By chance I came across this interview with a Harvard political scientist on his new book titled The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It.
Reading the interview was frustrating because it showed that even political scientists (even from Harvard) are apparently unaware that democracy is not the only alternative to authoritarianism, let alone the best one.
The interviewer, Sean Illing, introduces the book as follows:
Mounk’s book asks a fairly simple question: Why are citizens across the world falling out of love with democracy?
This fairly simple question also has a fairly simple answer: democracy doesn’t work very well.
In the system of democracy good laws are public goods and therefore underproduced, as David D. Friedman pointed out in The Machinery of Freedom almost half a century ago:
Imagine buying cars the way we buy governments. Ten thousand people would get together and agree to vote, each for the car he preferred. Whichever car won, each of the ten thousand would have to buy it. It would not pay any of us to make any serious effort to find out which car was best; whatever I decide, my car is being picked for me by other members of the group. Under such institutions, the quality of cars would quickly decline.
In a Polycentric Legal System, on the other hand, law would be far more like a private good. Different people in the same country could subscribe to different legal codes.
This way, the negative effects of a bad legal code would be internalised by the persons subscribing to that legal code – at least far more so than in a democratic system where I am no less subject to the costs of bad laws than the people voting for them. Hence, market forces can be expected to lead to rapid improvement in the quality of law in general.
Put differently: freedom in a Polycentric Legal System, where making a choice between different legal codes is similar to making a choice between different Internet providers, is far greater than in a democracy with its “one-size-fits-all” approach.
The problem is that people keep conflating the terms Democracy and Freedom – even political scientists from Harvard.