Brandon Savage has taken some of the good practices in object oriented application development and related them to some of the things that the government can teach you about them:

However, the ubiquity of governments around the world also gives us a unique opportunity to learn some lessons from them as developers, particularly about principles of object oriented programming. Governments serve as perfet object lessons (pun intended), demonstrating some of the good, the bad, and the ugly object-oriented practices we see.

He looks at five topics - abstraction, encapsulation, implementation of dumb objects, decoupling and the concept of "one class, one responsibility".