Tim Worstall

The basis of public choice economics is that politicians and bureaucrats do things which benefit politicians and bureaucrats, not the wider polity. Just because you’re elected or appointed doesn’t remove the basic human regard to self interest in other words.

An example:

One senior figure said: “We were led up the garden path by Gordon. I have never known a prime minister to be heckled at a meeting of the parliamentary party as he was on Monday. Not even Tony during the Iraq war got such a rough ride.”

MPs are considerably more irate about and interested in who is going to pay their cleaning bills than they are about taking the country to war.

QED.