With the federal government being taken over by a pack of unruly children and with leading financial institutions being led by a cowardly bunch of parasitical pirates, we are suffering through a leadership crisis.

The Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School released a study late last year that highlighted some disturbing trends. Eighty percent of Americans believed we have a leadership crisis in the country. Unless we can get better leaders, 79 percent believed that the United States will decline as a nation.

Of course, business leaders ranked near the bottom of the leadership list, but members of Congress were rated even lower.

Did people think that the media would lead us out of this wilderness?

No. Almost 90 percent believed that the news media focused too much on trivial issues, and 77 percent stated that the news is politically biased and had too much influence on who Americans voted for. Twice as many said that the media's negative coverage of candidates influenced them more than positive coverage. These people voted for candidates who then became our leaders.

There are two general reasons why we suffer through the likes of Bush, Pelosi, McCain, Obama and thousands of other incompetent and dangerous leaders.

First, people get the government and the leaders they deserve. Corrupt politicians are elected by corrupt people. Why do our politicians continue to pile earmarks and pork onto every bill even when the government is so broke that the consequences may bring down the entire nation?

Because the voters support politicians who are willing to raid the public treasury for their benefit ? the rest of the nation be damned.

We also get business leaders much like their customers. I can remember the first time I tried to sell a car on my own. Otherwise honest people suddenly began to lie to me. As soon as money or dealing was involved, it became acceptable to be dishonest.

Second, in the last several decades we have created a new paradigm of leadership. When I talked to people of my parents' age, now almost all gone, they told me stories of how managers would come down on the work floor and talk to them by name, asking about their children and their other interests.

These managers knew the people who worked for them. They related to the work because they used to work on the same floor. Even if they were the boss's son, they worked up through the ranks.

This is no longer true. We have created a leadership class that could more accurately be called a caste.

People in the caste pick other leaders from the same caste. Most have never done the actual work that pays their salaries. Most, in fact, would not even understand the last sentence.

Their work is to manage. Their goal is to advance their careers. They don't expect to be at any given institution long. Just long enough, in fact, to get the next better job. The current job is just a stepping stone to the next. If the manager can do something that makes the institution look great before the next job, the same manager has no concern that the long-term effects may kill the same institution down the road. They will be gone by then.

This paradigm has spread even to education. Deans, provosts and presidents were once faculty who came up through the ranks and had blood that ran the same color as the school's.

Now we go out and do expensive intergalactic searches, from which almost all internal candidates are excluded, to find candidates most unlike those already at the institution as possible.

These "leaders" are willing to spend millions of taxpayers' dollars to insulate themselves from decision making, and no level of incompetence can keep them from their next job.

So we get leaders who demand all the perks of leadership without the risks. Leaders who clean out the loose cash before the next "leader" can get their hands on it.

So what is the solution? As long as Americans remain sleazy in their own habits, and as long as we insist on, or even tolerate, bigger and bigger governments and big businesses, there is no solution, just an inevitable collapse.

Hopefully, we can then start again with an insistence on not just ethics, but morality, and that applied on a human level.