A former top adviser to British prime minister David Cameron has some interesting ideas about the growth of the American bureaucratic state. Morgan Chalfant of the Washington Free Beacon shares those ideas.

Steve Hilton, former senior adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron, is not buying the appeal of massive, expensive federal programs aimed at solving poverty and other critical challenges facing the United States and the world.

Hilton, an architect of the British Conservative Party’s return to power before he resettled in the United States, favors more localized, personal solutions to our nation’s problems like those he says he helped implement while serving as Cameron’s aide.

Hilton has been immersed in American politics since moving to California four years ago with his wife and family. Hilton teaches at Stanford University and runs Crowdpac, a two-year-old start-up aimed to make it easier for regular people to learn about and support politicians and run for office themselves.

During a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Free Beacon, Hilton made the argument against top-down, expensive policy initiatives developed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), President Obama, and others, arguing that big government solutions don’t consider specific hurdles facing individual citizens.

“The free college [proposal] is a great example of ‘inhuman’ policy thinking because it assumes that the problem is just purely economics, that the reason people drop out or don’t go to college is because of the money,” Hilton, who was in Washington promoting the newly-released U.S version of his book More Human, explained. “And actually the real evidence from real people’s lives shows that’s not the case. It’s also a lot more complex than that.”

While Sanders’ plan to make college tuition free has enthused his coalition of grassroots supporters, Hilton noted that it would actually be akin to “taking money from poor people and giving it to rich people, because it’s subsidizing people who can afford it.”

“I don’t even understand how he can say that with a straight face,” Hilton added. “It’s ridiculous.”