Yes. All institutions are governed by incentives. The Government is not run by angels, but men. Furthermore, being the largest organization of any sort in the e

Yes. All institutions are governed by incentives. The Government is not run by angels, but men. Furthermore, being the largest organization of any sort in the entire world, it has a particularly byzantine, inefficient, and wasteful web of contradictory incentives that govern it. It amazes me that people use such sloppy thinking when it comes to politics. "We'll should use the government to do X" is not the end of the conversation. We must ask how likely it is to carry out the goals given it, how much it will cost to do so compared to alternative solutions, etc. Edit: In Economics this line of reasoning is called "Public Choice Theory"