26 January 2009

In his book The Future of Freedom Fareed Zakaria famously suggested that The United States has developed too much democracy and not enough liberty.  In an Op Ed article in today's Wall Street Journal Philip Howard is more specific.  Below are some excepts from his  article.

"The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into every day choices."

"Teachers, doctors, officials, managers, even volunteers are paralyzed by legal self-consciousness."

"Defensiveness has swept across the country like a cold wave.  We have become a culture of rule followers, trained to frame every solution in terms of existing law or possible legal risk."

It is chic these days to say we don't know what happened to the economy, and don't know what to do.  I would suggest that we know, but are unwilling to see, and endure the pain it would entail.  The problem is unrestrained excesses, and the only way they can be restrained is via the free market system, which pain we are unwilling to bear.  Many, many individual decisions regarding risk - liberty - brought us wealth; democracy made us believe it was our entitlement.

Our lawmakers and litigators set out to make sure everyone had an equal piece of whatever was available, but making laws of favoritism doesn't make that happen.  Congress pushed for the American dream ('reasonaby priced" housing available to all), restrictions on business (increasing costs) and "fairness doctrines" of all kinds (inflating entitlement to levels of irresponsibilty).   So unreasonable housing prices proved unsustainable; personal debt levels became unsupportable; and expectations rose to levels of unbelievability.  And the bubble burst - bubbles actually.

Meanwhile the litigators took full advantage of the opportunities aforded them by the law makers - for the "good of the people."  Lawyers all.  Rule of law pushed far into excess.  Regardless of what anyone says there can be no surprise; it was both inevitable and obvious to anyone who wanted to see.  But apparently we didn't want to see because to see would have been to stop it, and they/we didn't want to stop it.  So now we suffer.  It must always be so, but we never learn; we never want to learn when it feels so good to remain ignorant.

So now we find - once again - that democracy (republicanism actually; everyone knows democracy is unrealistic, but that's another subject) works much better when things are getting better than when the are getting worse.  And typically we'll cry and whine and say we don't understand that when you make laws so restrictive and smothering that there are unlimited litigation opportunities, and fewer and fewer liberties in support of individual initative, the engines of growth sputter.

I realize that saying what I am about to say is simplistic, but when the smoke has cleared perhaps we will realize that excesses of lawyers (not lawyers; lawyers are critical to our way of life; but lawyer excesses) are, if not the root cause of our current problems, at least a powerful contributor.