Do you have anything to back that claim up? I have quite a few friends who go on rants about government inefficiency and would be nice to have some hard data.
I always just resort to asking: what's a more laissez faire country that you'd actually want to live in? is their approach scalable and sustainable?
The US is often in the top 20 for metrics like CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX 2012 http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/ and historically corruption was even more of an issue. Just think back to things like the Magna Carta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta. Rome, was considered the height of civilization in there day and yet corruption was rampant and rulers would have people killed on a whim etc. Not to mention extremes like the Inca civilization practiced mass ritual human sacrifice.
Even our somewhat tarnished free speech is worlds better than most areas.
Not to mention having the #1 most powerful military of all time. People look down on the space program as we have not landed on the moon in a while, but we still send more probes than anyone else. Ditto for infrastructure, there is little point to replacing infrastructure early so while Japan spends more on infrastructure that's not a good sign.
PS: I think people really have the mindset that we should be #1 in all things forgetting that there are almost 200 other countries out there.
Uh, no. The U.S. placed 17th out of 50 countries in the developed world. As the other 145 countries in the world weren't part of the study, there's no saying where the US would have placed if the whole world were studied. Among the studied countries, the US wasn't in the 90th percentile, or even the top third.
As to the non industrialized countries yes we beat zimbabwe etc. Often studies only compare industrialized nations as doing otherwise is a waste of time.