undertheice
Well-Known Member
the very term leader is one which we should be avoiding at all costs. this is the 21st century and we have all witnessed the fact that what you call something is what it eventually becomes. that we should consider our elected officials to be our "leaders" leads to the inexorable conclusion that the rest of us are mere "followers". in a nation designed to provide the individual with a supreme amount of self-determination, there is simply no room for a population that blindly follows the whims of "leaders". these people are not generals leading their troops into battle, they are men and women hired to do the job of operating the country by a set of rules that have existed for well over two hundred years. they are our employees, not our masters. their job is to balance the will of their employers with the limits set forth within the constitution. it may not be the simplest job in the world, but it certainly isn't rocket science. their job is not to invent new ways to spend their employers hard earned savings or to enhance their own reputations. their job is not to save the rest of the world or to limit the freedoms of their employers. they are little more than glorified policemen and accountants, not the grand arbiters of the nation's morality. they are simply middle-management, accountable to the millions of people who pay their salaries, and we should quit trying to force them to be something they are not.
one of libertarianism's selling points is that it recognizes the role of politicians in the workings of government and understands the dangers of allowing them the sort of power that comes with considering them our "leaders". a leader's sole purpose is the wielding of power and this is the power that should be vested in the people themselves. the decisions are ours, not the exclusive domain of our uppity employees.