Transcripts For CSPAN3 In 20240706

We are trying to hector people into making sense of daily choices when the right strategy is actually to liberate them and let them use their common sense sense and initiative and ingenuity and emotions to try to do a good job. Over time, judge whether they are doing a good job. Host you the former vice chair of covington, you have written a book called life without lawyers. Ay. What is the legal structure that allows the people who run the lay grounds and the parents to let kids go out and be kids . What legal structure does that . What is legal structure that liberates teachers to act on their instincts in running classrooms and instead of being chained to a compliance manual . Host you spend a lot of time talking about teachers, health care and rules around them. Guest health care, doctors and nurses spend half the day doing desk work, filling out boxes. It causes them to burn out because all these rules and compliances, they cant internalize them. Its not about the Good Practice of medicine, it is about, did you comply with this, did you comply with that on the privacy regulations . Did you meet every criterion to get reimbursed . Friend of mine used to be the president of Johns Hopkins and he told me a story about the frustration of dealing with the health care bureaucracy. The doctor kept getting the reimbursement form bounced for a patient. He finally got real person on the phone at the Insurance Company and they said, why do you keep bouncing and the insurance prison said, because you didnt check the box, did you ask the patient whether she had ever been a smoker . And the doctor responded, i didnt check that box because the patient is two years old. So you have these systems that are designed to be complete, like Central Planning run amok, that dont allow people to account for the many varied circumstances and it drives people nuts. Host i want to go to a quote from your book the dthf common sense, rights are not the language of doccy, cochran compromise is what democracy is about. Rights are the language of freedom and are absolute because their role is to protect our liberty. By using the absolute power of freedom to accomplish forms of democracy, we have undermined democracy and diminished our freedom. Hope us understand that. Guest you are in the workplace and youve got a worker who isnt getting along with people or isnt performing up to level up for whatever reason and people kind of know that and that is in every workplace. But you feel you cant get rid of the person because they are in a protected category, they are a minority or protected or old or young. So you have situations or people are no longer free to act on their best judgment because of the socalled rights of someone else. Take university today, where students are claiming if you teach something it makes them feel unsafe because it has gender stereotypes and other things. They are claiming the right not to feel unsafe. What about the rights of students who wanted want it . Host we are going to get your microphone on and we left off at key leader king lear. I want to ask you, are we a rightsbased society and if so, shouldnt i have the right, even though i may be in a protected category, to be a full member of society . Guest well, it depends on what you mean. The rights that our framers gave us were rights against state coercion. Government cant tell me what to say, the first amendments, they cant take my home away or barge in, fifth amendment. Fourth mm is unreasonable search and seizures. When you are talking the Fourth Amendment is about unreasonable search and seizures. When you are talking about it, it is about compromise and accommodations. There is no perfect word world where no one will be offended. Employers have to make choices of the time that adversely affect one person in the interests of the benefits for everyone else. So society is not about getting what you want, its about dealing with people and finding groups that you get along with and you feel productive with. So the modern use of a rights is all about its not all about but a lot of it is about selfishness. The reason we are sensitive about this is we have some horrible social values, regional segregation, discrimination against all kinds of people. Yes, we needed to change our values in the 1960s, but you cant connect into a general theory that any time something bad happens it might be a violation of your rights, because what happens is you end up freezing everyone elses rights. In the land of the first amendment, no business will give a job reference, because that israel at covington and burling. If you Say Something that is negative if you claim it violates your rights and you Say Something positive in a dont work out, they might claim its violating their rights. We created a system where rights are not a protection of freedom or a boundary against abuses, its a tool used as a weapon by one person to get what they want often. Host another quote from the death of common sense, the utopian urge that prompted us in recent decades to read the world st instruction manual, naming it the law of the land, has led us to invent a device that, like detailed rules, avoids the untidiness of human judgment. It goes by an engine name, process, but its purpose is new. It once existed to help humans make responsible decisions, process now has become and end unto itself. Guest welcome to the ability to rebuild americas infrastructure. It is hard to be old build a high speed line because do you care about the scenic views are Getting Energy from the wind farm in the midwest . What about the local community . Big about the communities that the power line goes over. Each of them claims a right to have its own process. It literally can take a decade or longer to get a permit for something that society desperately needs, which is accessed to renewable energy, because we dont have a theory of authority. Host philip howard, you spent 28 years writing books about common sense and the common good and inertia, and has it been a waste of time . Guest [laughter] time will tell, i suppose. When i was in college, my summer jobs where the overage national laboratory. So i was surrounded at the age of 18 with really the smartest people in the world. Another nobel prize winner, and what i learned working for them is that you figure things out for yourself and you figure why they are right and what the reason for it is and you stick to it. I think ideas matter. We have eight society which is increasingly alienated, where government is increasingly dysfunctional, or no one has the authority to fix a school or not one student is proficient in math or english, which is big cities all over the country, where nobody has the idea of why it is we have spent twice as much for health care. We are overdue for a change. The change, i think, you have to give back each individual the freedom to take this possibility and to succeed or fail. Responsibility Means Nothing if they dont have authority. Not authority to do whatever they want, but authority abounded by whatever their mission and goals are in life. So the continued failure or frustration and extremism that has arisen in the last 15 or 20 years i think are largely the result of the fact that people have not 1 done what i have been writing about, the idea of some of the great thinkers, it didnt invent this idea, you got to get back people in a free society the freedom to be themselves and to christmas ability. So i am going going. Host what kind of law did you practice . Guest i was an appellate lawyer. Host what does that mean . Guest i take cases often that have been lost by someone and try to reimagine and try to think about, whats right and wrong here . What should the lobby . You are writing what should the law be . You are writing about what the law should be instead what it is. My books i hope should be readable versions of appellate briefs. This is why we have to get back to teachers to have ownership in the classroom. Being a teacher is an incredibly complex job. Have 38 students in front of you with very different abilities and emotional needs and household situations they are coming from, and the teacher is being asked to somehow keep them interested and engaged and respond to their own particular needs. I have a daughter and we have talked a lot about this. There is a wonderful book by the university of chicago by Philip Jackson called the moral life of the schools. They sat in classrooms and talked about what were the little choices, incident to incident that made us some teachers effective. What all the Great Teachers had in common, nothing. They were completely different from each other and drawing on their personality but they were real and they made the students realize they were engaged with them and cared about the learning process. You cant just make that into a routine and create a system that does that. If we dont rehumanize society, well, Neil Ferguson and i had a form, the historian forum, the historian at Neil Ferguson talked about the inability to run schools as a National Security problem. We have created a system where we are not training the people that need to be competitive with china and other countries who wont be able to actually take the responsibility we need them to take when they grow up because we are training them to check boxes on a test and not to be strong people. Host can you tell us about one case you argued that fits into your philosophy . Guest mean one of my law cases . Host sure. Guest there was a takeover battle in the early days of mergers and acquisitions takeover, in which there are two competing bidders, and the bitter bidder that lost argued the other had misled the public. They said its Public Disclosures with the sec were misleading and the winner should pay tens of millions of dollars in damages, back when that was a lot of money. And they won, and they won at the trial and Appellate Court level in now the only thing left was to go to the Supreme Court, and they cited the loser decided to change the legal team and i came on and i was talking to an partner, if you look at the situation, if you let somebody sue for damages because they claim you should have disclosed something differently, every person who lost the takeover battle could sue for damages, because there is a huge amount of money you can collect and you have a 25 chance of winning tens of millions of dollars, so it is worth paying a Million Dollars for a law firm to bring the lawsuit. Everything there is a takeover good have a lawsuit over whether somehow it wasnt done in exactly the right way, and it is stupid, because it will drag down society we made the argument to the Supreme Court that a loser in a takeover battle should have standing to sue during the battle to complaint about inadequate closures, but they shouldnt be allowed to sue for damages because it would end up completely distorting the whole process and everyone would be scared of a lawsuit all the time. The Supreme Court took it on that basis and we won. And that argument, a leading expert in the Securities Law at the time at Harvard Law School told me and the young partner that we cannot make that argument. That had been foreclosed by prior cases and it was ridiculous and we wouldnt have a chance. We persuaded the Senior Partners to let us make the argument and we went to the Supreme Court and won. Host your most most recent book not accountable, opens with Derek Chauvin. Why did you choose that story . Guest Derek Chauvin was the policeman who killed george floyd in minneapolis. He was thought to be a tightly wound person, odd guy, didnt have a lot of friends, probably should not have been on the beat with a deadly weapon, but under the collective bargaining agreement, the police chief had no authority to terminate, nor did she have authority to even reassign him, because these collective bargaining agreements have it away the managerial tools of people in the Public Sector, including the police force. You have a situation where in minneapolis in the 10 years prior to George Floyds killing, there had been 2600 reports of unnecessary use and purchase discipline was a 40 hour suspension. So what that story and the broader fact tell you is that we have a system of government in which the police are clearly unaccountable, and the facts bear that out. There is near zero accountability and that is true also of teachers and civil servants. This democracy is a process of accountability is a problem if you are trying to have a healthy democracy if literally the links in the chain essentially disappeared. Host another example you bring up in the book is lori lightfoot, the former mayor of chicago and the chicago Teachers Union. Guest right, she was trying to get the Teachers Union to come back to teach during covid. The usual of the Teachers Union for two years to come back to work has had, according to studies, had a permit effect on the learning, particularly of innercity kids who didnt have a home base they could go and essentially be home during that period. It is tragic that they what happened they refused to go on because as she put it, they dont simply want to run the schools they want to run the whole city of chicago. And that is kind of a problem in micro seat and the people we elect dont have authority in democracy when the people we elect dont have authority. Host is the nondelegation doctrine . Guest it is if you have a democratic government and someone is elected to have official authority, they cant delegate it, sell it or give it to any private person. Once they have the sacred trust of government that has been entrusted to them by the voters, they have to keep it. They cant give it away. As reflected in several places in the u. S. Constitution, the nondelegation doctrine. What i argue in not accountable is the giving public unions from legislature private control, mainly the power of collective bargaining that an elected official at a mayor or government has to make a deal with the unions on the terms and conditions of employment and that has in effect delegated the authority to run the operating machinery of government. It should be unconstitutional. Host does the case in the Supreme Court play into this . Guest it doesnt really. The chevron case is there was a ruling 40 years ago where the Supreme Court held that if Congress Wants to delegate authority to an administrative agency, the court will defer the decisions of the agency if they are within the realm of reasonable list. Any plausible view of what congress intended, the chevron case before the Supreme Court where it looks like the conservative majority in court is going to say no, we are not going to defer to whatever the agency is want within broad boundaries but look at the purpose for that statute and look harder at how agencies are making decisions. Host a quote from not accountable,overnment is failing in court responsibilities. No plausible public serpas purpose is served by restrictive ion micromanagement, r is there any public purpose in publ union contracts, including over staffing, massive overtime for minor minor schedulehaes and pensions spiked by rigged overtime in the last year. Government cap possibly deliver what taxpayers deserve until elected officials are reempower tmake basic management decisions, but public unions block the door to a better government, arms crossed. I thought elected officials were in charge. Guest no, they are not in charge. That is why we keep electing people in nothing changes because they are not in charge. You cant get rid of a bad cop. You want to move the office in the federal government, you have to collectively bargain or who gets to set at the desk. 99 of federal place get a fully successful rating because the supervisors cannot put one negative thing in the file without prompting a grievance proceeding by union lawyers, the Senior Executive service guy is trying to run a federal department, has to prepare for a lawsuit simply to say it this percent isnt doing their job. It is crazy. I go through all the examples, what has happened to the operating machinery of government, not talking about policy but how things work and how you fix a pothole and how youre in a good school, all of that, the police force, should be a scandal. We pay for government that is literally, because of the union contracts, designed to be inefficient. Anything out of the ordinary, a pandemic, sorry, is nothing about teaching in a pandemic. Instance distance teaching, there is nothing there so we have to renegotiate. How can you run a government that way . All the other essential workers went back to work, the nurses and doctors and Grocery Store clerks and delivery people, but the teachers refused to because of the unions. It is a scandal. I was on a panel or program recently with a former prominent democratic strategist who is now at usc in l. A. , and we were talking about this and he said, yeah, but who is going to protect workers if the union is not there . First of all, there was no need to protect them, the Civil Service was all ready there in the late 1960s when they allowed all the powers to be given. It was the right resolution accident that the unions got away with this. It is not working very well if it doesnt attract good people because it is so rigid and horrible to work in government. The price is no one wants to work for government, not the other way around. Go into these 200 page contracts , this is not about setting salary, these are about rigid work rules. Give me one example of a role that is good for the public, just one. He said the teachers had demanded and gotten smaller class sizes. I said, yeah, it is only a coincidence that means you have to hire more teachers. By the way, the studies show the classsize doesnt make any difference, because of the quality of the teacher and all that. It is like a modern spoil system. They are politically powerful. They have insulated themselves from elected official authority so you cant fix a bad school. You cant fire a bad cop. And they continue on, but it is much worse than the old spoil system because even back in the 1870s, they existed to support half the citizens at least, whoever their supporters were that the benefits. The union spoil system exists only to give more to the union members. It doesnt help anybody. Their influence, political influence is corrupt. In the private sector, if there is a union, and i think there is an Important Role for Industrial Companies and unions, and the private sector, if a manager of a car company or ceo were paid by the union to give them something, they say if you give us something, we will give you a Million Dollars and in the contract, they would both go to jail because that is corrupt. How does it work in the Public Sector . The public unions in a Gubernatorial Race will raise tens of millions of dollars and a staff of the Campaign Headquarters of somebody running for governor, and then when they win and the contract comes up for negotiation, they dont sit on the other side of the table and go shoot for public interest, they sit on the same side of the table. It is a payoff. It is tragic. It costs the citizens in every way, not just financially but in terms of failed schools and such, and it should be unconstitutional. Host you talked about the rights revolution in the 1960s, what happened . Guest the 1960s with the last time we will have big changes in society. For that it was 1930s. Before that it was the 1930s. There were social abuses in the 1960s, racism, pollution, unsafe cars, gender discrimination, lies about vietnam, locking up disabled children in horrible places. And then caps off by watergate. So we had this decade from 1962 to 1972 more or less, of awakening to bad values we had to change. We had to change laws, we needed civil rights laws. That was really important to do. But two things happened as a result of that which were entirely understandable, but in hindsight proved to be terrible mistakes. The first thing is we decided to make it so that no one could ever abuse their authority again. So before the 1960s, it was no such thing as a thousand page rulebook or a tenure process or giving somebody a right to complain because they are offended by king lear. So we didnt have any of those tools so we created these tools designed to avoid abuses of authority, so we put authority in the penalty box, the teacher in the classroom, not knowing that would undermine our freedom, that if the teacher doesnt have authority to maintain order in the classroom, then the one disruptive student will destroy the freedom of all the other students to learn. So you need, authority is not the enemy of freedom, it is the or freedom the four freedom forefreedom. You are free to be whoever you are, and we lost a that. The law came in and started to tell people exactly what to do and the right to sue for everything and all the sudden, people werent free and it didnt work. Host good afternoon and welcome to book tv and our monthly indepth program, where we invite one author on to talk about his or her body of work and take your calls and comments. Our guest is philip howard, who began writing books in 1995, the first book he wrote is the best seller the death of common sense the lost art of drawing the line. He followed with how fairness went too far the paperback is called the collapse of the common good how American Culture undermines our freedom of life without lawyers came out in 2009, life without lawyers in 2014. Replacing failed ideologies of right and left came out in 2019. His most recent is not accountable rethinking the constitutionality of Public Employee unions. We have had about half hour of discussion and now it is your turn. We invite you to call in, text, email. Here is how you can do it, 202 202 7488000 for those of you in the east and central, 202 7488001 in the mountain or pacific time zones, and send a text message as well. Include your first name and city 202748, 8903 four Text Messages only. 20274 88903 for Text Messages only. Her book without lawyers 2009, there is a case you talk about and we want to show video and have you after we play this heavy talk through what we are seeing. [video clip] come over here. That is for you. Former resource officer Dennis Turner telling another officer to put a sixyearold in restraints. No, no i dont want handcuffs on. No, dont put handcuffs on. Help me. Help me. The incident caught on camera and unfolded effort complaints the little girl was acting out. You dont want to . No, please. You have to. No please, let me go. Host what are we seeing . Guest we are seeing the breakdown of authority broken down to the third degree. The police in the classrooms and administers are told they can no longer restrain a child. And they can get sued if they touch a child. Someone says you touch me on the shoulder and that is inappropriate and i want money. And this lawsuit Crazy Society we live in. If you dont have the authority to restrain a top misbehaving, the child keeps misbehaving and so what do they do in this case, they call the police on a sixyearold and handcuff her. Speaking of the death of common sense, it is literally absurd but it starts with the fact that the school itself felt disempowered from doing what they would normally do which is take the little girl by the arm and tried to gently kick her out of the classroom and make sure she stays there in summer mitchell she calms down. Host and the school i presume was sued at some point during this process . Guest i dont know how it worked out but a lot of schools have been sued and the rules a friend of our daughter was teaching women in harlem and to give who didnt know how to swim , and this is a young woman, who hold him up in the water so they wouldnt drown. She was told every time she put their hand on their stomach or chest to hold them up she had to ask, is it ok if i touch you, over and over again. How weird is that . It is one thing to be careful about people who act inappropriately, you are teaching kids who dont know how to swim, you are not going to do it without holding them up. Host we have become over legalized in your view . Guest is like a version of the precautionary principle, anything that might go wrong we have a rule eight a rule or a procedure. We have all these forms protecting against a really remote risk and as a result incur much greater risk, which is that we lose the spontaneity and humanity and practicality of just making things happen in life. Host as a lawyer, do you not, if im your client, dont you want me to avoid risk at all cost . Guest answer to that is no, actually. What you want to do, in the case, im a lawyer and they asked me about legal risk and not business risk, you have to take risk and the law used to be a place where you could reasonably say, the way most people handle these problems is this way and if you handle it this way, you are within range of reasonable and unlikely youll have significant legal risk. That is no longer the case. Now anytime anybody and anything goes wrong, hindsight bias is such, anyone can argue, if there have been more supervision, that wouldnt happen. If you have given me a clearer morning that wouldnt happen. So you have billions of coffee cups that say, caution, contents hot. Is that useful . It is not. We have so many warning labels and people dont read them and then the places you do need a warning label are ineffective. So that has happened throughout society. We spend all this time trying to avoid remote risk and as a result incur greater risk. It was a wonderful social scientist at berkeley who wrote a book want back in the 1970s called the secret of safety lines in danger lies in danger if you try to avoid all risk you incur greater risk. The secret of safety lies in danger. If you try to avoid all risk you incur greater risk. They tried to keep mud from spewing out of a well if there was feedback and it did that which prevents a little bit of publishing, but it also prevented it also created so much pressure in the case of that incident that the well exploded, causing i think billions of gallons, because of a safety mechanism that was designed to prevent a little pollution, they didnt realize the greater risk was that it would create a much bigger risk of the whole thing exploding because there was no safety valve. In a society, you need safety valves. You need to be able to people need to be spontaneous. Do you trust anybody who is measuring your words all of the time . No, you want to be spontaneous and get to know someone. If you are spontaneous, some things will come out the wrong way and you will unintentionally offend someone by saying something you shouldnt say. In any sensible society, people will judge whether that means you are a horrible person or just said something wrong and to apologize for it and go on with life. That isnt how we do it anymore. We have measured speech at every level in the workplace and it is the foundation for distrust, resentment and probably exacerbating the problems we are trying to alleviate. Host lets hear from dan in bridgewater, new jersey. You are on with author philip howard. Caller think about the american setting is there is disassociation between authority and responsibility. For example, he would have the responsibility of a teacher in a classroom to educate and maintain the students. On the other hand, would have the administrator not in the classroom and doesnt see the situation with the 30 to dictate the limits within that teacher operates. It seems both sides are kind of flying blind from the perspective of the other, with the childs caught in between. I wonder how you would resolve this kind of situation. Host 30 and responsibility. Authority and responsibility. Guest if they are not coupled together, then response ability is just a word. The way, the Teacher Needs to have this sensibility within the scope of their job description. Only she knows what is going on in the classroom and cant react to it. Defensible doesnt know that, but the principal has the responsibility of making sure the teachers in general are effective and doing a good job and that requires looking at the behavior of teachers over time and the success in the classroom and all of that. Absent more facts than you gave, a principal shouldnt secondguess a teacher for something the principal doesnt know anything about, because that is not the principals responsibility. Host next call is dated in tulsa, oklahoma. Please go ahead with your question or comment. Caller i greatly appreciate the observations that have been made about teachers. I do agree that with subject matter and teaching style, really good teachers are passionate about the subject matter and passionate about sharing that with her students. Some of the frustration we are dealing with in oklahoma is what can be taught, particularly in a history class and i would be interested in this observation as to thoughts on restricting, particularly with race, gender, ethnicity, those topics in history that are very important. Our country and a time of separate but equal is very pertinent in terms of understanding who we are now. How do we go about deciding what should be taught in the classroom so that i can passionately teach . It is frustrating, as you can probably tell. I greatly appreciate your guest. Host david, what do you teach . He is gone. I think he said he was a teacher. Guest yeah. I think it is an excellent point, i dont inc. You can legislate the appropriate books that is sort of light, except within very broad boundaries, that is beyond the scope of reasonable expertise probably of people trying to dictate what you can and cannot read. Anyone can and should teach the history, the bad parts in the good parts. On the other hand, if i were a parent in a School District that was teaching that all caucasians were evil, i wouldnt like that either. When does need to have a mechanism where ultimately general directions of teaching are subject to public debate. I think that is fair, you and i would agree you dont whitewash history in order to do that. Host one of your oaks was the lost art of drawing books was lost art of drawing a line, where you tal where you about fairness. Guest fair accommodation of the different points of view going on in a situation. In a workplace, treating some idiot fairly is not a question of what that person thinks, it is a question of what everybody in the workplace thinks of that person. So big auto manufacturers, even nonunionized ones, have Workers Councils and before they fire somebody, they actually go and talk to the people who work with that person and get their opinion about whether this person is really doing job or not doing the job. So that to me is an example of how you would deal with fairness. But fairness is not giving somebody whatever they want and people are never the best judge of whats fair to them, because we all are required to self justify. So it has to be a group. Innate democracy of it is the voters. In an institution, it is the opinion of the supervisors and hopefully informed by the coworkers. Host try common sense, revealed replacing the failed ideology of the right and left came out in 2019. In 2017, you served on a commission for president trump. Is that correct . Guest i was on the ceo counsel that lasted two months. Host what you think it accomplished . Guest it accomplished nothing. I was brought onto it because i was very active trying to refer the infrastructure permitting process so that we could build new transit, built highspeed powerlines, replace the antiquated Water Infrastructure in this country. I was not a trump supporter but he got elected president and he wanted someone who knew about infrastructure so i went and volunteered to help with some meetings, and it vaporized after the incident in charlottesville, which involved kind of it wasnt a race riot, but along those lines. Though it didnt accomplish much. One of the points of try common sense is that neither partys ideology allows them to do what is needed. The republicans have this incorrect idea that authority is the enemy of freedom, so they dont want to ever give an official the freedom to use his or her judgment. If they cant use their common sense, then you cant use your common sense either. If they cant use their common sense to say we should get a permit here or environmental should be restricted to these issues, than you, the citizen, will not get the benefit of that new infrastructure. It will be held up and paralyzed, which is where we are now. Authority is not the enemy of freedom, it is the essential freedom. Liberals think everything is a matter of individual rights and they dont like authority and they want to make to nobody is ever treated unfairly. You cant run eight lowest common denominator society. You do have to make common choices. Do you want a powerline or not . It will offend some people. Nobody wants to be seen as doing harm so as a result we have a government that is basically stuck. With the budget crisis, nobody will say anything or budget toward a solution. Host michael, broward county, florida. Caller in broward county, we stood up against the governor and the fight against vaccination. When i hear mr. Howard talk about authority overprocessed that is antidemocratic. Let me give you some examples. He misspoke when you said the number of teachers to student ratio doesnt have an effect. It does and that has been proven and it is proven whether those teachers have authority in the classrooms is a huge effect. The real issue is we had National Testing, mandated from authority, and that National Testing over the last 15 years it is not the teachers failing but the whole process itself and that begins with authority. In the state of florida, he may have heard of book banning. What you may not have heard is the head of education has been bragging about he contacted the suppliers to the schools and saw to it and the court has submitted approval at the state and local level that it had been edited and changed to meet his constituents interest. Host we are going to leave it there. I think we got the idea. So authority is not a binary concept. Guest it a concept as i meet and that matches the responsibility of the person. The teacher has authority and it is her present ability and the support and on up the line in terms of who decides whether covid is mandated or not, that probably is something that should be or could be within the authority of a larger jurisdiction and the decision might be a stupid decision, but it is one that could be made appropriately statewide, rather than sort of school by school. And process is important as a tool to inform judgment, but not a substitute for judgment. When y, then you get all kinds of terrible things. The testing complaint about is basically a process, a mandatory assess, only looking at testing and that is what you are looking at and it turned schools into a drilling shed for schools kids arent learning anything but how to do better on a test but not understanding the underlying material. Host you talk about Charter Schools in your books. What do think is the key to their success . Guest first, let me qualify that. There was a study in massachusetts comparing performance of private schools there versus Public Schools and the Charter Schools in massachusetts in the innercity were dramatically had dramatically better result. The Charter Schools in the suburbs didnt perform any better. So the most possible explanation for that is that what the Charter Schools bring that the innercity kids need is the socialization are not getting at home, maybe a single parent household or people working day and night to make ends meet, so they dont have the advantage of middleclass kids in the luxury the parenting. The Charter Schools that i wrote about in newark, Success Academy and others, also very successful, they have extremely energetic socialization programs. They vary by Charter School there uniforms, teaching values, paying attention and being quiet in the classroom, just little things. And it succeeds. I will give you one example. There is Success Academy school in harlem that shares a building is a Public School. In 2019, the Success Academy School Elementary scored 37th the state and academics achievement out of 2400 schools, straight up academics. The adjoining Public School in the same building, 1600 was 94th great it is not apples to apples, while the Charter School was 94th. It is not apples to apples, the Charter School pool had a leg up but it is a stark contrast, 37th. Host the former secretary of state mike pompeo described him as the most dangerous person in america. Guest that is special in the world, i think. It is obviously hyperbole. But the point is that there are these people who, because of their union powers and political influence, have really made it impossible or nearly impossible to fix failing Public Schools, particularly in the inner cities. It is a tragedy. We should put whatever resources it takes to pull kids up. But that requires being able to manage. There is an article in this weeks economist about why is america more productive than other developed countries . What they posit in this analysis is that American Business is willing to change personnel. In other countries, there is more job security and apparently they just do not have the same level of energy. We need to change people out in failing schools. Host if someone wanted to read one of your books, which one would you recommend to them . Guest if they are interested in the political how this relates to the current political system, i would say common sense. If theyre interested in how crazy it got, the history of and how it resulted in counterproductive effects, probably the death of common sense. If they are interested in the philosophy of governing and the Analytical Framework in which you have to think about how you organize, the rule of nobody. Host next is mike in new york. Caller good afternoon. I take exception with mr. Howards disrespectful and naive perception of the police. I spent after graduating from boston university, i spent over 20 years working in the 32 precinct of central harlem. Lawyers like himself have absolutely no idea whatsoever how busy and how dangerous that job actually is. Host give us an example of where you take exception with what he had to say. Caller he seems to insinuate that Police Officers in this country are sort of unduly shielded and guarded by their unions, which is not the case. Especially in new york city. There is a reason why there is a massive shortage of Police Officers in this country, because of people like mr. Howard disrespecting them when they have no idea how dangerous the job actually is. Host are you still active policeman, or have you retired and moved on . Caller i retired from the nypd april 17, 2018. I am still law enforcement. Where i worked was the deadliest precinct in the city of new york for a Police Officer to work. The average person has no idea on a daily basis how extremely dangerous and busy the job is. There is a reason why there is a shortage of Police Officers. The trend in society and america the last few years, this routine thought of life disrespect. People like myself, we did not have to become Police Officers. I could have done anything i wanted to. I think it is manifesting itself in this country and a lot of different ways and people like mr. Howard should reassess their criticism of Police Officers. Host let us get a response. Guest those are good points. The fact that bad cops are not accountable i think is demonstrated by lots of evidence. But your point about most cops being good cops and how hard of a job it is is incredibly important. We obviously need policeman, we need to compensate them well, truth them fairly. I was talking to a former head of a precinct in new york city recently who agreed that new york city does not have the same accountability problems that other big cities do in police, so he would agree with your statement. But you fundamentally have to have a system where the misbehavior you do not have the blue wall of silence or whatever they call it, were nobody rats on anyone else. People do not interfere with others, like the young kids who are watching Derek Chauvin with george floyd. One of them said something, you need to have a culture that any good police force were the policemen are willing to disagree with each other and say no, this is excessive, you should not be doing this. There is a lot of evidence that we do not have that culture, at least in most police forces. Host a little less than one hour left with philip howard, 202 7488200 if you live in Eastern Central time zones, 202 7488201 from mountain and pacific. You can send a text. Please include your first name and city. Cornelius is in louisiana, go ahead. Caller hey, peter. I want to make a comment first to you, peter. I hope on juneteenth month you will get carol swain, she is great. Host she has been on the program. Caller that is all right. It may go to howard. Mr. Howard, my name is Cornelius White and i disagree with the caller that was a cop in new york. I was a military Police Officer in louisiana and the cops do a fine job. They are getting blasted by all of these different people with sometimes false charges and stuff like that. Maybe he was a good cop, maybe he was a bad cop, but he should have stayed there to make the precinct better and stuff like that. We have Community Cops that try to go out in the community and help the community, whether they be white officers or black officers. That is what you need, you need Community Involvement between the citizens and the cops. My question for you, my parents were educators here in louisiana. When i went to school i am africanamerican. Im 62 years old. We had the National Anthem where the white schools have the prayer, pledge and National Anthem in the 60s. In the Supreme Court took that out, took at the bible, the devil stepped in. You could listen to paul harvey. If i were the devil, this is what i would do. If you heard of paul harvey and that, you would understand. Guest that is the way it is. I think there is the pendulum is moving back. Part of the rights revolution was to try to sanitize schools of any kind of belief system. Of course, what was once said Something Like reactionaries rush in where liberals fear to tread. You cannot create value free school. You do not want to indoctrinate people in one set of a particular religion or something , nor do you want to avoid all values, because society is based on values. We just had some decisions saying if you are going to have voucher programs, they should also be allowed to be given to religious schools, i agree with that. Let people find communities of values and let them thrive in that. We have taken too much of that away. Host where are you from and how did you get to columbia, yale and covington in berlin . Guest i grew up in eastern kentucky, my father was a preacher. So i grew up in a coal mining town. The coal mining town was very poor. The farm town was a farm town, i worked on farms. It was nice. I grew up in the 1950s, it might as well have been the 1750s, compared to now. You have all of the jobs, i worked on farms, i would cut tobacco for one dollar an hour during the season in august and september. I found after those jobs i knew what i wanted when i grew up, which was to have an office job. It was so hard. It was healthy growing up, then i got scholarships to good schools and got lucky, got this job at the national lab with very smart people. I have had a lot of luck in life , my father was very influential in guiding me in terms of my values and where i went to school and such. Being the son of a minister does somewhat deter you from being too religious, because you see the dark side of it as well as the good side of it. Host what does a vice chair of covington in berlin do . Caller i had started a Business Law Firm in new york city that merged with covington 20 some years ago. I was i had a lot of business relationships and clients and such with people in new york. In general, in the business world, if you are called a vice chair, it is because you are there to help them get business. So that is sort of what my job was at that point in my career. Host diane in massachusetts, go ahead. Caller first of all, i want to thank you, very informative. I pretty much agree with cornelius, we have gone so far away from biblical values that the constitution was written on, meant to be written on. There is no fear of god anymore, no fear of authority. It seems to me all of the people who have taken oath of office this is treason against the constitution that is going on here. I would like to know why biden has not been tried for treason. Host i kind of want to address what she had to say, we talked about the rights revolution in the 1960s. You said it needed to be changed, what do you think we have lost that we need to get back. Guest a really important point. We have created the structure where we have central rules and processes and rights to sue, all of that kind of stuff. That breeds and encourages a hyperindividualism. I will believe whatever i believe, i am who i am, even if that is bad values. What has been lost are communities of values, people getting together with people down the block to make the school work better or figure out a way to take care of homeless people. Or whatever. Which is the kind of thing my father did when he was a minister growing up. So i am working on an essay, the title which is everyday freedom. The point a number of philosophers have been writing a long these lines. But there is a concept called subsidiary, where you give responsibility down to the lowest practical level. A community should be able to manage and deal with its own schools within reason and manage and deal with homelessness, social problems like that. But they should not be able to veto an interstate transmission line. That should be decided by the federal government, not each community along the way. So what i mean by everyday freedom is restoring to everybody in their community and area of responsibility the freedom to act on their values of right and wrong. We have lost that and we have had several callers reacting to that. People need to be able to feel they wake up in the morning and live their values, not avoid their values. Actually live them. Host you mentioned homelessness, you write that homelessness is perhaps the starkest example or symbol of the failure of a rightsbased social welfare system. Guest it is just crazy what we did. We made these judgments back in the early 80s that people had a quote right to be homeless. People die with their rights. But most of the people that we see on the streets have a serious problem. They have a Mental Illness or they have an addiction problem and they need to be taken care of, their needs are going to be different for each one. It is not an easy it is not a one solution fits all. We also have a housing problem that contributes to a different kind of homelessness problem. But when you are talking about people who one way or another or incapacitated, you cannot honor their rights the way we have been without basically killing them sooner or later and destroying, like in san francisco, the quality of life of large parts of that wonderful city. Host you worked on the homelessness or housing problem back in 1991, up in new york with donald trump. Guest it was not really a housing i was the chair of a civic group called me to support society. It was a group of architects and Civic Leaders aimed at making new york citys real estate work better. Grand central terminal, they were going to tear out all of the lights in times square. I am some others led demonstrations that embarrassed city hall into abandoning that idea, so that then created laws to make brighter lights. All of the lights, i feel i own them. That is what they did. At one point, donald trump got control of these old Railroad Tracks on the west side of manhattan between 59th and 72nd street. He wanted to develop it, he had this horrible development plan. And so, we ultimately negotiated with him that we would support a deal for him to build on the back half of the property if he made the front half of the property into an extension threequarter miles an extension of riverside park, public park. Various things went wrong with the deal, they are not relevant. We had design guidelines. At one point, trump calls me up and says you know, i know i have to get your approval for this. But i think you just trust me to do the right thing, that my interest is to build housing that is successful, you wanted to be successful. Why dont we do away with this thing with a civic group gets to approve . [laughter] so i pause and say well, i hate to break the news to you, but people do not trust you. Then he paused and went, no. We made a deal. We were a civic group that had spent 100 years creating the Historic District to preserve the character of certain neighborhoods, get other neighborhoods zoned and all of that stuff. Before i got into writing books, i was doing a lot of urban design related things. So to just a project the buildings got built, they are pretty boring, i have to say. But we do have a public park. Host what is the city like postcovid . Guest the city is pretty energetic, new york city seems to have come back. Not that i go to restaurants often, but it is hard to get a seat in a manhattan restaurant. Subways are not as crowded, but it it is going along. Cities in general chicago i have been in recently. America has great cities. Enormous energy of all of these people from different racial and ethnic groups coming together, doing all of these different kinds of things people do in cities and such. America is blessed with dozens of fabulous cities great culture and great energy. Host next call from las vegas. Caller good morning. Morning out here, anyway. I am so fascinated by this author and his background and experience. Ive got two questions. My first question is, have you ever in your books if you could recommend it, where the employee is like the system and the union got together and trampled the employee because of their power or authority or whatever term youd like to use . The second question, are you going to be coming to the Las Vegas Area and having a seminar or book signing in the near future . Guest you know, there are lots of examples of the unions actually taking away rights of employees who do not want to be part of the union. The Supreme Court janice case was all about the Union Illinois could not force a nonunion member to pay agency fees to the union, because most of that money goes for political purposes. The Supreme Court found it unconstitutional. I write about that somewhat in my new book, not accountable, that would be the only place. I do not have a plan to come to las vegas at the moment, but i am starting to talk with candidates people aspiring to be president in 2024, starting to talk with them about their platforms. So i am starting to get calls to fly around the country and give talks about what a vision would look like. Also talking to people about what a third party look like. So it is not unlikely i will be in las vegas. If you go to commongood. Org, you can send me in email an email and i will put you on a list. Common good is a Nonpartisan Group that i started 20 years ago to implement these reforms, to basically replace red tape with individual responsibility. Which is essentially different variations of what we are talking about. We have a small staff of maybe six people permanently, but we have worked with the leading institutions in the country, we had a joint venture with the Harvard School of Public Health to design a new system for medical malpractice that president obama supported, we were going to have a pilot project. The day before the vote, trial lawyers got the Senate Majority leader he reread, he took it out. But weve been working the infrastructure reform the last few years and some of our reforms have been put into law in the biden period in some of the infrastructure bills. Now, we are working on organizing constitutional challenges to the public union controls that have disempowered mayors and governors. So we are unlike think tanks, we have a very clear positions and hypotheses, we have public forums, we invite people of different points of view. If they disagree with us, we want them to say how they would make it work better. So we have a role, we work with American Enterprises for bookings, lots of manhattan institute. A wide range of think tanks around the country. Host when you say youre getting calls from canada to talk about running in 2024 on the republican side, is that correct . They are running on the republican side, they are calling me for ideas. No one from the Democratic Party, because there are no other candidates other than president biden, and because the Democratic Party is affiliated with two groups that i think are insidious. They are not calling me out. For most of my life, i was a democrat. Now i am independent. Host when you look at a third party, you do not look at it from left to right . Guest no. I think they left right divide is completely missing the point. I think what is needed is a vision i would call it a practical party. A vision of how to make things work. While there are many policy differences between republicans and democrats over you name it, which are legitimate differences, i think the most important law in modern society is the disempowerment that alienates people and drives them to extremism. Some my party, if i were the person starting the third party, would be one that believes in everyday freedom. I want to restore teachers and cops going to that cop, cops have too many shackles on them. They are asked to prove why they know that person is up to no good. How do you prove it . Most of what we see, we perceive based on our experience. But you cant it is not likely our computers. I put two and two together, it is for. That is not how people are. So cops need to have they need to be judged for how they do, but they need to have the freedom to act under reasonable instincts when they know somebody is up to no good. We are taking that authority away certainly in the Public Sector and the private sector. Host colin in maryland. Caller yes, i am questioning the current request for reparations. I am wondering what the authors thoughts are on that in relationship to affirmative action, whether that request is an indictment against the success of affirmative action. Host what do you think . Caller well, i think it is an example of the failure of the round of action failure of affirmative action. Guest you know, the people that should leave this discussion should be africanamericans, not me. Because i do not have the background or experience to do it. To do it justice. I believe in general that people succeed because they convince the people around them that they are doing a good job, they are good people. I would like to think in our society, to the extent there is residual biases for racism that it is only skin deep. When you get to know somebody i just had a situation this weekend with a dying relative, this fantastic africanamerican woman wonderful. So it i do not think you succeed by giving people money. I think there are places where money can make a difference. But giving someone a lot of money is not going to make them feel good about themselves. What makes you feel good about yourself, we all know is when you give it your all and you do a good job and you make a difference. It is not about money. One of the cancers in our society, which i think has been said by income inequality, which needs to be addressed, is we think money is what is important. Money is really not. What is important is selfrespect and fulfillment. Being treated fairly, too. But i think somebody else should lead that discussion. Host your book that came in 2001 the lost art of drawing the line, you have a chapter titled legal wedge in the racial divide. You write the availability of the race card is genuinely terrifying to whites. Its changed the way that businesses manage. People it stems from the real guilt that we feel as a society toward the way we treated enslaved african americans. But what that chapter describes our studies and examples where we are trying to lean over backwards to far and it is counterproductive. You are not candid, you are not spontaneous. It is interpreted as proof of racism when people are being trained not to be candid so that it will not be perceived as racism. So we have this downward spiral were often you do not develop the kind of human relation needed for someone to succeed in the office. That book came out, a lot of people did not like that book. I got very negative reviews because i was harsh about the litigation system in this country. But even the people who did not like the book would not talk about that chapter. [laughter] i was once testifying before congress, the House Judiciary Committee about litigation reform. Congressman Maxine Waters pulled out the book and said i understand you do not think there is any such thing as racism. I said no, that is not accurate. I note that there was and it is a terrible thing and we need to do a lot about it. And she said but you do not think people should be able to sue when they have been discriminated against. I said i think there needs to be more credibility, not just because somebody has a disappointment in job does not mean they are discriminated against. That happens to all of us. And she said, do you think anyone would bring a lawsuit for discrimination if they were not discriminated against . I sort of bit my tongue. I said let me put it this way. Every federal judge i know believes that most of the people and the evidence is i think 90 or something of the people you bring discrimination claims were not discriminated against, they were disappointed in the job decision, in their employer. So i do think it is counterproductive even though it is not a perfect world, i think the cost of letting anyone claim theyve been discriminated against our greater then the benefits of going to a system where there is some pattern or practice of discrimination or explicit action acts of discrimination. Something that makes the claim more credible. Host two cases that are in the news right now you mentioned that money should not be a motivator. But a trial lawyer wouldnt a trial lawyer argue that money is the bottom line for a corporation, so that corporation will not act like that again if we take their money . I want to ask you about two cases. The water situation with the marines i do not know if you are familiar. And the lawsuit against Johnson Johnson. Guest i will not talk about the Johnson Johnson lawsuit, because Johnson Johnson is a client of covington and i do not know about it. The water situation first of all, if someone has been harmed by a mistake of someone else, they should be compensated for it. But compensation is not the same as getting rich. So giving huge damages this comes out of the pocket of the rest of society. There is not some people pot it is coming out of, it is coming out of the Pension Funds of the companies or u. S. Taxpayers, whoever it is. No sensible system of justice allows people to get rich freight tragedy. The system of justice designed to compensate them for tragedy. If you have 10 million of care that you need because of something, great if you get 10 million. But the extra ticket, 100 Million Dollars in punitive damages, that means that persons relatives to buy a fancy speedboat or have a fancy house. It is not the way any other society just way of doing that. And in the case of social wide problems again, i do not want to overlap with things my law firm might be handling. In general there should have been a regulatory solution to that. There should have been a social assurance scheme, you couldve collected it from the companies that made insurance, whatever. But it should not have been done with thousands of lawsuits where lawyers in these cases you are talking defense lawyers are collecting more than half of the money. The money is just going to the legal profession, not to the victims. It is just inefficient to have thousands of lawsuits over a societywide problem. Camp lejeune may be one where there are enough victims that it should have a social Insurance Scheme where they get paid fairly but does not have the inefficiency. Host the headlong pursuit to safety is killing off t Simple Pleasures of life. The air in america is so thick with legal risk that you can practically cut it. Guest it is crazy. Ripped out seesaws, the things kids like the most were merrygorounds. Merrygorounds are also dangerous, you can get thrown off. That is why they are so much fun. The question is how dangerous these things are. So it is more dangerous to have playgrounds be so boring that kids sit on the sofa and do video games and become obese. . How do kids learn to take responsibility . They go out by themselves, wander around, get into trouble. The range of walking by a 10yearold had declined in the last 15 years from one mile to 300 feet. We are so upset with safety we do not let kids be kids. Host you raised your kids in new york city . Guest raise the kids in new york city, they seem to have recovered from that. I was such a clueless father, i had no idea what they were doing. They seem all right. Host a text message, do you favor term limits for elected politicians . Guest they put in term limits in california, and the effect was the legislators when they get elected spend all of their time trying to be nice to the Interest Groups they wanted to work with after they left. It turns out that term limits are not a silver bullet. The Current System of democracy needs to be disrupted. I think getting rid of all private finance for campaigns. Let us have a Public Financing system. You know how much less expensive it would be if taxpayers it does not matter. 10 billion dollars, 30 billion on campaign financing, compared with hundreds of billions that we spend where a friend of mine running for congress a few years ago told me i said, how did you run . 95 on the phone raising money. It is just a sick system. Host you talk a lot in your book about bureaucracy and with term limits, the bureaucracy remains. Politicians come and go. Guest with my new book, not accountable, it is about executive power. Most executives are term limited. Governors typically cannot have more than two terms. My problem is they do not have the authority to run government during those terms, so they cannot fix the school or whatever. Even someone as independent as mike bloomberg, who had nothing to gain from all his years in Public Service could not make the kinds of changes he knew were needed. Host the next call comes from david in florida. Caller hello, peter. Thank you for cspan. I wonder if mr. Howard could tell us what common sense has to do with convening a grand jury to try to indict that marine for saving the people on that subway car in manhattan. It is absolutely disgusting what is going on there and the District Attorney es, a democrat named alvin bragg shock is behind it all. We saw the governor of new york, a democrat, saying how wonderful it is, that there should be compensation to the kid who was disrupting and threatening passengers. Host let us get the response if mr. Howard cares to give one. Guest so there is no way around my books are about this giving officials room to exercise their judgment. Prosecutors do not prosecute based on a computer program. They see 10 crimes, for every two, they indict. They decide what is important and what is not. My instinct is the marine who held down the man did not mean to kill him, it was an accident. But i do not know all of the facts. If i were to conclude that, then i would not have convened a grand jury. That would be my judgment. But i do not know the facts and in terms of a lawsuit again, this is a situation where what does a lawsuit have to do with it . You have somebody acting in an antisocial way, people felt threatened. Marine takes him down. As tragic tragically, the person dies. Was there a crime . It depends on the facts. Probably it was probably it was an accident my judgment would be not to indict him. But one could make the opposite conclusion. Host sharon is from new york city, good afternoon to you. Caller hello, mr. Howard seems so well spoken. I live in new york, weve been talking about the police, about the subways. Because of subway safety, theyve increased the number of police. You see clumps of them most of them standing in the middle of nowhere, many of them on their cell phones. When you go up and ask them why arent they patrolling the tracks where people get pushed on, why arent they monitoring the gate where everyone is jumping in . They say that as the rules, there is nothing they can do about it. It does not make sense to just stand in the middle of nowhere doing nothing. What can individuals do to try to see that some of the abuses that mr. Howard raises can be changed or improved or dealt with . Host what is your take on new york city today . And safety . Caller there are no rules anymore. There is no accountability. Theres no civility. Everybody is out doing things for himself and not paying attention and it is very frustrating. Guest you know i do not know why i have seen i take the subway, so i have seen the cops standing around. I do not know why they are standing around. I do know why repair workers are standing around, it is because the work rules do not allow them to pitch in for things they are not within their specific category. Probably pick a number, the level of inefficiency in the union work rules is probably one third or more. With the police, my understanding is it is more of a management issue. So if the police are standing around and not doing their job, someone should complain to the precinct. Start looking into why they are not doing their jobs. Ultimately, the job of the person running the precinct and the person elected to be mirror, former policeman himself, should have them doing a good job. One of the things a citizen can do is file a complaint. Host im going to read two quotes from try common sense. Accountability in the Public Sector in america is basically nonexistent. My proposal is to give democracy another chance. Let us learn from our mistakes and abandon the utopian dream of a legally correct society. Guest let people be in charge again. Life is sloppy, we make choices in our family life and jobs and such but did not end up well. There is no Straight Path towards a perfect and fair society. Democracy is certainly not designed to be efficient, but it is designed to move in Different Directions and it does not. It does not move because we have union controlling the operating system, so you cannot manage the police and the teachers and agencies differently. Weve got to let people start making decisions again and i think we need to restore the citizens a sense that their ideas can make a difference. There ought to be a police in the local precinct where citizens are invited to come in and say what they do not like. There should be active reception to the ideas of people in the community. I am on the board of some civic groups, we have a Good Relationship with the local Police Precinct for our neighborhood. But that is because some people cultivated that relationship. It is not available through your average citizen. I think we should do more of that. Host rick in maryland, good afternoon. You are on with philip howard. Caller mr. Howard, i appreciate your concern for the black people in this country. Let me give you a little resume. 1965, a small group got together and set up the department of housing and urban development. This small group went to detroit, st. Louis, baltimore, new york and bought the worst sections of land because they were the cheapest. They financed, developed and to this day own those section eight hellhole projects, theres about 42 million blacks in the country, about 30 are doing fabulous. The barack obamas, the actors, the singers, the football players. 70 are concentrated and living in these hellhole section a projects, the worst sections of the city, for the last 50 years. The worst school systems, etc. Who cares . Nobody. Barack obama and invited and biden for eight years, do know what they did for the black people in this country . Nothing. Host anything you want to address . Guest we have a serious innercity problem. What he is saying is true. I would not put the cause and effect white that directly, but the people who did section eight thought they were doing something good. They thought they were creating better housing, but they were in bad neighborhoods, etc. Ultimately, the people who i think something about this starting with pat moynahan and others over the years think that better education, restoring the Family Structure and probably a bigger investment. But with those things. It is a cancer. Host philip howard, is a Public School system worth saving, or should we open it up . Guest i think the Public School system i went to Public Schools for much of my life. It is definitely worth saving, but they have to be manageable. They cannot be Central Planning schools, they cannot be in the control of a national union. I do think that given where we are today, many of them are inept, not places of high energy , many schools are not Successful School choice is really important. For parents who really want their kids to feel they should have a range of choices. So i am firmly in the School Choice camp. But i would do everything i could i would give Public Schools the same freedoms that Charter Schools have, give them much more ability to manage. Why should people running Public Schools do so with one arm tied behind their back . Host in san mateo, california. Caller i am really enjoying the positive attitude, i am a retired Public School teacher. I taught math in san francisco. I think an ideal classroom especially at the lower level, Elementary School levels is on creating a Community Within a classroom for everybody where the attitude is everybody is here to do the best they can. Everybody is here to do the best they can under the circumstances. So we want to create circumstances in that classroom where students help each other. Guest such an important point. Very Successful Schools have meant touring and a sense of responsibility for other people. So i subscribe entirely to what the caller just said. Host 28 years ago, the death of common sense came out. What was the response he got to the book and how has it changed you youve got to the book and how has it changed you . Guest the response was overwhelming. The New York Times reviewer had a great line before the book came out, what mr. Howard is trying to do with this book is drive us all sane. [laughter] it was a great line. I am very pleased with that. You know, i think that my experience in working with every president ial Administration Since then in different areas has made me feel gratified that people want to restore a system where human responsibility is important, but it also talks about how difficult it is to make change in a democracy. We see the budget crisis right now, the clash of public this sort of high noon, we are not g toxtend the debt ceiling unless you make bets. Then republicans are not suggesting cuts. Why not . They will make them unpopular. Any cut comes out of somebody. So democracies are not good at change. The founders can add, but they cannot take away. That would be a better way of saying it. The framers made a mistake, they did not realize it is 10 times harder to remove a program than it is to add a new one. The person whos going to get removed will put all of their energy into getting support in congress to stop the change from happening. We have this budget, which is larded with inefficiencies, a Healthcare System where 1 trillion a year goes to administration and American Health care, that is 1 million per doctor for red tape. We have all of these places we could cut, but it requires changing the way the system works. I was writing a column today on this. If you want to take something away from somebody in a democracy, you are not going to do it politically. You will have to set up a special commission that makes a recommendation that congress commits itself to vote up or down. Because they are never going to negotiate to take things away. What i realize now 28 years later, whatever it is, to make the kind of changes i want and that every president i work with has said they want, we are going to have to get a National Consensus for a recodification commission. Nothing is working the way it should, simplify everything. Lets give it to the base Closing Commission and voted up or down. That is how change has happened in history. That is how napoleon did legal change. So we are never going to negotiate our way to a sensible place. We have to wake up one day and realize we cannot get there from here the system there are almost 200 Million Words of binding federal law and regulation. That is not the rule of law, that is a series of tripwires. You cannot possibly comply you cannot run a factory and comply with 4000 worker safety rules. It is not the rule of law, it is arbitrary authority. We just need to wake up and realize that we are at a point in history like the 1960s, like the progressive era, where we have to change the way that things work. Host we will close with its dish this we will close with this. New rights are created to help victims. These rights are different. While the right bearers may see them as protection, they do not protect so much as provide. The rights are intended as a new and often visible form of subsidy. That is from philip howards first book, the death of common sense. The most recent is not accountable