{"id":1299,"date":"1995-03-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1995-03-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/the-death-of-common-sense-how-law-is-suffocating-america-5\/"},"modified":"1995-03-19T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1995-03-19T00:00:00","slug":"the-death-of-common-sense-how-law-is-suffocating-america-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/the-death-of-common-sense-how-law-is-suffocating-america-5\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;The Death Of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>'The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America' <BR><BR>by Philip K. Howard <BR><BR>Random House, $18<br clear='all'><br \/>\nAmericans love to rail against excessive regulation - at least until someone gets hurt. Then they cry, \"There ought to be a law!\"<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<br clear='all'><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1506,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lc"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}