One of the forgotten goals of economics or political science is to predict ahead of time what leaders and others are likely to do given certain situations. An important question always, is what type of person is likely to become a president or congressman? Debate continues as to how much of a personality characteristic is inborn and how much of it is learned. My personal view is that people are born with strong propensities to behave one way or another. What is most important is that however a person acquires various personality characteristics, he is not likely to change.

Personality characteristics, each one of them, is distributed in a bell curve type manner. Odds are, any person you meet on the street, is likely to be about average in terms of honesty, sense of entitlement, empathy and all other social qualities. A person with as super strong sense of entitlement as in what you own is just as much his as it is yours, would actually possess a very unlikely personality characteristic.

A small percentage of people have a whole set of unlikely personality characteristics. Certain lifestyles and avocations are open only to the few who have the types of personalities that would make them successful in a select  chosen area.

Assuming the right physical attributes, a super competitive person has a chance to compete in the NFL. That same person may have too much compassion for others to become a career criminal. Saint Mother Teresa, probably wasn’t all that competitive. She had other personality characteristics that guided her towards helping people and doing saintly things.

So, what personality characteristics does it take to become president of the United States? What kind of personality does it take to become a senator of congressman? These types of avocations require a complete collection of highly unlikely personality characteristics. How, competitive must a successful candidate be? In terms of competitiveness Donald Trump is way off the charts. These kinds of political races are the world’s most competitive events. The winners must all have political personalities. Political personality is a euphemism for sociopath.

So, when others talk about their favorite candidates like they are their fairy god mothers, just know they are completely delusional. It is as close to impossible, as it is possible to be close to impossible, without actually being impossible, for a non sociopath to get elected to a high political office.

It is hard to say which fantasies are most destructive. The notion that elected leaders are just like the rest of us only better because they are working tirelessly in our best interest is somewhere close to the top.

The truth is a hard sell. Fantasy Free Economics gains readers one at a time. Major search engines simply do not list blogs which disagree with their political agenda. As long as folks share the link to this blog and others speaking out against the grain, the truth will at least trickle into the public consciousness.