By: George F. Will

Experience is often a brutal, and hence effective, tutor. The covid-19 tragedy teaches this: Government is more apt to achieve adequacy when it does not try to achieve purity.

Commenting on the widely varying results of the states’ different approaches to getting vaccines into arms, a Wall Street Journal editorial notes two things. One is the benefits of federalism: Among 50 governors, at least a few are apt to be wiser and nimbler than the federal bureaucracy. The other is: “The most successful state rollouts have departed from overly prescriptive federal rules,” and “The states with the highest per capita vaccination rates are all rule-breakers.” Philip K. Howard is not surprised.

He is a lawyer who thinks there are too many lawyers and too much law, and that both surpluses are encouraged by misbegotten ideas about ideal governance. One such idea is that ideal governance is a sensible aspiration. In the Yale Law Journal (“From Progressivism to Paralysis”), he explains why “Covid-19 is the canary in the bureaucratic mine.” Modern government “is structured to preempt the active intelligence of people on the ground. This is not an unavoidable side-effect of big government, but a deliberate precept of its operating philosophy. Law will not only set goals and governing principles, but it will also dictate exactly how to implement those goals correctly.” Result: paralysis. Governance congeals because “The complex shapes of life rarely fit neatly into legal categories.”

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