In my experience, most of the time those people in positions of authority aren't actually malicious. They're either misinformed (the higher you get, the less you're able to have both depth and breadth of knowledge), or they have competing priorities.
What you describe certainly happens and is probably the most common scenario. Many times there is no malice, just some very worldly constraints that result in undesired consequences.
However, rising through the ranks of social structures is facilitated by machiavellianism and this results in an over representation of the kind of people I was talking about the higher up you go. It's a numbers game.
This isn't even very controversial and academics studying psychopathy will even acknowledge it.
