One thing I’ve long said social planners are completely ignorant of is an aspect of the law of diminishing returns that I call the Pilot Program Effect.
Pilot Programs are different from large bureaucracies in any number of ways such as they still have flexible organization, their people are motivated and often more competent than average, and there is a big difference between doing something and doing nothing ... which is to say the law of diminishing returns hasn’t kicked in yet. There are more but those three are enough.
Essentially Pilot programs cause unrealistic expectations and I would argue that their structural advantages as mentioned above can overcome some aspects of really stupid ideas that have been tried and it quite probably takes monumental incompetence or mendacity to get a well conceived pilot program to actually fail (such as the Chicago Annenburg Challenge under Obama and Ayers and friends).
But once out of the pilot program the gloves come off.
A related idea is that bigger systems are inherently more able to be hidebound and inflexible, to be wasteful, be it the government a rich State with lots of people compared to a smaller State or all of the several States combined compared toany given State. This should argue for keeping most government as local as possible ... which is of course anathema to Leftists who these days are bucking for even international governance!