We have a selection criteria for all our other education tiers. The medical schools choose those members who they belief are best fit to become doctors. Ditto engineering schools. Unless you have a good grasp of mathematics no one is allowing you to build the next bridge. Why not have a school for leaders selected by experts in the field of leading...
[jumping back a bit to answer you (been away from pc)] Of course different professions have qualifications for highly skilled activities. I just don't buy the argument that the nebulous generalised 'skill' of 'leadership' or 'management' are in the same category - leadership is a personal/social quality that people bring at any level of an organisation. I've seen how the increase of management culture in public services has wrecked them and made them less efficient - i've seen the sort of people that occupy management positions (leadershiop doesn't come into it), with wages twice and more of what the people they're managing get, for an easier job - the culture that says people can have generalised management skills without ever having experience of the job of the people they're managing do; their special skills seeming to consist of ability to sack people without being troubled by empathy or solidarity, for the good of the company (ie shareholder profits).
This management culture is a bourgeois microcosm of elite 'leadership' or centralised political control (does saying bourgeois make me bourgeois?); this in turn is a residue of feudal power structures - just because feudalism did some impressive things (on the backs of the all their subjects), doesn't mean society can't evolve and improve how it distributes its resources. I believe in historical progress through periodical revolutions (eg we wouldn't have the freedom we have now but for the british and then french revolutions).
When power is centralised and wealth is inequally distributed, the politics will follow the money - when 'leaders' are picked from a small elite pool of well off people, they will naturally, even unconsciously, gravitate towards politics that suit or juistify their own position; laws will tend to favour people of the same class as them. This is the self-justificatory nature of all politics imv: people tend towards views that say people like them are OK, and other people aren't - this is the same for poor people - given complete information and a choice of which laws or taxes to enact they will choose ones that benefit them more (like redistribution). But there are many more poor people, so their views should rightly prevail according to majority rules - the control of power and information that the elite enjoys needs to be constantly maintained to stop enough of the poor people realising these basic facts, joining together and applying democracy directly. ('we are many they are few' and all that)
I am not talking politics here either, politicians are only concerned with popularity and appeasing the masses. Leadership, especially of a nation or an entire society requires strong decisions that, while not perfect, are required for society to excel forward.
This fairy tale of strong decisions by a leader is often woven around the carrying out of actions that most people would obviously be against if they knew the truth - this sort of 'leader', shepherding the unfortunate ignorant masses according to their superior understanding is exactly what democracy should guard against imo - this vanguardist ideology of self-elected masters herding the massses is the same as the neoconservatism of Leo Strauss (or even ayn rand (or lenin for that matter)) - not an ideology i'd be happy to associate with.
A common example given (to chuck in another strawman) is the leadership of churchill, but should it matter that churchill didn't care a jot for the actual poor people that make up the empire he was trying to save? His beef with hitler was that he didn't want the british empire to be bested - if it wasn't for that they'd have got on famously (they could have swapped indian/jewish genocide notes, or discussed churchill's pioneering eugenics bill from 1908 )
Food, shelter, health and education for all is a pretty basic building block for a happy society. Rather than out sourcing humanities science and research it makes sense to fund and direct it internally. Of course human nature and it's associated pride and greed are more of a hurdle than voter apathy in the current system.
That's exactly the point of socialism, because without it that stuff would never have happened for more than a few.
Sorry for the essay (i don't half talk a load of bollocks). Tl;dr - four legs good, two legs bad
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
Futurama but this is another example of deliberately missing the point to make a perfectly valid and sensible position appear ludicrous. The relevant part is refusing to take part in a system so fundamentally flawed it needs to be put out of its misery (or rather turfed out from it's far, far too comfortable position of having deeply vested interests in keeping voter turnout as low as possible and voter apathy as high as possible).
