Is no one really at fault here?
We don't get bang for our buck from the monstrosity we know as "the federal government". This is no one's fault in particular. It's not the fault of the federal employees who just want to do their jobs and live a quiet life until they collect their generous pensions. It's not the fault of members of Congress who just want to get re-elected so that they can keep their paid staff and their franking privileges. It's not even the fault of the average voter who votes his interests or votes by caprice, depending on how informed he is. None of them intended to create or maintain the behemoth.
Maybe Big Media are to blame, since they package and market the victim mentality to their audience, thus requiring the federal government to vacuum up an ever-increasing proportion of our wealth so that it can hand it out to ever-increasing numbers of official victims, keeping a little bit back to cover "administrative overhead".
Speaking from more of an engineering position myself, I think the part that is missed here is that we are responsible for what we don't do as what we do in fact do. In any engineering project, there are tradeoffs that have to be made, but there must be a purposeful effort to create the best possible design and implementation that the situation allows, and that's precisely what the elected officials and the average voter have avoided like the plague. Yes, we can blame the average politician and voter for the situation because it was they who created it. Especially the politicians because they are the ones who draft the laws that direct the growth and action of the government, but we cannot forget the role of the average voter who puts them there in the first place.
The problem began primarily in the so-called "progressive era" when pseudo-scientific, nanny state-loving posers began a series of flawed experiments with "social engineering" that haunt us to this very day. To a large degree, such people have come about as close to being legitimate engineers as a monkey randomly playing with nuts and bolts could be considered one. They tweak, they build without aim, they try to control and modify outcomes, not even planning and painstaking analyzing beforehand which is the root cause of their failure. The fact that they also have an enormous capacity to avoid introspection in their work only adds to the problem.
The behemoth we have today is in fact a kludge of the first degree. It is such a kludge that it is astounding that it even functions at all. The great problem that we are faced with today is how to make the "government work," but that is impossible with the current approach popular with most voting Americans, regardless of their beliefs. It would, realistically, take a Congress and President dedicated to fixing problems at least a decade to start sorting out the dead wood just in the United States Code while keeping an eye on judicial precedents that need legislative correction. Working through full sessions of Congress every year, with no new legislation except legislation to address problems that need genuine fixing, it would take at least a decade without radical change.
Our founding fathers gave us a constitution that would not be possible to have enacted today. It is simple, succinct, yet provides a consistent design to work with. It is fundamentally sound, whereas the work since then has been conducted by rank amateurs by comparison. These are people who would rather pile on "new features" rather than fix bugs, if you prefer the software analogy. You can't even compare them to Microsoft because even Microsoft's standards were never even remotely that low.
The mainstream media has only compounded the problem by essentially plaing the role of agent provocateur. They alternate between stirring up unrest and passionately defending the established order. They may ruthlessly attack the government in its foibles in one area, usually for ideological reasons, but be completely silent about social problems such as systematic corruption in a local government's leadership or police force. For example, where is this toothless watchdog in the aftermath of many botched drug raids that use wholly unacceptable levels of violence against simple crimes? Often silent, lest they be "irresponsible." Yet in the same breath, they may agitate the public on another issue that may have only minimal importance.
Links:
Outside the Beltway.
You are exactly right about the Progressive Era, but there's one thing that ought to be noted, and that is the the PE shatters only on a faulty view of mankind: the view that what ails Man is lack of education.
When the 19th Century Man looked around him, Science (capitalized) was still arising as the new god on the scene, and it appeared that the problems that infested America (and especially its cities) were due to ignorance, because it was the ignorant who were the problem (fine, educated men were certainly not the problem, harumph).
60 years of Pietism (in which churches tried to solve many of mankind's problems thru a social gospel) had made great inroads into dealing with many of the very real social problems caused by the poor, and the Progressives (Yankees, all, except for the odious Woodrow Wilson who was a Yankee transplant) decided that what worked voluntarily would be so much more efficient if one could only add compulsion.
Out went concerns about unchecked power and even freedom, and in came the idea that, in the words of el Presidente, "when someone hurts, the government's gotta move." Because government had been so good (I know, ask a Suthrin', but work with me here) most people didn't mind the idea of the government doing good, so long as it was done to those nogoodnicks who didn't know any better.
But it could only have been science if people were like atoms. It could only be science if people were tabla rasa, wholly creatures of environment as the Marxists claimed. But if they had been, molding them into a smoothly-functioning whole would have been no less scientific than creating amonium sulfide in a petri dish.
But people aren't atoms or chemicals, and they don't respond perfectly to stimuli. Hell, most of the time, they are not even rational, and they are always sinful, even - and maybe especially - those doing the 'science.'
And so it failed, but not because there was not plan; the plan of the ant farm has been the tyrant's dream for centuries. Rather it failed because people are too stubborn, too independent, and too willfully blind to play along.
And thank God for that. Because the dream of the Progressives, all of us whistling happy tunes in a factory, is far more North Korean than it is American.
At least the America I know and love.
And that part about them refusing to accept that humans are the way they are is the root of my disgust with such people. A scientist or engineer is expected to work with the world or tools the way they are, not how he or she would like them to be. All science did for these groups is give them an illusion of legitimacy.
The fact is that the people who want to use government in these ways, tend to ignore its original specifications. They are clueless as to why people consider them idiots, not engineers. They've twisted the system far beyond its useful limits, and all the while they don't even understand why it's not working anymore.