Local Politician Crime Spree

My rule of thumb is the governments of the world are composed of all the worst people in each jurisdiction. Whenever I imagine this rule might be faulty, some new story will pop up in the local paper that cements the idea in my mind again, However, I don't think anecdotal evidence is necessary to support this concept. There's much more basic and obvious evidence provided by the politician jobs themselves: who would want to do that boring shit and what would the motivation be to run for office to obtain such a position?

Let's take the example of township trustee. There are some localities in the US who can't find anyone to run for such offices, so they faux elect a dog or something but their roads get paved and the trash is collected anyway. In my township there's a professional staff that actually does all the road maintenance and contract management, etc... They have to be knowledgeable, professional people with a background in construction and management of construction projects while the trustees are often randos with no relevant experience, and a dog could do the job of trustee because the professional staff does all the actual work.

Trustees and other low level politicians or officers in the government frequently find some way to steal millions of dollars from taxpayers. It's usually discovered relatively easily through audits, but I'm not sure how much money is ever recovered. For example, in Chesterland Township, Ohio the clerk (elected office) embezzled $4 million dollars in the late 1990s through early 2000s, but I can't even find any news stories about how much money was recovered, so it probably wasn't significant. Also, any web searches for the topic are lost in the sea of similar corruption from around the country because it's so common.

One of my middle school and high school friends lived next door to a woman who was a long time township trustee. She was an alcoholic dingbat weirdo. When he was a kid, his family went to a pool party at the trustee's house and she poured a beer over his head while he was hanging out in the pool. I listened to her give an election speech one election year--she just rambled incoherently for a few minutes. She won the office because nobody else cared to do it.

A persistent problem for humanity is the people who are actually productive are robbed or exploited by people who "organize" activities. This problem seems to arise from the infantile mindset of most people and is built into the system.