‘The Death Of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America”

'The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America'

by Philip K. Howard

Random House, $18

Americans love to rail against excessive regulation - at least until someone gets hurt. Then they cry, "There ought to be a law!"

Philip K. Howard's new book, "The Death of Common Sense," is the latest swing of this pendulum. The slim volume is packed with splendid examples of absurd regulatory inflexibility - like the portable public toilets in New York, doomed because they were not wheelchair-accessible; or the nuns who were stopped from converting townhouses into homeless shelters because they could not afford to install elevators.

Howard complains that this growth of bureaucratic rule-making stifles economic growth and impedes the very safety and environmental objectives that the regulations are supposed to ensure. "Common sense," he declares, is the solution.

But countless lives have been saved by seat belts, air bags, air-quality standards, child-resistant drug bottles and flame-retardant requirements for children's pajamas. Howard threatens to throw the baby out with the bath water. And "common sense" is not always obvious, especially to unelected government regulators.

Still, as our own governor was distressed to discover last month when he tried to allow a girl to keep a horse she had found, formidable regulatory barriers often thwart common-sensical solutions. Flexibility and measured deregulation can be valuable goals. Howard's overwrought manifesto at least provides a starting place for the debate.

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