> Democracy is an empirical way of finding policies that work No, its not. At best, it is a source of policy variation which could be the input to an empirical

> Democracy is an empirical way of finding policies that work No, its not. At best, it is a source of policy variation which could be the input to an empirical process of discovering what works. > where of course what “works” reflects what a particular population values. Even dropping the improper reference to "empirical" and steel-manning your claim into "Democracy is a manner of progressively optimizing policy for a particular population over time", no, it really isn't, for a large number of reasons, starting with the fact that the "particular population" is in constant flux, and the policy changes produced by the system are an influence on that flux, so it it does as much to shape the population to the policy as vice versa.