| The Collapse of the Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom |  | Author: Philip K. Howard
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Seller: GSB co
Sales Rank: 777,822
Languages: English (Unknown), English (Original Language), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.2
ISBN: 034543871X
EAN: 9780345438713
ASIN: 034543871X
Publication Date: January 29, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In pursuit of fairness at any cost, we have created a society paralyzed by legal fear: Doctors are paranoid and principals powerless. Little league coaches, scared of liability, stop volunteering. Schools and hospitals start to crumble. The common good fades, replaced by a cacophony of people claiming their “individual rights.”
By turns funny and infuriating, this startling book dissects the dogmas of fairness that allow self-interested individuals to bully the rest of society. Philip K. Howard explains how, trying to honor individual rights, we removed the authority needed to maintain a free society. Teachers don’t even have authority to maintain order in the classroom. With no one in charge, the safe course is to avoid any possible risk. Seesaws and diving boards are removed. Ridiculous warning labels litter the American landscape: “Caution: Contents Are Hot.”
Striving to protect “individual rights,” we ended up losing much of our freedom. When almost any decision that someone disagrees with is a possible lawsuit, no one knows where he stands. A huge monument to the unknown plaintiff looms high above America, casting a dark shadow across our daily choices. Today, in the land of free speech, you’d have to be a fool to say what you really think.
This provocative book not only attacks the sacred cows of political correctness, but takes a breathtakingly bold stand on how to reinvigorate our common good. Only by restoring personal authority can schools begin to work again. Only by judges and legislatures taking back the authority to decide who can sue for what can doctors feel comfortable using their best judgment and American be liberated to say and do what they know is right. Lucid, honest, and hard hitting, The Collapse of the Common Good shows how Americans can bring back freedom and common sense to a society disabled by lawyers and legal fear.
Amazon.com Review
Author Philip K. Howard returns with the same storytelling style and supreme reasonableness that made his first book, The Death of Common Sense, such a smash hit in 1995. He begins The Lost Art of Drawing the Line by noting the damage predatory litigation has done to the communal fabric of the United States: "Social relations in America, far from steadied by law's sure hand, are a tangle of frayed legal nerves." He tells how seesaws have started to vanish from playgrounds, how teachers are banned from touching students, and how emergency-room staff are blocked from attending to patients off hospital grounds--even if they can see them bleeding to death just 30 feet away. These aren't just speculations, a parade of hypothetical horror stories--they are actual trends and events that Howard describes and documents. The ability to weave dozens of anecdotes like these into his narrative is one of Howard's great strengths, and it allows him to make important points in entertaining ways. Yet the book is much more than a collection of outrageous stories or a mere broadside against the legal system--though the legal system does come in for plenty of criticism. Instead, it's a meditation on the meaning of freedom, why freedom cannot exist outside of authority, and why individuals in positions of authority should have the ability to make decisions based on sound judgment. There is a temptation to secure liberty by restricting authority through the law, but this can be overdone, and it carries a high price: "Put law or any other formal construct in the middle of daily dealings, and people will start looking to the law instead of to one another." Then things get much worse: "The more our common institutions fail us, the more Americans want to limit their authority. Through a downward cycle of distrust, legal controls, [and] worse failure ... we drive Americans' governing institutions further into the bureaucratic maw." That is a terrible place to be, where no one is held accountable and antisocial behavior rules. And it has nothing at all to do with freedom. --John J. Miller
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