It's funny. I almost mentioned Google -- both as a good example and a bad one. Just compare and contrast the organization over time.
From the systems standpoint, Google is great. People continue to think that if we just got the right people -- smart, college-educated, libertarians, whatever -- that systems wouldn't ossify. But until you've seen a group of brilliant people self-create themselves a living hell, and realize that each person was acting in a reasonable, intelligent fashion, it's tough to really grok that. We naturally want to assign blame. It prevents us from doing the meta thinking necessary. One of the reasons democracies work so well is that we can easily assign personal blame to a politician, then peacefully get rid of him and bring somebody else in. There's a tremendously useful social mechanism at work.
I think there's a separate discussion about what you want government to do for you. I've gotten to the point where after listening to so many idealists on both the left and right I just gave up: whatever your social goals, that's fine. I just want an acknowledgement that you are aware of he trade-offs you are creating. I prefer lots of little, agile, self-optimizing systems. I think over time people could probably reach many of the social goals they have. But to do so you need to have the right tools. You'll never get from point A to point B trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer.
As an example a lot of us can relate to, there are a lot of technology teams with a huge amount of personal freedom that have all sorts of benefits and create vast amounts of value. We got that way by millions of little failures from which we harvest some generic best practices that then we pick up, try, and adapt one bit at a time for that particular situation. But there are even more folks, hundreds of thousands of people, living a death march because they tried to create huge systems with lots of little rules and processes. These huge systems never spring forth fully-formed from the head of Zeus. When you really start looking at them, it's a story of incrementalism and tough trade-offs. Everybody has a little architecture astronaut inside of them. Maybe not a lot, but enough to cumulatively screw things up given enough scale and time. If anything, smart people are the worst at this. They can even understand my points and try as hard as they can not to do it -- and still do it. Hominids are funny creatures.