I'm not going to claim that undergraduate education in the US is perfect or anything, but we do have a world class education system which rivals or bests all other nations'. And on top of that, i would say that my publicly subsidized education was just as good if not better than many private educational experiences, and it was a whole hell of a lot cheaper.

And i grew up in a city with one of the best public library systems in the country. You'll still notice that it was populated with plenty of Barnes & Nobels and Borders book stores.

Oh, and i'll note that the Ambassador Bridge, the Blue Water Bridge and basically any bridge in and out of Ontario to the US are privately owned toll bridges, which charge you to travel over them.

[edited to remove pointless but cathartic ad hominem]

We're in the late phase of step 8 for undergraduate education. Let me know in 10 years if you still think everything's peachy with it. The signs of strain are already there if you know where to look, but I'm pretty sure by 2020 you won't be able to pretend otherwise. Probably by 2015. Possibly by this time next year. (Personally I'm thinking that barring a major economic turnaround we see a distinct drop in college enrollment next year.)

You also don't know which is cheaper, public education or private. You know that in a government-subsidized environment, public was cheaper to you than private, but what a freaking surprise, when you pay for public school whether you attend or not, then must pay for the private school on top of that. Of course X + Y > X... but school's only free if you never pay local taxes.

The government is very adept at pointing out what handouts people are getting and hiding how much its actually costing them. And it seems to work on plenty of people.

Libraries and bookstores are different things. You may not see many private lending libraries outside of universities where there are public ones, but they used to flourish.

God help us. You are so right.

So how come it works fine in other countries?

What works fine? How do you define "fine"? The whole world looks very pretty from space.

But regardless of your answers, its clear to me that many places have governments that are better at pursuing the their national interest, at least in some areas.

Well, one reason is many other countries have proportional representation. At least when its rationally implemented. In PR countries, people can actually choose to be represented by someone that agrees with their values. And if that person or party sells out, that party will lose support or the party members will pick a different candidate next time that will do what they want.

In the US, elections are winner-take-all. So representatives don't have to align their behavior with the beliefs of their supporters; they just have to convince the most people that they are better than the other options. It becomes a con job.

Candidates must tell different things, lie even, to get the most votes or they get no power at all. An expensive process that candidates in a multi-party system don't really have to do because the people pick their party by their values and the membership of the party know their own people. They don't have to struggle to get ALL the power or none; they get their share.

So what you get in the legislature in PR countries are groups that more closely represent the different groups in society. Some want more government, some want less. But in the US system, you just get people who want more power for themselves and have no incentives to stick to any set of values and many dollars given to them to go along with all of the piranhas that abuse our system.

And it probably will not change until the system hits a wall where all of the tricks and cheats have been exhausted and we are finally forced to live within our means.

I should really have been more precise with the question. I meant that governments provide functional services in many countries, without the cost-spirals described in the parent. To me government is just, "we'll get you out of the prisoner's dilemma by providing a framework for forced cooperation, but we'll also misalign incentives in a way that introduces some inefficiencies". In many countries, this trade-off is often good value --- but in the US, something always seems to go wrong. That's what I didn't understand.

For instance, in my country, Australia, our government provides interest-at-inflation loans to all students for undergraduate degrees. The loans are repaid via income tax, and repayments only begin once your income exceeds a certain threshold. Almost nobody defaults, since the payments are just subtracted from your paycheque before it even gets to you, just like your income tax. At the same time the repayments are calculated to never be too onerous, and you're only ever paying the principle. I don't know what stops universities from inflating their fees --- presumably the government has guidelines for costs of courses eligible for these loans. A typical 3 year arts degree might cost about $30k. The good universities are about on par with the good US state schools in rankings. We don't have any universities equivalent in quality to the top tier US schools. I believe this is a sane and sustainable system. Our single payer health care system isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than the USA's system.

It's possible that it does come down to the subtleties of our electoral systems. It seems a little unintuitive to me, since folks here do mostly make their choice between the two major parties and pull for whichever they like. On the other hand we do have single transferable vote for our senate, which always elects some independents who represent their constituents. We also have compulsory voting, so you can't pull any shenanigans to disenfranchise people or discourage them from voting.

Even if the electoral system is rational, its still possible to make bad choices. But bad choices are a lot more likely with our system, more bad than we'd have in a rational system.

I don't particularly care how much government you have in Austria, but that's really none of my business. If people are unhappy with it, they can change it.

The things our government does badly do much more damage to us and to the world and we have little ability to change it.

Your initial criticism said "The pattern with the government is the same from situation to situation". The implications of that are very different if the root problem is that your country doesn't have a functional democracy electing that government. Instead of saying "we need smaller government in America", perhaps you ought to be arguing "we need democracy in America".

That's why you ought to care how much government we have in Australia, and how much government they have in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, etc. The countries of the world form a natural experiment that provides some evidence about the effects of certain policies. This evidence points against the "big government always bad" hypothesis.