President Obama has recently hit the road, talking up that nebulous and wonderful thing called innovation.

Of course, we’re not talking about just any innovation.

The President is certainly not touting the sort of garden variety innovation that lets a microbusiness owner figure out how to rearrange his business model so that he can make a profit doing something that scores of business gurus before him decided was unprofitable.

Nor is he talking about the kind of innovation that is behind the nonemployer business woman with the seven-figure income, who has put together a stable of other nonemployers and microbusinesses so that she can expand capacity whenever a job or project call for it.

I’m sure he’s never even heard of the microbusiness innovation of finding or inventing digital versions of all sorts of products, that can be manufactured once and sold to an infinite number of customers for heretofore-unheard-of profit margins.

That stuff just doesn’t count.

It’s a funny thing how often our nation’s and our society’s leaders try to incent or coerce people into doing things that they don’t want to do and that may or may not be good for them.

A good example of that was the way our leadership under previous Administrations encouraged people to borrow and borrow, so that consumers would keep buying things and the economy would keep growing.

We all saw how that turned out. Debt, as matters have evolved, is not a many-splendored thing.

At the same time, those leaders never seem to want to look at what people actually are doing — as opposed to what they, in their infinite wisdom, want people to be doing — to ask themselves “How can we support the people in what they want to do?”

If President Obama wants to encourage certain kinds of innovation, that’s fine. If it worked for President Kennedy and the space race, maybe it can work for President Obama and the energy race.

It would be nice, though, if he and everybody else in the federal government behaved as though they cared what we want.

Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work?