"The Price (and Potential) of Failure" is the title of the BBC World Service's excellent economic program Global Business with Peter Day (listen to the podcast). The segment's title may put you in mind of the challenge facing the US Democratic party (more on that later), but in fact Peter Day is interviewing author Clare Lockhart, head of the Institute for State Effectiveness, about the challenges facing failed states, especially in light of the Haiti earthquake.
The Institute's diagram (click to enlarge) lists the "Ten Functions of the State," which Lockhart admits sound slightly statist/Stalinist, but are actually just attributes of good governance. The kind of things - "effective infrastructure, regulated market, investment in human capital" - that you'd like to see whether you're in Haiti or in Harrisburg. The kinds of things we Americans like to preach to Haitians, Iraqis, and Afghans - "national military controls a monopoly on the means of violence" - then balk when someone proposes gun control at home or limits to sales of military hardware abroad.
The lack of effective governance in Haiti is now answered with massive US deployment of its military, the only state institution capable of moving huge amounts of material under crisis conditions. But the US military "monopoly" on rapid disaster deployment is simply due to its success in securing unlimited state spending on military hardware and personnel. It's a choice, one that in other countries might be moderated by funding of civil defense - shown to be quietly effective in international relief efforts in Haiti.
Haitians have impressed aid workers with their stoicism in the face of utter disaster, but their stoicism is born of generations of constantly lowering expectations of their own government's capacities. Americans still expect more of their government(s), though they sometimes want to deprive their "public servants" of the means to deliver services (see California's various Propositions, and the Reagan ethos of government as the problem). At a minimum, they want governance from their government.
The United States is not yet a failed state, though many of its elected officials appear hell-bent on taking us down that road. Republican legislators apparently plan to continue to say "no" to all Democratic proposed bills over the next three years, and Democratic Representatives and Senators appear to be frozen into inaction despite their large majorities in both houses of Congress.
Failed states don't all look like Haiti or Somalia. Failure to reach your potential is still failure.