[rogerv]

I agree with what you have said, but not the conclusion you draw from it. We can do better than muddle along; that is why we have r&d. Modern medicine is much better than 19th century medicine because we have actively and aggressively sought better surgical technology and better drug therapies. And modern medicine would have been impossible without the studies in anatomy during the renaissance and breakthroughs in chemistry in the 19th century.

[TKDietz]

Even modern medicine causes unintended consequences though. And with medicine, quantitative analysis can be used in a laboratory setting. With social engineering there are far many more variables that can come into play that can't be ferreted out in a laboratory setting. The problems cased can take years and years or even generations to manifest themselves and by then it's often to late to change things back to the way they were.

We need government to try to keep things fair and to protect us from each other and external forces. But we need to understand governments limitations. Government can't do everything, and the more they do the more they are likely to screw up. Governments are inherently inefficient and they are prone to corruption. These are facts you need to acknowledge. Our forefathers recognized this and that's why they drafted the Constitution to limit the power and scope of government, and included checks and balances to limit the power of each branch of government so none got too powerful.

I for one believe that our federal government in particular has already gotten too big and too powerful contrary to the intent of our forefathers. I don't see this as a good thing. I don't see them making great strides improving the lives of the people. In fact I see them doing the opposite in many ways. I do not have confidence that they could accomplish the things you believe them capable of.

Part of the "problem" is that we are a democracy. I used the quotation marks because I don't really look at it as a problem, but it is a major factor in our governments inability to be efficient. A totalitarian dictatorship could be streamlined and run much more efficiently, but then we are at the mercy of our leaders who may not have our best interests at heart. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. With a democracy, we are always going to have all of the competing interests struggling and fighting in government to do the things necessary to please their constituency and those who finance their political campaigns. This is just a fact of life in a democratic nation. It will never be a particularly efficient form of government, but it is preferable to the alternatives for people who wish to be free and who wish to have at least some control over those who govern them.

[oldbrowser]

Many thousands were killed and maimed as we muddled through
our discoveries of the last few centuries. That worked out
to our advantage because there are many millions of us.
We only have a dozen or so societies and most of them do not
function independently. It would be foolhardy to attempt major changes with the hope that there might be something better out there.
Our world is in fact a laboratory where different theories
are advanced and tested. As these theories are proven they
are accepted by different cultures. Kind of like Darwin's
theory of evolution.
Certainly the evolutionary approach is a slow piecemeal approach, but it is for a reason, the stakes are enormous.
For every Greek culture that comes around we have a hundred
failed cultures that sounded good on paper.