Government cultivates incompetence

A few days ago, I came across this very long but thoughtful article on the nature of modern governments.  The author asks this very important question.

Why do we get the people we do at the top of politics, such that an incompetent is appointed then replaced with another practically interchangeable incompetent, then the same again, all without the appointing person aware that they keep appointing duffers, and without anybody pointing this out?

He is musing about what I have long called a Culture of incompetence.  My first Job out of university was for a company that had a culture of incompetence.  Somehow a few people got promoted to senior positions they should not have been in and they knew it.  Their clever solution to hiding their incompetence was to surround themselves with other incompetent people.  Not really hiding in plane site.  More like hiding a diseased tree in a forest of diseased trees.

This can work for a while but in private industry sooner or later it bites you in the ass.  Eventually the company gets into financial difficulty, and they are forced to shake things up.  That is where private industry differs from government.  In private industry incompetence is only ever a temporary event.  In government it is a permanent feature.

How does a theoretically permanent civil service (i.e people can be dismissed and replaced but it’s expected that a large fraction will persist regardless of government/leader changes) affect the quality of government? Is it possible that the ‘professionalisation’ and ‘meritocracy’ of the permanent civil service was a profound error?!

Whenever a senior bureaucrat or politician gets appointed to some new important position the media diligently detail the person’s previous government experience.  Kamala Harris we were told is the most qualified person to ever run for president because of all her previous government experience.   I always think the same thing.  We would have been better off with someone who had never spent any time in government.  No one has ever made that point better than Ross Perot did in 1992.

Experience working for the most corrupt, evil, institution on the planet should not be viewed as positive.