Sublime

At every level of responsibility, Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible.

An unlimited rate of change makes lawful community meaningless. Law is based on the retrospective judgment of peers about circumstances that occur ordinarily and are likely to occur again. If the rate of change which affects all circumstances accelerates beyond some point, such judgments cease to be valid. Lawful society breaks down.

Indeed, I will argue that liberty in the broad sense requires judges and officials, when applying legal principles, to assert norms of reasonableness. Otherwise, self-interested people will use law to claim almost anything.

Starting in the 1960s, the social and legal institutions of America were remade to try to eliminate unfair choices by people in positions of responsibility. The new legal structures reflected a deep distrust of human authority in even its more benign forms—a teacher’s authority in the classroom, or a manager’s judgments about who’s doing the job, o

People must have “everyday freedom,” by which I mean the individual authority, at every level of society and every level of responsibility, to act as they feel appropriate, constrained only by the boundaries of law and by norms set by the employer or other institution.

fixation on the executive

Americans didn’t abandon our belief in individual responsibility. It was taken away from us by a post 1960s legal framework that, with the best of intentions, made people squirm through the eye of a legal needle before taking responsibility.