Philip Howard's new book, Radical Thinking About Radical Change: Radical Change in America, explores how we can return to the kind of democratic responsibility and efficiency that our founders intended. He explains how we ve gone from a system in which government got involved to a system where you can t do anything unless the government says you can do it.
00:00:00.000Hey, welcome to the podcast. Today, I want to explore something. We live in a society so far
00:00:04.880from what our founders envisioned that you, the individual American, have the freedom to make
00:00:11.420choices about the way you want to live your life every single day. We're not that country. We spend
00:00:17.140our time now trudging through red tape rules and regulations so much so that it is suffocating
00:00:23.040the God-given individual constitutional freedoms. Our parties in Washington can't and won't
00:00:29.960fix the problem. Neither side. They're part of the D.C. bureaucracy that has become nothing more
00:00:35.440than a giant rule book where all of us, in some way or another, are living in infraction. So where
00:00:42.200do we begin? How do we even begin to fix this? Well, I know I can sit down with people who even
00:00:48.600disagree with me, and it feels like after a while we could fix it in two days. Well, that's called
00:00:54.840common sense, and we don't have an awful lot of that anymore. Today, I sit down with the author
00:00:59.140of a book called Try Common Sense. He is not only the one who is really frustrated with today's
00:01:05.540political system, just like you, but he is frustrated with both the left and the right,
00:01:10.680and he has decided to do something about it. He is trying to develop a clear plan for how we can
00:01:16.180return to the kind of democratic responsibility and efficiency that our founders intended.
00:01:21.520Today's podcast, Radical Thinking About Radical Change with Philip Howard.
00:01:29.140Philip, I have to tell you, I feel like the audience is going to say, I want that so much,
00:01:52.320but they will feel like they're on the other side of the glass with absolutely no way to get it.
00:01:59.140Because common sense is not a part of our life anymore.
00:02:08.660That's right. It's been banned by Washington, and Washington is this isolated foreign entity,
00:02:18.180as if some force from outer space came and started dictating how to behave and how to do this or that.
00:02:26.900And people have kind of lost any sense of how they can use their hands again, how they can grab hold of a problem and solve it.
00:02:36.900We used to, let me tell you this story. My son, in my house, in my house, raised by me,
00:02:44.500we were watching the original producers, the Mel Brooks film, you know, Springtime for Hitler.
00:02:50.740And he was probably 13 at the time, and he said, Dad, how did the government ever allow this to be made?
00:02:59.440I stopped the movie and I said, say that to me again. We have gone from a country where, yeah, where the fence was to keep the bad guys out,
00:03:12.720and you could do whatever you wanted inside here. Just don't break these rules. You know what I mean?
00:03:19.540Now, you're in here. Everything has a rule. Everything has a rule. And it's all basically telling you you can't do that without permission.
00:03:29.260That's right. And so the fundamental difference between the Soviet culture and the American culture that's described by the great people who wrote about this,
00:03:40.160Hayek, Havel, and others, is that in America, you had a system of law and government that prescribed bad things,
00:03:50.440but left you free to otherwise lead your life. In the Soviet Union, you weren't allowed to do anything unless it was permitted.
00:03:59.260And what's happened, almost without our noticing when it happened, it's like the pot slowly getting hot or something.
00:04:07.680In the last 50 years, we went from a system in which government got involved to protect bad things to a system where now you can't do anything unless the government says you can do it.
00:06:29.880You can make judgments about someone, whether they're trying hard or whether they fit in with the other people.
00:06:37.720You can make a joke and and not be scared of getting fired if it kind of bombs.
00:06:44.640I think everyone should have five bisps.
00:06:46.460They should have five inappropriate jokes every, you know, every month or something, you know, right, you know, without getting in trouble, because we've we've lost all spontaneity in the workplace, too.
00:07:39.540Well, I think a safe workplace is important.
00:07:42.740But in my world, instead of 4000 rules where people get tickets because they don't keep the material safety data sheets exactly up to date for things that aren't even unsafe, like joy dishwashing liquid and things like that, that require you to have a material safety data sheet because no one's using your judgment.
00:08:00.900This is like no one's using your judgment.
00:08:04.020You only have those those sheets for things that are really poisonous.
00:08:08.080You don't get tickets for paperwork and the regulators look for material unsafe conditions, focusing on industries that are unsafe rather than going around handing out tickets.
00:08:20.460And so what that does is it allows people because they know now that government is actually concerned about safety, not mindless compliance.
00:08:31.440They can go to their workplace and focus on doing their job rather than compliance.
00:08:47.220We've all been in a brainstorming or something where you have that negative guy who is constantly negative, negative, negative, negative, negative.
00:08:55.140And you just you just you just give up after a while.
00:08:58.900And so so in in in in the world that I'm envisioning, you don't have this incredible waste and and sort of suffocation of people going through the day asking themselves,
00:09:14.120can I prove that what I'm about to do is legally correct?
00:09:18.980They're allowed to rely on their instincts of right and wrong.
00:09:22.760And other people are free to judge them about whether they're, you know, doing their job well or whatever.
00:09:30.300They're free and other people are free, too.
00:09:33.020And people are free to express themselves because they're not going to get into trouble.
00:09:38.200Or if you're a doctor, you're willing to say, hey, I'm not sure this is right, where now you're not sure you should say that because that will be on a record someplace.
00:09:49.300And if the wrong decision was made, you've just blown the case without really knowing.
00:09:57.220We had the nonprofit I share, Common Good, had a joint venture with the Harvard School of Public Health a few years ago.
00:10:03.300And one of the biggest problems in patient care is legal fear by the professionals where they're afraid of speaking up.
00:10:15.860They're afraid to say, are you sure that's the right dosage?
00:10:18.580Because they don't want to take legal responsibility because of this unreliable, in this case, litigation system.
00:10:24.180You know, where anybody can sue for anything in our society and nobody on behalf of society is drawing the lines of what's a, you know, a reasonable lawsuit and what's not.
00:10:35.180So in that case, we proposed a system of expert health courts.
00:10:39.700And we got literally everyone in health care to support it.
00:10:43.580Even even the patient safety advocates supported it.
00:10:46.960You know, people on the far left supported it.
00:10:49.060Everyone was in favor of this because they saw what it was doing, not only to cost in terms of defensive medicine, but also safety, you know, sort of the quality of care.
00:11:00.720And of course, who people who killed the reform with the help of Harry Reid, who is then the Senate majority leader, were the trial lawyers.
00:11:19.060Are we on the verge of massive reform or change sooner rather than later?
00:11:33.020Because this system does not work and everyone knows it.
00:11:36.880So are we headed for massive change one way or another?
00:20:22.360Secondly, people, the conscious part of our brain is actually quite limited.
00:20:28.380It's like a eight bit processor or something.
00:20:31.520Whereas the it's called working memory.
00:20:33.960The long term part, the big part of our brain, the instincts, the subconscious where we have our reside, our experience, our values, our training, all that kind of stuff.
00:20:43.260The subconscious is accessed by the working memory.
00:20:46.820What happens when you have too much bureaucracy that people are thinking about?
00:20:50.760It's like going through a detailed checklist.
00:20:52.800It uses up all of their working memory and it freezes out the long term memory.
00:21:07.160It makes people it really makes people stupid.
00:21:10.040And it also I was talking to a senior doctor who is at a big company the other day about this.
00:21:18.620It also makes health care professionals, in that case, burn out because you're so exhausted trying to keep all of these details straight of all the rules that you burn out.
00:21:30.100And we've created this world now where 30 percent of the health care dollars spent on administration.
00:21:37.900That's a million dollars per physician where almost half the states have more non-instructional personnel than teachers.
00:22:02.900And we have all of these systems in place from Washington that literally squander, not only squander, pick a number, half the money, but they also prevent Americans from being American, you know, from, from, from the energy to solve a lot of issues.
00:22:21.380So, that's what needs, we need to reframe the discussion to, to human empowerment.
00:22:28.920Every, there's not a single farmer that I've ever talked to and many, many smart people not in government who haven't at some point when we've really gotten into what the problems were with America.
00:22:40.080And they don't have to agree with me politically and they will say the same thing.
00:22:45.200Dude, you and I could fix this in two days.
00:22:48.360I mean, people know that there's this machinery that is stopping that if we just started using common sense, we couldn't fix it in two days.
00:22:58.300But you, there is a lot that would change just by saying common sense.
00:23:04.820Well, and, and, and the way, let's continue that, that string, because the way to give people the freedom to fix it in two days is to replace that, take worker safety.
00:23:19.340Those 4,000 rules, really deep, seven pages on ladders, you know, stairwells shall be lit by either natural or artificial light.
00:23:31.780You know, you know, all that kind of stuff, you know, material safety data sheets on joy, dishwashing liquid.
00:23:38.380I mean, or on bricks, you know, like bricks or toxins or something, you know, a hard substance who, you know, define, somebody's actually spending time doing this stuff.
00:23:47.640If you replace those 4,000 rules with some rules, because there's some things that may not be self-evident, but mainly basic principles of safety.
00:23:57.520And you have, you have an authority structure where people are evaluated and those things get evaluated too.
00:24:05.940So you don't have unfairness or arbitrary decisions, but basically you create something that looks more like the constitution.
00:24:13.800Based mainly in principles and rules only where you think you've got to really have a rule, not, you know, for the joy, dishwashing liquid.
00:24:22.940So have you ever heard of this book, Philip Drew, Administrator?
00:25:54.740You have to say the role of law and the role of government generally, not exclusively, is to protect against bad things, pollution, people cheating on their contracts, crime, you know, that sort of thing.
00:26:13.300And the way it does that 10, almost like the Ten Commandments, maybe like seven of the Ten Commandments.
00:26:18.180Yeah, it's exactly like the Ten Commandments.
00:26:20.580And so it's a series of walls, outer walls, says you can't pollute, you can't discriminate, you can't cheat on your contracts, those walls.
00:26:32.340And those walls define a field of freedom in which people can do whatever they want.
00:26:47.140They can go move to a part of the country where they have things in common with other people, like the Mormons have moved to Utah or, you know, or the Hasidic Jews are in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
00:26:59.360And those negative things enhance freedom because you go through the day not worrying about whether your bottled water is polluted or not because there's no pollution, right, or whatever.
00:27:11.840You do contracts with people without being too scared people would break it.
00:27:15.200So the first thing that we have to do with each and every law is pull it back to a series of negative things that leave people free to innovate on their own.
00:27:28.560What's happened in the last 50 years is that government has come into our daily lives and told us how to do things correctly.