The American experiment is built on the powerful engine of individual initiative. Let people follow their star, and let other people make judgments about how they do. As Tocqueville observed: “No sooner do you set foot upon the American soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamor is heard on every side; and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the immediate satisfaction of their social wants.”
 
The July 4th holiday is an opportunity to reflect on how we’re doing. Not great is our view. The most powerful forces in America today are repressive—litmus test politics, suffocating red tape, suffocating political correctness, a cacophony of claimed rights. Accumulated legal requirements, like sediment in a harbor, prevent us from getting where we need to go—including addressing public challenges such as climate change, wage stagnation, and homelessness.  
 
Instead of fresh ideas, political discourse seems almost Soviet in its predictability and marginal relevance. The recent showdown over the debt ceiling was remarkable in what leaders didn’t debate—the need to eliminate wasteful programs and get our fiscal house in decent shape.    
 
A new political narrative is needed. This week C-SPAN aired—as a four-part series—a recent Common Good forum at Columbia University on re-empowering human agency. In the first of the four programs, Philip Howard presented a draft paper, and the panel included economists Edmund Phelps and Paul Romer, both Nobel laureates, social philosopher Yuval Levin, and political scientist Jennifer Murtazashvili. The bottom line is that America is overdue for a spring cleaning—not to de-regulate but to re-empower humans to take responsibility and start making needed choices. 
 
America can’t get where we need to go with a legal and government structure that disempowers humans from getting the job done. None of today’s endemic problems—including public paralysis and broad alienation—can be cured without dredging the public harbor to unleash American initiative at all levels of responsibility. Others are picking up the theme, including Kimberley Strassel in The Wall Street Journal and the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

• Professor Marshall Kapp reviewed Not Accountable for The Florida Bar Journal, writing: “We can continue to complain ad nauseam about the performance of our federal, state, and local governments and our seeming inability to effect meaningful reform; or we can read and thoughtfully consider the potential implications of this constructive new approach to a potentially society-endangering problem.”

• Philip talked with Julie Hartman about the role of law as explored in his books on the “Timeless with Julie Hartman” podcast.

• Philip talked with National Review’s Dominic Pino about Not Accountable on “Capital Writing.” Pino also cites the book in this piece for National Review.

• The Orange County Register cites Philip's work in this editorial marking the fifth anniversary of the Janus decision.