Tamsen, while I really, genuinely appreciate your detailed and well-thought out comment, I think I failed to sell my position to you. Continuing on what I think was productive about your comments, the local governance notion is a refreshing concept to hear in a time where national elections take the top headlines. That all said… you say you don’t see the free market as always good but admit (and i agree) that we don’t have a genuinely free market in the US. Nor is there one really anywhere. Regulations, taxation, and government spending are just three of the most notable ways that government intervention distorts the free market. This goes to show that the government is the problem. If you realize this, it’s funny that you prefer Hillary to Trump when she is the one notorious for taking massive donations from not only the biggest too-big-to-fail banks, but also middle eastern governments like Saudi Arabia. Again, I’m getting off track because I don’t want anybody to rule me. The “beauty of our system” as you call it is a subjective opinion. The “darkness and evil of our system” as I see it stems from the two main aspects of it. First, even on a local scale, but especially on a national scale, the people have essentially no say on policy, fiscal affairs, civil liberties, and military activity. That’s not attainable through the ballot box. Next, and far more importantly, compromise is not nearly as desirable as actual representation. In a totally free society, the collective “we” has the goods, services, and regulatory functions that we desire based on who is willing to fund said services. The wastefulness of government and the bloat in government bureaucracy is dependent on their ability to coercively take from their subjects (accurate term for citizens) in the way of taxation. If it isn’t moral for me to take money out of your wallet without your permission, and it isn’t moral for me and 99 of my friends to get together and collectively decide to take money from you, then at what point does it become moral for a body, group, or theoretical electorate / constituency to take funds coercively from others? You have two ways of answering this: 1, it never becomes moral and you admit that all government is based on immoral theft from its subjects and that there are two fundamentally different classes of people in the world — those who have the right to steal from others and those who don’t. Or 2, you say that it is moral and then you have to define morality in a way such that you can justify two classes of people such that some have the right to initiate violence (theft) and others do not. Then, you also have to explain how such rights are attained. If you admit that America isn’t a free market and you can only point to abuses of the market that have to do with government intervention, then I think a case can (and has, by me) be made to suggest that the government intervention itself is the problem, not the market. Compromise is a far less desirable, far less efficient ideal for society than the real, direct representation where every citizen gets to vote with their dollar, their feet, and their entrepreneurial ability to provide value to the causes they support. We’ll still have roads, security (not police in the sense we know them today), hospitals, and all other facets of a modern society… and we’ll all keep more of what we earn. Not only that, getting out from under the weight of the central banks protected by government will also make our money more valuable and will encourage savings and will actually allow us all to work less and enjoy more time with our loved ones. Democracy is just the drug dealer of our age, who got us hooked on nationalism, patriotism, false moral superiority, warfare and welfare. It’s time we started to look at this ideology as it really is, not as our government indoctrination centers (public schools) brainwashed us to think of it as.