People making things are entrepreneurs. People taking things are civil servants.
There's not a thing I can think of that civil servants actually make. And I speak as a former Australian civil servant, son of civil servants; but also in business and an entrepreneur, if only a small one, here in Hong Kong.
I've often thought and said: there's nothing like the discipline of having to meet a payroll every month. To give you perspective. And make you truly responsible. And make you appreciate the plus side of actually making things, creating services, and selling them to people who value them.
Below is a French person, @brivael, telling a tale of two types.
Elon Musk had said something that really stuck with me about resource allocation. In essence: beyond a certain level of wealth, money is no longer about consumption—it's about capital allocation.
That sentence changes everything.
Economics, at its core, is just an allocation problem. You have finite resources and infinite uses. Who decides where what goes?
Imagine a school playground. 100 kids, packs of Pokémon cards handed out at random. You let it play out. Very quickly, an order emerges. The good players accumulate rare cards, the collectors sort, the negotiators strike deals. No one planned it. And yet every card ends up in the hands of the one who gets the most value from it. The system maximizes the total happiness of the playground. That's the invisible hand.
Now bring in the teacher. She finds it unfair. Leo has 50 cards, Tom has 3. She confiscates, redistributes, enforces equality. Three immediate effects. The good players stop playing—what's the point. The bad ones have no reason to improve; they'll get their share anyway. Trades collapse. The playground is equal, and dead. She maximized equality, she destroyed happiness.
The teacher's problem is that she can't have the information the playground had collectively. That's Mises' economic calculation problem, formulated in 1920. The USSR tried to solve it for 70 years with the Gosplan. Result: shortages, lines, collapse. Not because the Soviets were stupid, because the problem is mathematically unsolvable in centralized mode.
When Musk has 200 billion, he doesn't consume it—he allocates it. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Every dollar is a bet on the future. And he has a track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. He's demonstrated he knows how to spot massive problems and allocate resources to them with spectacular returns.
The state has a track record too. Hospitals collapsing, education declining, debt exploding, public services degrading despite constantly rising budgets. The market identifies good allocators; politics identifies good communicators.
Profit isn't an end goal—it's a signal. It says: you've allocated scarce resources to a use that people value enough to pay for. The bigger the profit, the greater the value created. When Starlink turns profitable, it means millions of people in rural areas finally have internet. When a ministry runs a deficit, it means it's consuming more than it produces. One creates, the other destroys, and we call that redistribution.
In our societies, there are two categories of actors. Entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. The entrepreneur takes personal risk to spot a problem, mobilize resources, create a solution. If he's wrong, he loses. If he's right, his customers win, his employees win, his suppliers win, the state collects taxes. He's the basic cell of human progress.
The bureaucrat takes no personal risk. His salary is guaranteed. At best, he maintains an existing rent. At worst, he destroys it through overregulation, forced bad allocation, perverse incentives that discourage those who produce. But in no case does he create.
Look at the last 50 years. iPhone, civilian internet, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. All private inventions, driven by entrepreneurs, funded by venture capital. Not a single ministry has invented anything that's changed your daily life.
France has become the world's laboratory for bureaucratic drift. 57% of GDP in public spending, an absolute record. A sprawling administration, a tax system that penalizes wealth creation. Result: falling behind the United States, Germany, Switzerland. Brain drain. Deindustrialization. Exploding debt.
And the worst part is that bad allocation self-reinforces. The more the state takes, the less entrepreneurs create. The less they create, the less tax base there is. The more the state borrows and taxes. Perfect negative feedback loop. The teacher thinks she's helping, and every year the playground produces less.
In our societies, it's always the entrepreneurs who advance civilization. Bureaucrats, at best, maintain a rent; at worst, they destroy it. No society has ever progressed by taxing its creators to subsidize its managers.
The question is never who has how much. It's who allocates the next unit of resource best to maximize humanity's future. The answer hasn't changed in 200 years. It's not the civil servants.
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