Taking on a Public Role Does Not Magically Protect You From Corruption and Incompetence.

Many citizens hold a strangely schizophrenic attitude toward power-holders. They treat certain types of public actors, such as public health officials or financial regulators, as essentially immune to corruption, while treating private actors subject to public regulators as morally suspect or blinded by their own financial, political or ideological interests. They give a free pass to the World Health Organisation, a public institution dependent on private actors like Bill Gates, while treating private individuals who complain about public regulations as “un-cooperative,” viciously self-interested, or outright delusional.

Public choice theorists have pointed out just how naive this dichotomous view is. It treats the individuals manning public institutions as benign officials impartially executing their public functions in the most public-spirited manner possible, while treating private institutions and actors as constantly teetering on the brink of corruption, and therefore in need of public regulators to keep them on the “straight and narrow,” if necessary by means of coercion.

The notion that public officials are somehow magically protected from the corruption and vices that afflict the rest of society, is almost never articulated explicitly. But it is clearly implicit in the rose-coloured glasses through which many citizens view public actors. For example, it is assumed that human beings, just by virtue of being appointed to roles in public institutions, become more competent or knowledgeable than others, or are suddenly freed from the temptations of pleasure, power and wealth that accost the rest of us “mere mortals.”

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