A razão pela qual os governos fazem políticas econômicas ruins

"Consider a professor of economics and the dullest student in his class. Let us assume that, by accident of gene selection, the dull student becomes a king, and possibly by inheritance from a previous king, the professor becomes his principal economic minister. As all professors of economics know, many of the duller students never learn what economics is about, even with the best efforts on the part of the teacher. In the assumed situation, the professor, now a minister, c...an no longer compel attendance of the part of the dullard, nor can he even threaten the latter with a flunking grade. His only refuge is to try to charm the dull king into accepting his ideas which would be completely beyond him were he in a classroom."

"Such a minister has open to him three courses of action: he may resign; he can stop trying to improve the economic conditions of the kingdom and simply implement the king's stupid ideas on economic matters; or he can try to deceive the king into carrying out the policies that he, the minister, thinks wise while agreeing with the king in council. The apparent preferability of the third alternative vanishes when it is recognized that someone else who wants the position as economics minister will surely tell the king of his current minister's deceit. The intelligent and ambitious man will, therefore, certainly choose the second course of action. A man of intelligence, but with less ambition, might choose the first or the third, either one of which would eventually lead to his removal from the position and his replacement by someone else who is more interested in what the king thinks about economics than in what economics really is."
Gordon Tullock, The Politics of Bureaucracy, 1965, 74.