of cooperation and respect needed for life as well as academic success. Public schools need the same freedom and accountability. Some will succeed, some will not. Today, failure is guaranteed by bureaucracy.
• Infrastructure: “[W]e can put Americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow,” the president claimed. “From the first railroads to the Interstate Highway System, our nation has always been built to compete. There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains . . .”
But America can’t build new infrastructure because no one has the authority to say “go.” Nearly endless environmental review, followed by years of litigation by anyone who doesn’t want the project, will make it impossible to put a shovel in the ground for a new project for years.
Too much law always causes paralysis. Environmentalists wanted legal power to stop bad projects, and now find themselves unable to build good projects. Real people must have responsibility to make these decisions—that’s what government is for. Cut the environmental review process to a year or two at most.
• Lobbyists: According to the president, the culprits for governmental sclerosis are easily identified. “We face a deficit of trust—deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years. To close that credibility gap we have to . . . end the outsized influence of lobbyists. . . . That’s what I came to Washington to do.”
Washington is distrusted not because of lobbyists—they’re just a symptom of the vacuum of authority. Who among our political leaders stood up and explained how to recapture the $1 trillion of annual waste in health care—a huge sum that could be devoted to countless other public goods? No one, because political leaders can’t even imagine questioning entitlement programs such as Medicare, which contain no incentives for prudent spending by patients and providers.
Mr. Obama is still stumping for a health-care bill that was substantially written by lobbyists. That’s why the legislation is so convoluted. It’s an agglomeration of special-interest deals far removed from what’s needed to bring health-care costs under control. Lobbyists didn’t kill the health-care bill. According to Katharine Seelye of the New York Times, they spent about half a billion dollars promoting it. The American people killed the bill.
Americans know what’s wrong: Government has taken on a life of its own, dragging our country down to some horrible pit of quicksand where, increasingly, no one can make sensible choices.
Washington is broken. So are most state governments. The reason is the same. Government is out of control, schools are out of control, health-care costs are out of control, lawsuits are out of control—because law has supplanted the responsibility of people needed to keep them in control.
Fixing modern government, Peter Drucker once observed, requires returning to first principles. What’s missing in government is the activating principle of all human accomplishment—individual responsibility. America must shift the goal of reform from desired results—universal health care, effective schools—to a new philosophy that allows people to get things done.
Originally published in the February 4, 2010, edition of the Wall Street Journal
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