Whenever we talk about government as an entity without keeping in mind that it is nothing more than the output of the people within it, we fall into error.
Government is nothing but a set of distinctively titled people and the particular sets of incentives and opportunities available to them.
Those opportunities and incentives are largely structured by the rules - institutions - that characterize the organization called government along with the rules governing acceptable political activity. This includes both the formal rules, written down and at least in theory judicially enforceable, but also the innumerable informal rules, many known only to insiders and very close students.
But government is also inevitably, the opportunities available to people outside the formal and informal rules, if they have a strong enough desire or incentive to pursue them. The power available to government - that is, to individuals within that arrangement of people and institutions that make up the entity we call government ensures there will always be a temptation to individuals with wicked preferences, but also to people whose preferences are in themselves not wicked, but whose desire to impose their not-in-itself-wicked preference on others is not self-bounded, making their actions wicked event when the preference itself is not.
It's never "government" that does wicked things; it's always individuals, emboldened and empowered by the opportunities inherent in this institutional structure we call government.