Do you send your children to private school, dread interactions with government agencies or prefer to buy a new house rather than get a building permit to renovate your existing one? If you answered yes to any of these questions, or even empathized with them, Philip Howard is the writer for you.

Over almost three decades, Howard has written more than half a dozen books surrounding the theme that common sense is being replaced by excessive regulation, which leads to under- or non-performing governments. His latest book, “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions,” introduces the idea that some groups benefit from government under-performance even at a cost of increasing public frustration.

Howard is a lawyer, who believes that there are too many lawyers, and a student of government, especially regulation, who believes there is too much of both and that it is largely misdirected.

To his great credit, he has focused on a significant problem that is highly resistant to solutions. Why is government so inefficient especially in contrast to the private sector?

His new book explores the relationships among government employees, the unions that represent them, the elected officials that hire them (and are charged with managing them), and the public that has learned to dread the process of any interaction with those who theoretically serve them.

Wondering about the title are you?

Though it appears Mitch Ohnstad, a reporter, once asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, Sutton denies replying “because that was where the money was.” That saddens me because, for years, I liked to follow up with, “apparently Sutton had never heard of governments.”

Philip Howard has learned what Sutton had not. Governments are where the money is, and they are easily fleeced.

There is an important difference, however. Sutton took the money without rendering the banks themselves dysfunctional. The unions both take the money and stop the governmental units from functioning.

Here, it is useful to understand a distinction. Public employees themselves are not the same as the unions that represent them, and thus need to be considered separately.

Most teachers want to teach, and most firefighters want to save lives. The entity that wants to bargain for the teachers and for the firefighters wants to collect dues that it will then use to win elections both through contributions and organizational efforts. Entirely different motivations.

Each year, the union must provide each member with slightly more benefit than the cost of the union dues. Each year those benefits are stacked on top of those from the years before. Like a game of Jenga, many governmental units in the United States are in danger of toppling.

Sometimes the benefits are work rules requiring more employees to do the same job. Sometimes they are pay increases. The most pernicious are retirement benefits that either shorten careers or bloat monthly retirement packages. These are less visible to the public, but they are bankrupting cities and towns.

The process is both successful and incredibly inefficient. Union dues represent a tiny fraction of municipal employee costs in terms of stultifying work rules, bloated salaries, healthcare costs and retirement benefits, but the dues support sufficient political contributions to enable the unions to elect public officials beholden to them for their support – in essence to elect their bosses.

Few doubt that unions can organize company workers. If they go too far, the companies will go bust or move their operations away from the unionized locations. Governments, on the other hand, can do neither. Worse, governments are not spending their own money because governments have no money of their own. All they have is taxpayer money. What is the motivation of a public official to drive a hard bargain with actual or potential campaign workers and contributors?

Howard argues that elected officials cannot bargain away their authority without unconstitutionally delegating it to unelected officials.

“But most of the choices needed for effective governance have been disabled by union controls. Instead, unions have imposed restrictions and protocols that presume that there is ‘one correct way’ to deliver public services and that any deviation requires union approval.

Union disempowerment of daily management choices is not a legitimate public structure but a repudiation of the constitutional and moral imperatives of democratic governance. Although the extent of the interference varies somewhat by jurisdiction, public employee unions have disabled democratic governance in five principle ways. Public employee unions have:

1) Severed the links of accountability;

2) Rendered government substantially unmanageable with detailed rules and veto powers;

3) Made government unaffordable with opaque benefit packages and compensation manipulations;

4) Changed public policies to the harm of the public good; and,

5) Entrenched these abuses and made reform practically impossible, through organized political power.”

He would like to see these abuses challenged on constitutional grounds. Likely, this would require litigation culminating in a Supreme Court decision and presumably, as with other constitutional changes, this would require years of effort. Alternatively, a significant public awareness campaign might be required to convince taxpayers (voters) of what is being done to them.

Failing either of those, taxpayers will move out of profligate jurisdictions and some units of government will go bankrupt (states cannot do so). We are seeing the former in California and we saw the latter in Detroit. Neither is a pretty picture.

The Constitutionality argument might seem creative or novel, but, in the past, other creative or novel arguments have come to seem routine upon being absorbed.

One way or another, one hopes there will be less Willie Suttons seeking to fleece the public and bankrupt their cities and towns in inefficient ways that serve only their own interests.