Rachel_P._Kovner@gorgias.ilt.columbia.edu says:
It was once said that (and I quote -very- loosely) "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance", therefore, 'bad government' is probably not a result of some kind of evil or malicious people, but just people who do not guard their rights.
Actually, as public choice economic theory has shown, bad government tends to be the inevitable result of the evolutionary pressures on government and government officials. This is not to say that some government programs are not occassionally well run or that some government officials are not legitimately "trying their best", but that the pressure on the whole system is to go towards maximum corruption, just as the evolutionary pressure on organisms is to only follow survival-prone strategies. As just one simple example, take subsidies. If you have a chance of getting a $1,000,000 subisidy for your company, you can afford, economically speaking, to spend up to $999,999 on lobbying to get it and still have a profit on your hands. If, on the other hand, you are Joe Taxpayer in a nation of 250,000,000 people, you are losing only $.004 because of the subsidy -- it is not even economically worth your while to spend a single stamp on trying to stop the subsidy. For this and a myriad of similar causes, the evolutionary pressure on governments is always towards evolution in an unsound direction. This is not because anyone involved is evil but for the same sorts of reasons that only organisms with healthy drives to reproduce are found on the planet. Perry