The US government is a massive bureaucracy, which is bad for efficiency, but they also control the bureaucracy, which gives them an advantage in cutting through red tape, and they can get an economy of scale that an individual can't.
I don't believe this especially. We've replaced a large amount of our work with a huge amount of bureaucracy. There's so much of it that it feels like I'm being overwhelmed by just it some days.
> Is it really the case that there's an argument that this can't work in the US because there are more people?
The simplest such argument would be that there are diseconomies of scale - it's conceivable that the bigger you make a bureaucracy the less responsive/effective/efficient it gets. That certainly could be true - whether it actually is is an empirical question.
Another possibility is that our federal system is ill-suited to the task. There's nothing really preventing individual US states from providing such services. And if most states haven't done so thus far - and in the few that have tried, it hasn't worked out very well - there might be reasons for that which we should try to understand.
If you can't imagine that a bureaucracy as large as the united states government might not have competing interests within... I'm not sure I can help you.
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