Okay, but I can give you a counterexample. Desegregation in the US happened in the teeth of much contemporary popular support for segregation, and without any salient financial motive.

That is a good example (accepting for the sake of the discussion the premises based on US history that I am not excessively interested in). It is evidence that the individual leaders are other than amoral power maximizers and somewhat weaker evidence that the government could be usefully modeled as a moral agent.