[1stranger]

> Inefficiency and lack of centralization in government may have indeed been a plan of the US government that worked at its founding, but at some point we have to re-evaluate and find a balance between decentralization and efficiency.

This one thing I've thought about. People seem to assume it's bureaucracy within government that's the issue when really it's bureaucracy among government.

At a minimum there's Federal, State, County, Municipal. Then you might have other specially formed districts for transportation or whatnot. There's no "the government". There's many governments and trying to get them all to agree on a coordinated plan for anything beyond the status quo seems next to impossible. The Bay Area is a perfect example of this. It's all one region. For all intents and purposes municipalities are pointless. It's just one giant organism. But some counties didn't want to join BART, some are more NIMBY, some don't want to construct housing, and so on.

Could anybody familiar with other better functioning countries maybe compare this system to one that is known to work better?