I replied to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18927767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18927767 To reiterate, my main objection to

I replied to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18927767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18927767 To reiterate, my main objection to asserting "democracy is the best" is that it discourages thought about other possibilities. I don't know what work better. But I do think there are other possibilities. I'm using a somewhat stricter definition of democracy and autocracy. For our purposes, lets say a democracy allows nearly everyone to vote for a person or party that will have complete or nearly complete control over the government. We'll allow exceptions for felons and young people not voting. Lets call countries where one person has full power an autocracy. I'm not going to give an example of a perfect form of government. But I'll give some bad or half-baked ideas just to illustrate it's possible. As you mentioned, there's anarchy. Not far from there, you could have rule by corporations, where corporations hire their own internal police force to protect their employees, enforce their rules, and make up for the lack of national government. I know, scary. I said these weren't good ideas. You could have rule by experts. Technocracy, or something similar. Only economists would vote on economic policy, medical professionals would vote on healthcare policy, etc. We could say all new laws must be in pursuit of some mandate, such as increasing standard of living for the lowest 30% of the population. Laws that don't work towards this goal could be challenged and struck down in courts. Maybe laws could be proposed by anyone and the most upvoted ones would be considered by the courts. Maybe direct democracy should be revisited now that we have the internet. We could allow more departments to operate independently, much like the Federal Reserve Bank does now. Maybe it's totally impossible to improve on the democracy we have now. I'd still rather not discourage thinking about it.