Comments Elsewhere

(I should add that, as an anarchist, I regard all representative democracies, insofar as they are monopoly states, to be failures, and see very little reason to think that private defense associations on a free market would tend to be operated according to the constitutional structure of such elective oligarchies. But the democratic elements of representative democracy have, for all their faults, acted as important checks on the powers of tyrants in the past—which is worth acknowledging—and some cases are, though failures, much less intense failures than others.)