In response to:
Mancur Olsen in the Rise and Decline of Nations, discusses the same phenomena but with rigor. Interests, groups, cliques,etc. organize formally and informally to pursue the group interest, but being composed of men who simultaneously pursue their personal interest, group members must face rules, selective rewards and sanctions imposed on them or the group will disintegrate. Thus through time interests organize and impose a rigidity on the group that gives it staying power but makes it almost impossible to change. The result through time is stagnation, plutocracy and institutional decline, or in the case of nations, national decline. So one can't be too confident that just because they are incompetent they will vanish.
Angelo Codevilla has spent more than his share of time as a sojourner among America’s ruling class. He was a key part of the Reagan transition and point-man in the Gipper’s efforts to transform both the foreign and the intelligence services. Then later he served as a professor of International Relations at prestigious Boston University. From this vantage point, Codevilla was able to get a close look not only at the international relations elite, but at the entire American ruling class, from which the former are overwhelmingly drawn. I had the honor of sitting across a Skype line with...
Another point that is important, even without the self serving clique that undermines the general level of competence, the best and the brightest have a built in tendency to error because they know, having spent their whole life being smarter than everybody else in the room, and for the most part are right, that "if anyone can do this, I can" The problem is that most things in the public sector can't be done and they are the last to recognize it. For instance planning an economy, or changing the weather.
It is not about that - it is all about holding power.