Simple Rules for a Complex World.

• Author: McMenamin, Michael

By Richard Epstein, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 361 pages, $35.00

You remember Richard Epstein. He's the guy who wrote Takings, the book on compensation for government regulation of private property that Sen. Joseph Biden held up for the cameras during Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. Biden made it clear that Thomas's having read or, worse yet, having been swayed by that scandalous tome would have done more to disqualify him in Biden's eyes than being the consumer of hard-core pornography implicit in Anita Hill's testimony.

Biden was right. If Thomas has been influenced by Epstein--and some of his decisions on the High Court are eloquent evidence that he has been--then Biden and all other regulatory liberals are in for a tough 30 years (roughly how long Thomas intends to serve on the Supreme Court). Epstein's new book, Simple Rules for a Complex World, will give them even more cause to be afraid. Very afraid.

Epstein literally wants a revolution in the American legal system, turning it away from its heavy emphasis on government regulation as the solution for most social ills. He advocates a return to a simplified and modified version of the common law--judicial decisions applying "a set of simple rules capable of handling the most complex set of social relations imaginable, whether in the United States or anywhere else." In the wrong hands--say legislators or judges--this book could make Takings look positively soft-core.

Here's where Epstein comes from: "[I] think that permanence and stability are the cardinal virtues of the legal rules that make private innovation and public progress possible. To my mind there is no doubt that a legal regime that embraces private property and freedom of contract is the only one that in practice can offer that permanence and stability....

"In reaching this conclusion, I have been heavily influenced by the work of Friedrich Hayek....Hayek's major target was central planning...the question of whether government officials could ever acquire the information routinely imparted by prices to organize product and labor markets. Today there is little general sentiment...in favor of the collective ownership of the means of production....Instead the newer pattern is to preach the virtue of markets in the abstract, and then to insist that government regulation of private enterprises is necessary to correct the legion of supposed market failures that arise in complex market institutions....

"[T]his book [ids a reply to the argument that regulation is normally desirable even in circumstances where government ownership of the means of production is not. In my view, there is no sharp dichotomy between government...