We used to joke around election time that no matter who you voted for, the government always got in. Gallows humour, because it’s quite literally true. Enough people can get angry about the government in power and vote out the politicians … but the politicians aren’t the one implementing the policies that get people upset. The permanent bureaucracy barely notices when the government changes because the government rarely manages to get anything done that the civil service doesn’t want to do. It’s actually worse in Europe, because the politicians are even more mere figureheads than they are in the Anglosphere:
Christine Lagarde and Ursula von der Leyen
Nobody grows up dreaming of a career shuffling directives around Brussels.
Those jobs always fill with the same type of person: people drawn to power for its own sake, the ones who crave authority without ever answering for it. Bureaucracy doesn’t attract the best. It selects for the worst, then shields them when they inevitably screw up.
Hayek named this in The Road to Serfdom. His chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top” spelled out the logic. Unchecked power appeals most to the people least troubled by wielding it.
Mises found the engine underneath. In a market, a bad decision shows up as a loss, and losses remove you. Bureaucratic management faces no such test. Fail to fix a problem and you keep your job, then collect a bigger budget and a larger staff to keep failing with. The incentive runs backwards: waste earns you more, and the machine grows on its own.
Look at the European Union. Ursula von der Leyen presides over the Commission, the body that proposes almost all EU law. No European voter ever put her there. Heads of state handed her the post in a 2019 backroom deal and waved her through parliament. Christine Lagarde runs the European Central Bank, setting monetary policy for more than 340 million people and steering the value of the money in their pockets. She faced no voters for the job either.
You can throw out your national government every few years, but nothing above it moves, the apparatus stays. The unelected keep their offices, their pensions, their power, untouched by the only check ordinary people have.
This is the design, not a flaw in it. The people with the most control over your money and your future are the ones you are not allowed to fire.
