Post-WWII USA was both a period of big government and tremendous economic growth.
The government is just people deciding to come together and delegate power. It’s not something separate from people. Why can’t the “human spirit moving things forward” express itself through the public sector?
Power concentrates to a few. Sometimes very few, as in North Korea. Sometimes a slightly broader few, as in America. But it's always a few. The rest are acted upon by government.
Also it's pretty jokey to say that government is people delegating power. The only reason it needs to be delegated is because it was seized in the first place - by government!
The classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian “revolution” against what we might call the Old Order—the ancien régime which had dominated its subjects for centuries. This regime had, in the early modern period beginning in the sixteenth century, imposed an absolute central State and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older, restrictive web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions.
The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes, and monopoly privileges to produce and sell conferred by central (and local) governments upon their favorite producers. This alliance of the new bureaucratic, war-making central State with privileged merchants—an alliance to be called "mercantilism" by later historians—and with a class of ruling feudal landlords constituted the Old Order against which the new movement of classical liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
-- For a New Liberty / by Murray N. Rothbard
Today we have a much worse alliance of government and privileged monopolies, corporatism. The few have decided that the companies are "responsible" for doing the decisions for us. Effectively removing any personal freedom the people might have, freedoms that most countries had in their constitutions for centuries are today being removed by government-backed corporations, as-if they don't need to exist at all.
I forgot about the famously non-existent ancient Egyptian and modern Chinese governments.
We do know about the free economic zones in modern China, which had very very limited government. So these only reinforce my point.
It has been called the first command economy [1][2].
[1] https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-c...
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=318&v=DiG0LomEptE&...
Arguably it was the new power blocks associated with industry that destabilized Tsarist Russia, not that WWI helped.
The FPTP system essentially means that elections are decided by a small number of people living in marginal seats, that usually straddle poor urban and wealthy rural areas and so that is who (successful) politician's messages and policies are targeted at. It's also how you get the weird situation that on a lot of social and economic issues both major political parties are often to the right of the public.
Add to that the dominance of the Oxbridge PPE brigade in both parties, and you end up with them all drawing on a small, outdated set of policy options (basically what they were taught as undergrads), that don't really work in the modern world.
Finally we still have a monarch, and it turns out the last one (God bless 'er) had a large number of kaws modified in her and her family's favour.
So yeah. Sclerotic socio polotical system