Most industrialized countries in northern or western Europe have most government systems that are an order of magnitude less absurd than the American equivalents.

You just narrowed your claim down to a very small group of nations in the entire world.

It's like when people say: Europe is so much better at xyz. When what they mean is: Finland is amazing, you know, tiny little 5m person Finland, with very little diversity and a strongly exclusionary (just try immigrating into it as a low-skill poor person) homogeneous culture, it's amazing. The same goes for much of affluent Europe: it's hyper exclusionary, elitist, and often extraordinarily racist against outsiders.

Meanwhile the US is the world's largest economy, has welcomed tens of millions of poor people from the third world over the past 40 years (and that door is still very much open), has the third largest population and is hyper diverse compared to nearly all peers in Europe. Even Canada is drastically less diverse than the US. It's far easier to manage a nation that consists of an overwhelmingly dominant single culture, there are far fewer competing interests or complexities.

A country as large and complex as the US, with that much diversity, and that many layers of government to manage it all (federal, state, local; the US state government system is gigantic in its own right), is going to be a very messy machine. There's no scenario where that isn't going to be the case, no matter where it exists.

The only reasonable comparison regardless, due to the scale, is the US to Europe broadly. The US does just fine on that comparison. Shall we talk about how nice Western Russia is? How about the last 20-30 years of Greek and Italian history? Or is the premise to only refer to the good outcomes of Europe?

France, one of the most emblematic Western European countries, has a proliferation of 49-employee companies because of a boatload of regulations that kicks in starting employee number 50. Some estimates see almost two and a half times as many companies with exactly 49 employees than with exactly 50. Now that's pretty absurd!

I'm a recent immigrant to the UK from the US, and by way of example, I was really looking forward to being out of the American medical system. Then I discovered that the way you make a doctor's appointment over here is that you log into their website or call them at exactly 8am and hope you beat out the other people also trying to get an appointment for that day. Of course, the appointment will likely be just a phone call as triage, and then they'll sort out an in-person appointment -- but good luck if you can't use your phone at work for whatever reason!

What I'm saying here is: Until you've lived in a country, you probably don't know the absurdities of their own system.