The bureaucrat is not only a government employee. He is, under a democratic constitution, at the same time a voter and as such a part of the sovereign, his employer. He is in a peculiar position: he is both employer and employee. And his pecuniary interest as employee towers above his interest as employer, as he gets much more from the public funds than he contributes to them.
This double relationship becomes more important as the people on the government’s payroll increase. The bureaucrat as voter is more eager to get a raise than to keep the budget balanced. His main concern is to swell the payroll.
– Ludwig von Mises (author, economist, 1944 volume, Bureaucracy)
I have experienced this at the local level except it is generally not made so directly as “swell the payroll”. Instead, it is a function of “more work” which has generally been a function of a bureaucracy deciding that it should be doing more – often incrementally in small ways at the local levels. But it can also go big time as in Obama declaring his Executive Amnesty which now is going to grow multiple bureaucracies in increments of thousands (like ICE needing 9,000 agents).
(H/T: Café Hayek)
