> (although in practice, I'm not sure there's much difference)

You really ought to qualify that with "where" in practice there isn't much difference.

In the US, yes, obviously your government is pretty much entirely bought by corporations to such extent that I'd be hard-pressed to even call it a de facto democracy.

There's other parts in the world however, that have multiple political parties, that actually have radically different viewpoints on a wide variety of topics, which are not merely deemed "the lesser evil" by many[0] of their supporters ... some (this depends on the party) even depend on their supporters for input on what policy course to take.

Sounds pretty utopian, but such places do exist.

[0] you can never please everyone, of course

> Why do you believe that the "ideal" you're positing is the best one to maximize human freedom?

I don't. Nor do I believe it is right to merely maximize human freedom. You need to maximize both freedom and happiness, didn't you ever take a course on ethics? If you only have one but not the other you get terrible badwrong things.

To clarify further, it felt weird to defend democracy in my previous post. I don't usually do that, I think it's a very imperfect solution, but it's still the best option that I know of.

> Democracy is still a kind of uniform, monopolistic rule.

Sure, it's just that most alternatives that I know or heard of generally fail on the "who's going to take care of the elderly and the disabled?" criterion. In particular the ones that aim at purely maximizing freedom are generally proposed by young and healthy individuals that either don't realize or don't care that part of society will be left rotting in the streets that way.

You cannot judge a society by how it treats the average individual, you can only judge it by how it treats those who are worst off.

> I'll also point out, as an aside, that you're channeling this conversation into a debate opposite sides of a false dichotomy: the existing forms of centralized government and commercial corporation are hardly the only two viable models for social institutions: there's a vast range of alternatives that offer a variety of risk-reward tradeoffs.

I didn't mean to do that, I'm not even sure that I did.

> That false dichotomy is also based on the presumption that people must outsource responsibility for a wide range of elements of their lives to some external institution. But what about people who want to take direct responsibility for their lives

Yeah usually that means these people want to be free of the burden to also take responsibility for the lives of those who cannot (or not to a useful extent).

There are exceptions of course, but people that do this by their own motivations, are pretty rare, definitely not enough to take care of the problem. Even if you take into account that most (but definitely not all) will take care of their own families (but not everybody has that luxury either).

> or create their own social institutions in conjunction with like-minded others for that purpose? How are they not hamstrung by attempts to create universal monopolies?

It is my experience that, unless such social institutions are in fact governments (or something very similar, religion, giant computer, etc), these communities will fail after about 30+ years when generation-churn sets in and the amount of "like-minded others" in the community starts to dwindle.

It's perfectly possible to start some beautiful communal living project where everybody knows what's what because they all believe the same thing, and it can go very well for a while, make a beautiful space to live, etc. However, as soon as the original founders start to disappear (or can't do their part anymore), and if there is no "construct" that is somehow bigger than the individuals that makes sure the values of the society are kept as they were intended, it'll fall apart. Such a construct is called a government (or something very similar).

For a real-life example of this happening, see Christiania in Kopenhagen, Denmark. Beautiful idea, really fallen apart. If you ever visit Kopenhagen, check it out, not for what's left of the hippie art and community ideals, but for the broken roads, windows and alcoholics. It's very educational. Fortunately there's an actual state just a few blocks away.