[AIMunchkin]

Well yes it is actually, by collecting more data, you are doing a better job marginalizing the distribution of government corruption and waste across the planet. And that can make a seemingly bad thing turn out to actually be relatively good and vice versa.

Or, to quote some famous dead dude: "The World Is a Book and Those Who Do Not Travel Read Only One Page" - St Augustine

Or, to quote Anthony Bourdain himself: “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.”

[tcfunk]

But I'm not talking about relative goodness or badness.

If I say "boy I'm tired today, I only slept 4 hours" and you say "you're tired? I didn't sleep at all!", your being more tired doesn't make me any less tired.

In the same regard, other governments doing a much worse job than the US government doesn't mean that the US government is doing the best job that it can.

[AIMunchkin]

Sure, that's possibly true. But if the ensemble of governments planetwide are mostly doing worse than the US(1), then you need to consider it might not be humanly possible to do much better even if it's obvious how to do better theoretically.

But, by all means, go get some billionaire to buy you an island or build one for you to test out your ideal black spherical cow ideas for government. The US itself was once a crazy experiment in cutting edge governing theory itself.

(1) We're not the best, but we are in the top 10% here, no? But I note that everyone who beats us has much smaller populations to satisfy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report