Institutionalists in development and growth theory will point to features of law or ruler behavior that prevent the “accumulation of capital” (eg. Maddison, Contours of the World Economy (2007), 225), by which they seem to mean that accumulation was inhibited in private hands. The fact that this inhibition does not mean that a counterbalancing accumulation takes place in the hands of the state or the ruling authority is curious, but it appears to be a widespread assumption, and perhaps actually the case. Certainly it seems reasonable to assume, and to some extent evident from the facts, that expropriated capital tends to be consumed by the expropriating power. This occurs for two reasons; firstly a government rarely invests for income, largely because it need not plan for the future since the host does that in order to survive. Secondly, it may be best advised to consume the capital, since when rulers and their bureaucracies attempt to invest and strengthen their state and population, they tend to make errors; investment is an activity best left to the tax base. Furthermore, by consuming this capital the expropriator will augment its ability to extract more from the tax base by making itself temporarily stronger while simultaneously weakening the tax base. In other words, by consuming capital that would otherwise be returned to the private economy for management, the state can prevent the private world from becoming better able to resist taxation. It is thus obvious that expropriating powers tend to destroy economies on which they feed, which is perhaps why they so often end up being expansionists as well. There is no necessity in this destructive tendency; cunning expropriators will keep the host alive – that is the essence of the Third Way – but it is very hard to satisfy the bureacracy with a stable or steady state economy, and this need for growth in the state's own machinery will tend to push them towards exhausting the population and driving it to destruction.