Rights, Howard reminds again, are rights against the law, not positive goods that government is obligated to provide for any and all claimants. Others have made this point more analytically and philosophically, but Howard's anecdotal approach certainly makes it more vivid, which helps explain the book's great success, and great value. Such scams often succeed, because of the perverse calculus of the lawsuit settlement game. Howard quotes from Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty , and even from Reason's own Tom Hazlett. It can barely fire an employee who doesn't show up for work.
Law can set up the conditions for interaction and work toward changes over time.
When it tries to do more, it only drives us further apart. But Howard's prescription undermines the force of the book, and reveals that he hasn't quite gotten to the heart of the matter of what common sense ought to entail. He thinks the problem is that bureaucratic rule has squeezed out human judgment and good sense by limiting discretion and reducing choice through cumbersome decision-making processes. Once the premise of the regulatory state is accepted, we are destined to end up with the outrages of bureaucratic rule, no matter how wise and benign the administrators, and no matter how much discretion is allowed to mitigate the worst outrages. For example, one of Howard's many attacks on OSHA involves a rule requiring that a dust mask have a close fit against the face, which caused an OSHA inspector to require that an Amish employee at a brick factory shave his beard regardless of the fact that the dust hazard in the factory was minimal.