The fundamental problem here is demosclerosis - any low-hanging fruit have long since been plucked. Essentially every plank in the Socialist Party Platform of 1

The fundamental problem here is demosclerosis - any low-hanging fruit have long since been plucked. Essentially every plank in the Socialist Party Platform of 1928 has already been enacted into law. Nowadays many of the issues government tries to address were caused by the previous round of government efforts to solve problems. But the longer you apply patches on top of patches, the more rickety the whole structure becomes. Eventually you reach a point where you'd be better starting over with a complete rewrite from scratch. It happens for software languages and OSes; it happens for governments too. As for what to do about it, I always liked Heinlein's suggestion (in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) that there should two houses of congress: one whose job is to pass new laws, another whose job is to repeal old ones. Without that second house, the legal code invariably becomes a cancer or an impenetrable thicket. Another idea is Seasteading. Basically there needs to be some way that brand new from-scratch ideas of how to govern can be tried out and demonstrated. The same way stodgy old companies can learn by stealing ideas (and people) from tiny new startup companies, the stodgy old governments need a way to learn by stealing ideas from tiny new startup governments. Any change that helps big old countries break up into smaller new ones or allows brand new smaller ones to come into existence would be a big help. Seasteading (forming new societies in international waters) is one such option; another is the "charter cities" movement, where existing governments are convinced to voluntarily allow other legal systems to flourish in small areas that would otherwise be in their domain.