Prudence and Leadership

Some excellent words from James Chastek:

One common way of denying that prudence is required for leadership is to cast political decisions as essentially easy. Politicians need not be prudent men, we think to ourselves, because any moron can just look at problem X and see what needs to be done. If we simply point out that people are starving, or uninsured, or immoral, or uneducated, or oppressed, or attacked then what we should do (or whether we should do anything at all) is assumed to be immediately obvious. Notice that on this supposition, a bad leader can only be incredibly stupid or evil or both, since this is the only way to to account for why he neglects to do obvious goods.