The Rule of Nobody: Saving America From Dead Laws and Broken Government, Howard - B

                                               This is a fascinating, brief (only 183 pages) book about how our country's love for the rule of law has made our society much, much weaker than it should be.  The message is that government ( at all levels) does not work and is horribly inefficient in almost everything it does - the proverbial law of unintended consequences. Howard is a noted lawyer, commentator, and author who I saw on Fareed Zakaria's GPS show a few months ago. I believe the book is apolitical. His enemy is incompetence and he clearly states that an efficient government need not offend either the right or the left. His first example is the Goethals Bridge connecting Staten Island to New Jersey. The Port Authority concluded that the best way to modernize the Bridge is to raise its roadbed, thus allowing SuperPanaMax tankers to pass under and keep the Port of Newark competitive.  Many years later, nothing has happened because of the assessment process. He points out that since the approach roads would be the same and there is no increase in traffic, perhaps environmental impacts could be fast-tracked. Not in modern America, because we have endless laws that prescribe how things must be. There must be an environmental study, and in that study, time was spent on whether it was a good thing for the Port to be competitive. After all, this might lead to more traffic in Newark. Also, it took a year to complete the study of the project's impact on historic buildings within a ten mile radius.  Western Staten Island is industrial and there isn't a historic building anywhere near, but there are a lot in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Other examples of rule governed policies are: a cafeteria worker fired from a school for feeding a hungry child whose pass had expired, a lifeguard fired for saving a life after he crossed a beach boundary line when he should have called 911, a fireman prevented from saving a drowning man by his boss, because he did not have the proper certification, and on and on endlessly, until you don't know whether to laugh or cry. On a larger level, he tells the story of the cotton subsidies for farmers put in in 1933. They were part of staving off the Great Depression. Today we spend $2.5B on cotton subsidies and the WTO condemned us and slapped sanctions on goods sent to Brazil. Brazil had initiated the objections about our subsidies. Our Congress would not eliminate the subsidies and was pained to see innocent bystander industries punished because of their exports. So, we solved the problem by sending $147M annually to Brazil's cotton farmers. His suggestion is that we need less reliance on rules to be followed and more focus on outcomes.  He provides some great examples in the area of nursing homes. America has so many rules that homes will wake people from a sound sleep in order to comply with eating time requirements or place comatose a patient in play groups in order to comply with play ratios. In Australia, the industry has been revolutionized by using outcome based rules.  They simply require that people be taken care of humanely and with consideration. There's a reasonably long section on government philosophy and a suggested list of constitutional amendments. As I think we all know, we could figure this out if we left the politicians out of it. That is not likely because only legislators can change the Constitution or anything else in the good ole USA.