Who Says America Needs a “Leader”?

“You cannot lead people you loathe,” vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence recently said, about Hillary Clinton.

He has a point. Hillary Clinton has called Trump supporters “irredeemable” and deplorable. Nearly half the voting population seems poised to vote for Trump. That’s a lot of deplorables. She has mocked Bernie Sanders’ supporters as largely “basement dwellers,” and even if she’s right, it doesn’t change the fact that most of her own proposals are the exact same as Bernie Sanders (at least at the moment).

But the real question is, why do we even need a leader in the first place?

A leader is someone who pushes or directs people to do something. A leader inspires or persuades people to move in a certain direction. By this definition, Adolf Hitler was a leader. He pushed and directed people toward Nazism. Karl Marx was an intellectual leader. Does this make his policies wise and sound? No. But he was a leader.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were likewise strong leaders. Would we do equally well with Thomas Jefferson or Adolf Hitler as president today, so long as they’re both strong leaders? Obviously leadership, while important in a time of crisis, requires something more than a strong will.

When you long for leadership, you have to ask yourself: “Where do I wish to be led?” In a functioning, healthy mind the question auto-corrects itself to ask: “Where do I want to lead myself?”

In politics, leadership refers to the apparatus of government. A political leader will either persuade people to move in the direction of submitting to force, or will inspire people to move in the direction of liberty. Throughout human history, leaders in the liberty camp have been rare. One of the reasons Jefferson, Washington, Madison and Adams stand out is precisely because they were so rare: They didn’t want control, they wanted liberty. For a brief moment in history, around 1776 or so, these leaders pushed people in the direction of individual rights, private property and liberty.

Candidates like Washington and Jefferson would not last five minutes today, and there’s a reason for it. The vast majority are seeking a strong leader. They want a government leader who will “fix” things. Democrats want things fixed one way, and Republicans want things fixed in a different way. In all cases, it seems that government will do the fixing.

But the basic error here is in the expectation of “fixing.” Corrupt political institutions cannot be fixed. The only answer is to get rid of them, or at least phase them out. Examples include phasing out federal control of education, health care and college student loans. Phase out corporate subsidies of every kind, and privatize charity. If we left such matters to the private and voluntary sectors, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than it is now. America rose to brilliance via the private and voluntary sectors. We had very little government at the time America spawned the inventive Industrial Revolution, improving the standard of human life exponentially in only a couple of generations. The great things that have happened since, including the Information Revolution and the Internet, were all due to the private market, not any government edicts or directives.

A leader, in this day and age, would point all this out to people. A true leader would try to inspire people with the simple facts: That all greatness comes from self-determining individuals, operating in the context of a free market, private property and unbridled free speech. Government’s proper role in today’s mess is not to lift us up, but to get the hell out. We have to find the confidence and courage within ourselves, not these awful, morally ugly people we keep elevating to high office.

You can’t call for “strong leadership” unless you’re prepared to identify exactly where you want to be led. Strong souls don’t look to government for leadership. They look to themselves and to others in the world who think, create, produce and manage profitable enterprises in living. They want a government to protect the system that allows them to remain free, not to grant them special favors or pay all their bills.

Unfortunately, from Wall Street to Main Street, government — over many generations now — has trained people to expect government to do things for them. When people talk of having a “strong leader,” this is what they mean. They mean: I want my guy (or gal) in there, so he (or she) will do things for me.

Americans of the present era are poised to learn what people of all prior great civilizations had to learn the hard way. Nobody does anything for you. Nobody can give you a living, or authentic happiness, and it’s not anyone else’s moral obligation to do so,  even if they could. You have to be in charge of yourself. When you look to government to “lead” and manipulate things your way, it will eventually blow up in your own face, as injustice and favoritism always do.