Originally Posted by Prime Junta
I can.

The "grassroots" — that is, everything up to the municipal and in many cases the state level — actually works rather well in the US. The real problems are at the federal level — that's where the closed political elite, the out-of-control government programs, the pork-barrel politics, and the corrupt lobbies are. All you have to do to solve them is to dissolve the union. ;-)

Or change the nature of a man…

I agree that smaller is easier in terms of change—for good or ill. A large part of the problem is the hugeness of the country(and thus the infrastructure) the salad bowl effect of recent immigration/class polarization, and the enormity of overcoming the inertia of the past.

AFA grassroots functionality, having been a municipal employee for most of my life in small cities up to a fairly large one, I do agree up to a point. The problem is that the larger government(or possibly anything else) becomes, the more mediocrity, inefficiency and apathy intrude. I worked for a small city with big budget problems, but it was actually less of a nightmare in terms of accomplishing tasks than a large city with an almost unlimited budget. This problem is just exacerbated at the federal level and carried to the nth degree of inefficiency by what amounts to a sinecure for the self-serving careerists there employed. So the level of grass roots functionality depends heavily on how layered a bureaucracy you're dealing with. In terms of fiscal responsibility, many municipalities function just like the feds with far too little accountability, the delusive "lowest bid" system and strangling unionization.