The tempting efficiency of infant capitalism was its decentralized and small scale structure. You can’t govern a country top-down, and letting the people at the bottom do their own work is most efficient.
But now some companies are larger than most countries and we are back to where we started… but without transparency and democratic regulations.
I think we need better ways to deal with large systems and complexity.
There's the Chinese saying "Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away". The idea being that low level bureaucrats are actually the ones running the show. Effectively, that's where China and the CCP sit today.
However, that has similar issues to the ones I described above. Top down mandates, the low level feigns to appease them, but marginal progress is actually made. Instead of expanding the timelines as I spoke about, in the CCP(/Soviet) case, the actual accomplishments are made up to keep "going forward". Think of all the ineffective building done to meet bullshit quotas in the China currently. It harkens back to the Soviet era.
This is identical to the idea of small scale teams working on systems they completely understand and own. This is where you have the most productive teams and it is the same in terms of bureaucracy. And the job of an architect is not to create "a beautiful system", but to lower the complexity of the overall system.
I think the topic of complexity and large systems is one of the defining ones of our time. Similar to entropy, you start with a low-state system where you can generate energy from putting entropy into the system. But with a higher state of entropy, your energy gains decrease.
We act like you can just pure more and more onto the same pile, but eventually, everything stagnates. And only collapse can create a blank slate.
It seems like the real problem is finding a way to address that.
We've seen this play out over and over. Take something like building and zoning codes. They start out doing something worthwhile, like requiring fire exits. But soon you have a bureaucracy micromanaging everything, imposing minimum parking requirements even on a building sitting on top of a subway stop, imposing minimum lot sizes or density restrictions, requiring unnecessarily costly or labor-intensive construction methods at the behest of device makers or trade unions, etc.
What you need is a mechanism, something like checks and balances or a challenge process that allows any rule to be repealed if it doesn't still have enough votes to pass in every branch, to inhibit that process of ossification and corruption and clear out the cruft accumulated by its past operation.
The issue is that it's not perfect, and it's never going to be perfect, so you're occasionally going to have things get past the gauntlet and make it into law when they shouldn't. And over time those things accumulate.
So what you need is a functioning process for clearing out the cruft even once it's already there. Something like, make it much easier to repeal rules than enact them.
I agree in the sense that some way of "caretaking" is absolutely necessary. Like in a badly maintained IT-system, many managers think you can just keep piling stuff ontop of the old system and you can just happily going forward forever. But of course that is a terrible misunderstanding.
In an IT-system, you either restart from scratch or start a refactor. I think these are the only options here either. This needs talent and money, something the public services have been massively drained of. You can't make a system more lean and efficient by cutting costs, you mot make investments. If you involve Civil Servants, they will tell you exactly what kind of issues they are facing each day processing official documents.
Ideally, you'd start a digital transformation of public services and also streamline the legal cruft at the same time. But the problem is that much of this "cruft" is there on purpose because somebody profits. Such as the impossible Zoning Rules in California to prohibit any additional housing space... because that would make housing more affordable and lower their prices.
Sadly culture in the US is diluted into believing that profit motive is a silver bullet that fixes all problems. And many are raised in religions that teach one to deny critical thinking, embrace appeals to authority, and love confirmation bias.
Ergo, the idea that the market handles their duties more efficiently is a lie. It has nothing to do with corporate vs state owned enterprise, but a matter of complexity.