Polls are expecting a divided Congress. One sure bet is that the new president and new Congress will not fix how government works. Change is too hard. All those Washington lobbyists and lawyers are doing fine with thousand-page rulebooks and years-long bureaucratic processes.
 
Change requires outside pressure. Sometimes it’s a crisis, as in the Depression. Sometimes it’s a shift in public opinion, as in the Progressive Era. Sooner rather than later, pressures will likely require replacing the paralytic and wasteful red tape state. The world order is too perilous to perpetuate an inept governing framework.
 
But change can be bad, as in 1917 Russia. Where’s the vision for a more effective American government? Crisis is not a good time to debate how things should work. That’s why it’s useful to begin the discussion now.
 
Philip Howard's book Everyday Freedom proposes to replace red tape with human responsibility and accountability. Teachers could run their classrooms, doctors and nurses would be liberated from desk work, and officials could deal with homelessness and give permits for new infrastructure.
 
This vision requires people to accept the need for human authority in a free society. Someone must be able to make common choices, and someone else must have authority to hold them accountable. No institution can inspire mutual trust unless people in charge have authority to uphold standards and values. By contrast, red tape and a self-interested concept of rights cause failure and sow distrust.
 
Everyday Freedom has prompted leading experts to confront the delivery failures of the modern American state. Here is a podcast with political scientist Francis Fukuyama, another with American Law Institute president David Levi, and a new book by Justice Neil Gorsuch drawing on our work.
 
A human-responsibility governing vision is not about policy preferences. It’s an imperative of organizational physics. No social enterprise can succeed—no government, no employer, no institution of any kind—unless people at each level of responsibility have the agency to act on their best judgment in doing their job.
 
Our agenda at Common Good is to work with leading experts to present simpler governing frameworks that honor the role of human judgment and responsibility. Where third parties have disabled official authority—as with teachers union controls—we are organizing constitutional challenges with the help of leading public interest law firms. How can democracy work if governors and mayors come to office with no authority to fix broken schools or cut wasteful practices?
 
Common Good needs help to advance this mission. For years, we have relied upon the generosity and contacts of a few friends, but now we need to broaden our base to create new operating templates and build demand for change. If you think our initiative for effective government is important, we need your support.

• Everyday Freedom was reviewed by legal historian Stephen Presser, who emphasizes its foundational significance: “Everyday Freedom…provides a blueprint for shifting the focus of American law from the rights of the individual to the well-being of the community. It is also a critique of our modern administrative state…and a plea for decentralization of authority and policy.…In fact, if, through some unlikely and twisted time-travelling gene-splicing miracle, Alexis de Tocqueville, Socrates, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could be combined, such a person would be like Philip Howard.”