> A bit more American-style distrust of government would be a good thing.
Nope. The American distrust is resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy of a failing government. Your bureacracy is years behind basic things we've had in many European countries, and because there's massive distrusts there's no investment making it impossible to improve.
E.g. your tax process is a massive joke, but will it ever be fixed? Probably not soon because if nothing else, one of the only two parties claims government is by default incompetent so any money spent on it are by definition a waste.
You seem to think that Americans want a European-style society and have failed to achieve it.
We don't want it. We don't want to "fix" our tax system -- we want low taxes and lots of deductions, and that is why we have them! We want cars. We want suburbs. We don't want the government to be our mommy. This is not a failure, it is an intentional feature of the American system.
Also just remember that if we built a competent bureaucracy that enforced a nationwide ID system, it might be handed over to Donald Trump if he wins the next election, and he really could win. Every power we give the government, assuming that the government will be good, will also be given to a bad government. Sometimes it's better to refuse to give that power at all.
> We don't want it. We don't want to "fix" our tax system -- we want low taxes and lots of deductions, and that is why we have them
You can have that without having to rely on third parties you pay for to get there. How exactly does a middleman help if the point is low taxes?
> We want cars. We want suburbs
Funnily that's in direction contradiction to your previous want. Suburbs and cars are much more expensive, therefore you have to pay more for them, either in taxes to pay for the useless infrastructure, or to pay for it directly.
> Also just remember that if we built a competent bureaucracy that enforced a nationwide ID system, it might be handed over to Donald Trump if he wins the next election, and he really could win
And how exactly would someone like Trump abuse an ID system?
> Funnily that's in direction contradiction to your previous want. Suburbs and cars are much more expensive, therefore you have to pay more for them, either in taxes to pay for the useless infrastructure, or to pay for it directly.
And yet we have the infrastructure. This is not a thought experiment. I am posting this comment from a house in the suburbs with high-quality roads and utility services, which we have managed to build despite our tax system.
So where is the contradiction? Clearly it's possible to live like this, because we do now, and we have done so for a very long time.
Nope. The American distrust is resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy of a failing government. Your bureacracy is years behind basic things we've had in many European countries, and because there's massive distrusts there's no investment making it impossible to improve.
E.g. your tax process is a massive joke, but will it ever be fixed? Probably not soon because if nothing else, one of the only two parties claims government is by default incompetent so any money spent on it are by definition a waste.