This study explores how the rent-seeking behavior of the government may impede economic development and delay industrialization. Introducing a rent-seeking government to a Schumpeterian growth model that features endogenous takeoff, we find that a more self-interested government engages in more rent-seeking taxation, which delays the economy's transition from pre-industrial stagnation to modern economic growth. Quantitatively, a completely self-interested government could have delayed industrialization, relative to a benevolent government, by about two centuries in the UK.