I’d feel differently, perhaps, if I had ever met a bureaucrat whose incentives w

I’d feel differently, perhaps, if I had ever met a bureaucrat whose incentives were to help the customer rather than engage in rent seeking. I haven’t. The people who deal with the tradesmen and permits are much better than the rest. But none of them is anywhere near the service provider of the worst discount store, or the best coffee shop.

If you spend any time with government at all (I was in the justice department) it’s pretty clear that aside from perhaps judges and short term members of the house of representatives, that everyone’s a rent seeker. Everyone. And they want expansion of powers so they have access to expansion of rents.

I don’t know yet how I feel about condo and neighborhood associations, but from what I’ve been able to collect (and it’s not easy) a town of ten thousand people is probably the maximum scale where bureaucrats act anything like citizens rather than rent seekers.

Once you’re out of the city-state, everything collapses rapidly into corruption. In america, corruption is systemic and procedural, and takes advantage of the fact that the voting process cannot correct a bureaucracy. The competition to a bureaucracy is the court, not the vote.

I actually prefer the corruption here in the east. I dont mind increasing the payroll of policemen and bureaucrats if they provide service for it. I do mind increasing the budget of the bureaucracy when they DONT give service for it.

Russian friends always told me this was true but I couldn’t put my arms around it. They’re right. It’s MORE CORRUPT in America than in the east. It’s just that the corruption in systemic, not interpersonal.

The rule of law is good government. Bureaucracy is bad government. The problem of government is bureaucracy.

If a government wants to conspire to achieve my preferred ends, then it is not a government that’s hired labor. If it wants to conspire to use the products of my labor to achieve ends I disapprove of, then that is not government that is slavery.

I am having a hard time defining good government. Unless government is hired labor under the law, rather than dictators in charge of the law.