> If people in America just stopped to look around at how other countries do things they'd be doubly as well run. Most parts of Europe, Japan, Canada, and many other places are well run and have a great deal of governmental involvement.

One big problem with this approach is that it basically pretends that the American citizenry is interchangeable with those of the countries you mentioned. It's not. Identity politics problems, legacies of slavery and of the colonial / revolutionary mindset are still big issues.

The people of Detroit and of Baltimore and of other ruined American cities are not the same as the people of Norway or of Japan. The solutions that work in high-intelligence, high-trust, coherent communities with strong traditions of work ethic won't work in every environment.

You want to use PHP as a metaphor? I'll use NFSv3/NIS. They're simple to run and work great on a small network where you trust everyone completely. The moment there's a malicious party at work they become hopeless and you need to either put in incredible amounts of work to try to lock them down, or switch to a much more restrictive, secure-by-default option.