There Are 89,004 Local Governments in the United States (2012)

Discussions about "the government" often treat it as a monolithic entity. This isn't the case, and within the United States there are nearly 90,000 individual governmental units (roughly on per 3,300 adults). Nearly 7,000 of those are within Illinois alone.

I find this has interesting implications when discussion heads toward "what if we supported X through the government", and the inevitable objection that handing "the government" too much power would lead to excessive concentration. The reality is that distributed governmental support might well be diverse and reasonably competitive.

By contrast, there are roughly 2,200 companies listed on the NYSE, with another 3,400 at the Nasdaq, a substantial portion of which are foreign:

<https://www.statista.com/statistics/1277216/nyse-nasdaq-comp...>

I am not a fan of this endless proliferation. I thought it was a cool idea when I was younger, about several decades later I view the sheer abundance of governing bodies, in a perversion of Justice Brandeis' famous phrase, as meth labs of democracy.

This doesn’t include the apparently over 350,000 Home Owner Associations in the USA that are effectively another layer of local government with the powers to tax and regulate like other special districts