This is not a good bedtime read. It's frankly aggravating, but I knew that coming in. This is, more or less, 287 pages of stating the obvious, but in ways that continue to amaze and infuriate anew. In short, there are too many laws, and more specifically, too many highly detailed universal regulations that don't actually apply to anything in the real world. It was a little upsetting how this book reminded me of all the things I don't like about my job: the idiotic paperwork and endless mandatory procedure that goes along with basically everything. This book simply gave me more reasons to roll my eyes. Sure, I didn't quite see eye to eye with the author on everything - I am not quite as enamoured of the New Deal as he, for instance - but he makes enough valid points to give me plenty of food for (frustrating) thought. There is, luckily, a marginal amount of hope offered in the last chapter. I think the author's purpose here was mostly to point out the inanity of the current climate, to show us just how far down the slope we've slid. I doubt we are quite as close to the authoritarian, death-of-democracy dystopia as he implies, but there are unquestionably problems with the way things are being done. This is a book more people need to read, especially those who work as bureaucrats and special-interest advocates. ( )

The author examines the American trend toward regulating every aspect of our lives -- and I'm not talking just seat belt laws here -- and argues that this trend saps our sense of responsibility and encourages the belief that government should fix everything. Howard provides concrete examples of well-intentioned laws and regulations that make worse whatever problem they were designed to fix. But no criticism is complete without a solution, and Howard makes some suggestions on how to get out of the mess we've created.

Having worked for government on both municipal and federal levels, and in private corporate America, I believe the author's points are well-made. The paperwork hoops that many ordinary citizens, not to mention government employees, must jump through to comply with rules and regulations and accomplish a given task are nightmarish.

Fascinating read. ( )

America has traded individual common sense for "protection" via ridiculous laws and organizations. Reformers continually accelerated the scope of law's influence, some wanting to change it into a branch of psychiatry. It's a thoughtful premise backed by numerous examples. ( )

Dangers of bureacracy, excessive process, and lack of human oversight and judgment in human affairs. ( )

This is one of those books written from the modern American conservative viewpoint that does a very good job of opening the reader's eyes to a serious problem caused by modern statism, but whose solutions are problematic. The author argues that America is choking on legalistic bureaucracy run amok, a legalism that is sapping the ability of government to actually do anything. His solution is to say that government officials and employees should be allowed more flexibility to make decisions using their own judgement. I agree with him about the problem, but think the solution is wrong. American government was traditionally a government of laws, not men, meaning that government agents were allowed to act only as the law authorized them to. This was intended to be a defense of liberty, because it prevented goverment officials from exercising arbitrary power. However, this system can only work when government is quite limited in the functions it performs. What has been happening since the time of Roosevelt is that government has been rapidly expanding its role in society, involving itself in more and more areas of life. The current choking legalism is a result of this expansion of government combined with an attempt to retain the government of laws approach. Howard's solution is essentially to say that we should relax the requirement of having a government of laws. Instead he prefers to allow goverment officials to have more latitude in exercising their powers. To my mind this is exactly the wrong answer. The answer is not to allow officials more freedom to exercise arbitrary power, it should be to roll back the powers of government. But like most modern conservatives, Howard seems to have abandoned or forgotten the old conservative principle of limited government, and instead seeks only to make the modern statist state more efficient. ( )