VANITY MOTIVATES GOVERNMENT SPENDING

To most people the wasteful spending of governments cannot be a surprise. Politicians do not pay the financial costs or reap the financial benefits of their spending; the benefits they receive are instead in the form of public exaltation. This is the vanity problem with government spending: that a main motivation for the spending is not to deliver anything of practical use or to produce economic benefits to the public but rather to generate acclaim for those doing the spending.