Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Government, we are sometimes told, is just another word for things we choose to do together.

Like a lot of things politicians say, this sounds good. And, also like a lot of things politicians say, it isn't the least bit true.

Many of the things government does, we don't choose. Many of the things we choose, government doesn't do. And whatever gets done, we're not the ones doing it. And those who are doing it often interpret their mandates selfishly.

Take, for example, the Veterans Administration. The American people -- most of us, anyway -- did "choose" to provide first-class medical care for our veterans. But we didn't do it. We set up the Veterans Administration to do it. And the Veterans Administration -- or, more accurately, some of the people who work for and run the Veterans Administration -- had a stronger interest in other things. Things like fat bonuses, and low workloads in comfy offices.

Thus we find that, even though veterans were dying, and books were being cooked, every single VA senior executive received an evaluation of "fully successful" or better over a 4-year period. That's right. Every single one. Over four years. At least 65% of them received bonuses ("performance awards"). All while veterans around the country were suffering and dying because of delayed care. The executives got these bonuses, in part, because they cooked the books, because the bonuses were more important to them than the veterans' care.

It would be nice to believe that this sort of problem is limited to the VA, but there's no particular reason to think that it is. The problem with the VA is that, like every other government agency -- and every other human institution -- it's not a machine that runs itself. It's a collection of people. And people tend to act in their own self interest.

Left to their own devices, people will tend to make choices that produce a more comfortable life for them, and that produce a higher paycheck. Whether the sign out front says "Department of Veterans Affairs" or "Ministry of Silly Walks," their behavior will tend to favor those personally agreeable outcomes more than the mission of the institution. As public choice economics notes, voters vote their pocketbooks, and so, in a different way, do public "servants."

This being the case, changing personnel at the top won't make a difference for long. People will quickly revert to their own interests.

If you want to get better service out of people, then you need to make it in their interest to provide it. That's what the VA's evaluation system is supposed to do, but it's unsurprising that when an institution essentially rates itself, it won't hand out many failing grades.

In the world of businesses subject to competition, of course, the consumers provide the evaluation system that matters. If you do a bad job, they go elsewhere. Businesses not subject to competition -- monopolies -- notoriously provide poorer service. Back in the days of the old Bell System, Lily Tomlin spoofed them this way: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." The government, of course, is the ultimate monopoly.

There's a naive tendency to believe that whatever a government agency's mission is supposed to be, is really the mission that its people pursue. That's seldom the case for long.

Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, observing such things, has formulated what he calls the Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In every organization there are two kinds of people: those committed to the mission of the organization, and those committed to the organization itself. While the mission-committed people pursue the mission, the organization-committed people take over the organization. Then the mission-committed people tend to become discouraged and leave.

As a result, the strongest priority of most bureaucracies is the welfare of the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats it employs, not whatever the bureaucracy is actually supposed to be doing. That's worth remembering, whenever someone says they've found something else that we should "choose to do together."

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author ofThe New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the opinion front page or follow us on twitter @USATopinion or Facebook.