Quote Originally Posted by Jimbean View Post
This is a collectivist viewpoint. Since when has forcibly collectivizing people worked efficiently?
You don't have to exert force to collectivize, there is something called incentives. Not all collectivism is involuntary, democracy is a voluntary collective, but one which a individual may be born into involuntarily. We're all born into this world out of another individual's volition and not our own, does that make our birth somehow forced or wrong? However, the use of force has always been efficient(for some) or at the very least effective. The pyramids were built, the Great Walls, a great number of Empires were built on the backs of slaves, Roman, French, British, America. It is not only out of efficiency that these things were abolished but also out of justice, benevolence, compassion, ethics and morality.

What made this world the one we live in today, where so many people are not subject to the lash, the whims of aristocracy, the brutality of slavery. It is enlightenment, of philosophy, science, ethics, law and the technologies that were brought by this enlightenment, which include democratic forms of government. Naive ideas of good and bad based on size of government is mere sophistry and rhetoric, and do not adequately represent the world we live in and the advancements that have been made in society.

The past does not have a good guide for us to go towards a free and open society, only empire. Some people might even prefer empire but that's a very big government.

My view is that modern democracies are not simply collectives, but semi-autonomous voluntary distributed collectives. This is quite a bit different than totalitarian involuntary centralized collectives.