Choosing Your Leaders -- Unwisely

Oh, I'll just bet you looked at that article title and assumed this piece would be about the 2016 election season.  You would not be very right.

Government is different from business in so, so many ways.  Businesses, like households, are required to live within their means and then make profit on top of that.  To make a profit, you have to provide value that justifies customers being willing to pay for the product or services, an amount that exceeds the cost of the business producing what the customer is paying for -- plus a proportionate share of all the expenses of having a business in the first place.

Government, on the other hand, specifically the Federal government, is under no legal constraint.  It can spend, spend, spend and when it finds itself unable to control itself to spend only what tax revenues produce, it may simply borrow, borrow, borrow.  There is always, at least so far, someone willing to lend.  That's why the Federal government owes about $19 trillion (with a "t"), a lot of it to mortal enemies like China.

Another way that governments are unlike business -- directly opposite, in this case -- is that the leadership of a business is derived from the ownership of the business, and those whom the ownership has entrusted with that leadership role.  Those who take the risk maintain the scepter and the purse strings, and they make the decision as to who the leaders and decision-makers are.

Government is quite the opposite, in a republic or representative democracy, such as the USA.  The leaders of the government are not in their jobs because they control the purse strings and have taken the risks.  No, no; they are in their roles and control the purse strings because they have been selected by the people they represent in some way.  If he populace is stupid enough to select leaders who are incompetent, or corrupt, or weak to represent them, and the result is that their quality of life swirls down the toilet, they have only themselves to blame.

The same applies to leaders who may not be elected officials, but who somehow float up and portray themselves as representing the people as would a government leader.  When they turn out to be corrupt, incompetent or otherwise detrimental to their followers, it is only the followers who can blame themselves.

I think of this as I ask myself how many conservatives are currently leading large cities in the USA.  It seems somehow that there are about none, and that's at least since Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York.  Then I ask myself how many large cities in the USA are both peaceful and financially stable.  I'm asking ... I'm asking ... nothing.

What, pray tell, is it about people that when they live in cities with horrible crime rates and financial problems (Baltimore, Chicago, Washington, New York, Detroit, to name a few of the many), that they don't connect the fact that they're run by Democrats with the fact that they have horrible crime rates and financial problems?  You pick your leaders, people!  If you don't like your iPhone, you can go buy an Android, and if you don't like your government you can vote it out office just the same.

But you don't.

I suppose no one will stand up and say that Palestinians are a prosperous people.  They are poor and not going upward economically anytime soon.  But do they collectively rise up and say that maybe continuing to choose and follow leaders like Arafat and Abbas might, just might be what has gotten them where they are, and kept them subjugated and poor?  Does being a Palestinian seem a lot like being, say, black in Baltimore?

It is not a lot of fun to be black in certain areas of Baltimore and, for that matter, pretty much any of those other USA cities.  Yet in the 2011 election, the last time the city voted for a mayor, over 84% of the votes went for Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the Democrat who had served a year as interim mayor after replacing the previous mayor, another Democrat who had been convicted of misappropriation and forced to resign.  That would be the same Stephanie Rawlings-Blake who handcuffed her entire police department this past year and allowed the residents to burn and loot entire neighborhoods, destroying its tourism potential for a while -- no cops, no protection, no tourism.

Do you think that the citizens will respond this November when the next mayoral election is to be held?  Sure they will.  They'll give Mayor Hyphen's successor (she is not running) over 80% of the vote again, and Baltimore will be a mess for another five years.  And one of those candidates to succeed her recently spoke at Yale, supporting the rioters who looted his native city.

What is it?  We live in the one country on earth where we granted ourselves the constitutional right to choose our leaders. Yet communities here continue to send Democrats back to office regardless of what they have done as mayors, over and over again.  No matter how poor the citizens are; no matter how little gets fixed; no matter how far in debt the cities get, the voters reflexively avoid electing competent leaders, and return leadership that has shown itself incompetent to solve the citizens' own problems.

Whether elected officials like Mayor Hyphen or Bill De Blasio, or unelected, self-appointed publicity hounds like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, one must wonder when it will be that communities will finally rise up and say "enough", exercise their constitutional right and decide that the people they've selected as leaders have been screwing them for decades -- and it's time to change.

If your leaders are not helping you and your community, it is time for new leaders.  Try it, no matter what continent you live on and what language you speak.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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