Honest question: given what you know about politics in Norway, do you personally believe Norway’s complexity reduction through agreement on common standards can scale to a country the size of the US?
Could 60 Norways mutually agree on common standards?
Maybe they’ve figured out something we in the US haven’t.
This is not true if Norway is anything like Germany. A few years ago the German government commissioned a study on the public's influence on policy.[0] It concluded decisively that political decision making aligned the closest with the wants of the wealthiest while there was even a negative trend with regards to the poorest in that policies favored by a majority of them were especially unlikely to be enacted. Europe isn't as insane as the US in that regard but that's not a high standard.
[0]: https://www.bmas.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/PDF-Publikatione...
There's zero chance of this being true, even despite strict campaign contribution regulations. Arguably, it makes buying politicans more effective because corrupt people can easily skirt the rules "i.e. getting groups of people to donate on your behalf", etc.
Of course corrupt people will always try to skirt the rules and rig the game in their favour, so the harder you can make it the better. And strict campaign contribution rules are definitely better than not having them there, but to suggest that no Norwegian poltiicans are bought is absurd to the point of naivete.
Norway as many other Nordic countries have high taxation levels and many government employees, but this is primarily because education and health care and a lot of child care is run by the government. It does not imply a larger bureaucracy.
However this does not stop us from having efficient and simple government. We have much simpler tax code than the US e.g. Despite health care being public, our health care bureaucracy, regulations and rules are much simpler.
You actually need some regulations to stop complex regulations from creeping in. E.g. we have strict rules regarding political advertisement and campaign contributions which means money is not an important thing in Norwegian politics. Consequently politicians are not bought and we have much less of this business initiated regulations and red tape that the US has.
Yet we have stronger regulations with respect to workers rights, unions, environment etc. But that does not mean it is more complex.
Having a "bigger government" does not necessarily mean a more complex one. In fact it often reduces complexity by setting more common standards.