Philip Howard – Getting Unions Out of Government

The Glenn Show

Glenn Loury

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2023

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

0:00 Philip’s early work on post-nuclear war recovery

2:26 Philip’s skepticism toward the role of lawyers in the US

4:34 What’s wrong with the EPA, OSHA, and the EEOC?

6:59 How to ensure worker safety without “4,000 rules”

8:07 Why the US spends so much on healthcare

11:32 Philip: We’ve degenerated into a culture of distrust

14:58 The origins of American distrust

18:42 Re-instilling trust

21:38 The problems of national security and public health

26:57 Are public employee unions constitutional?

39:35 Market constraints don’t hold for government employees

34:55 Do public sector workers need protection from exploitation?

39:22 Philip: “Public service is repellant to good candidates”

40:58 A short history of the civil service

46:49 Is Philip inveighing against the Democratic Party and the labor movement at large?

53:12 Philip: Police unions prevent accountability, too

56:08 The necessity of a constitutional solution to public unions

1:00:58 Philip: The political organizing of public unions harms the public

1:04:46 Would the current Supreme Court be receptive to Philip’s case?

Recorded October 27, 2023

Links and Readings

Philip’s book, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America

Philip’s book, Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America

Philip’s latest book, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions

Edward Banfield’s book, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society

Robert Putnam’s book, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy

Philip’s forthcoming book, Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Glenn Show is brought to you by the Manhattan Institute.
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0:40.9	Woodson Center. Thank you.
0:46.2	Hello there, everybody.
0:47.0	This is Glenn Lowry.
0:48.2	You've tuned into the Glenn Show.
0:51.0	I'm a professor of economics at Brown University and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, which sponsors the Glen Show and my guest this week is Philip K Howard, who is a distinguished lawyer and writer about American public policy with books such as the
1:06.9	death of common sense, life without lawyers, and most recently not accountable rethinking the constitutionality of public employee unions.
1:19.9	So welcome to Philip.
1:24.0	I'm a huge fan of your work.
1:27.2	Oh, well that's very kind of you to say.
1:29.6	You tell me you're an economist as well as a lawyer. How did that come to be?
1:34.0	Well, I don't have a degree, but when I was, I mean I have an undergraduate degree, but I was, when I was in
1:41.2	college I worked as a gopher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for
1:45.2	Eugene Vigner, who is a Nobel Prize winning physicist Manhattan Project person.
1:51.0	And my job, I worked in a Civil Defense Group, my job was to do analysis, various analyses
1:58.0	on post-nuclear War recovery, including publishing some studies on post-nuclear War economic recovery.
2:07.0	And so it was all economics. I was working with economists and they were my co-authors,
	...

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