Public Enemies: Government Bureaucrats as Societal Parasites06/11/2025 • The Misesian • Thomas J. DiLorenzo
This article is adapted from DiLorenzo’s lecture at the Our Enemy, the Bureaucracy Mises Circle in Phoenix on Saturday, April 26.
Economists have been studying and writing about government bureaucracy for quite a long time. Ludwig von Mises became the first “modern” economist to write a book on the subject with his 1944 Bureaucracy. The public choice school of economics, founded by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, among others, has produced a huge literature on the economics of bureaucracy, much of which is complementary to Mises’s pathbreaking work.
This literature has produced many easy-to-understand insights about the essence of governmental bureaucratic behavior. For one thing, it is vastly different from decision-making in the marketplace. In the market people voluntarily “vote” with their dollars to express their preferences. There is a market feedback mechanism whereby if one pleases his customers he prospers, if one displeases his customers he fails. In government, by contrast, we are basically told: You need this, this, this, this, and this, and if you do not pay for it, we will make you live like a dog in a cage for several years. That’s called being sentenced to prison for tax evasion. There is nothing voluntary about it.
As for the evaluation of government “services,” there never is any real evaluation based on the behavior of citizens; government bureaucrats and politicians tell us how wonderful their “services” are and then demonize us publicly if we dissent. Government today is so gargantuan that no human mind could possibly comprehend a smidgen of 1% of what government actually does. Consequently, most citizens are “rationally ignorant” of all but a few things their government is involved in.
Government bureaucracies use tax dollars to employ a large army of “intellectuals” and court historians to praise bigger and bigger government while castigating the free market and the civil society as “failures.” Anthony Fauci alone reportedly dispensed some $7 billion annually in research grants so that he could publicly boast, “I am science.” And that is just a single bureaucrat!
A government bureaucrat’s status and pay depend crucially on how many subordinates he or she has, which gives every ambitious bureaucrat an incentive to hire far more people than necessary to achieve any conceivable task. The first question posed to any bureaucrat seeking a higher-level job is, “How many people work under you?” Thus, bureaucratic bloat is rule no. 1 for every rule-following bureaucrat.
Speaking of rules, they are another hallmark of government bureaucracy. Since there are not profits (or losses) in an accounting sense in government, “success” as a bureaucratic “manager” is measured not by the bottom line but by how closely bureaucrats follow the rules dictated by their higher-ups. Breaking the rules can stymie or ruin a bureaucrat’s chances of promotion, so rules are rarely challenged or changed, oftentimes not for years or decades, no matter how foolish or dangerous they are. This is another stark difference from the marketplace, where stupid rules that harm the bottom line must be jettisoned—or else.
* * *
Source:
https://mises.org/misesian/public-enemies-government-bureaucrats-societal-parasites
