Gasoline engines (like the ones in a car) will only ever have at maximum 30% thermal efficiency. That means for every dollar you spend, 70 cents of your dollar

Gasoline engines (like the ones in a car) will only ever have at maximum 30% thermal efficiency. That means for every dollar you spend, 70 cents of your dollar is doing nothing. However despite how inefficient an engine is, academia, industry and the military pout millions of dollars every year to increase modern engines efficiencies by .1%. So is inefficient bad? Well its wasteful and we have worked very hard to reduce that waste, but it will never be physically more than 30%. However I would call a modern lamborghini engine "bad". With the tools and knowledge humans have at the moment lamborghini has managed to produce an amazing engine. Same goes for the government. Yes there are holes and I'd imagine there are people working to fix these holes. But is the government today objectively bad? Are we blindly driving ourselves to wall. I think its hard to say. Its easy to say that the government should do x, y, z and all our problems would be solved, but that is easier said than done. Modern human society is exceedingly complex. So to say the government is "bad" would require more knowledge on modern human society that is currently even possibly, just like to say if an engine is bad you would need to be an expert on engines. However just like I can say 70% of an engines energy is wasted on heat and is therefor inefficient, the government is also inefficient in a similar matter, without at all being "bad"