I think you're right. Change is not the goal, rather, it's what me must adapt to. I have thought about this a great deal, and I've not come up with a perfect solution. The root problem has to do with moral authority. The perfect system would be one where we were all effectively beholden (enslaved) to a clear moral system with a lawful creator and moral judge (God). The reason why is that moral judgment and authority, in order to function perfectly, must transcend the system itself. The problem, of course, is that even our most successful religious systems have failed to convince people of the reality of said authority, and within a paradigm of rationality and empiricism, it is impossible to verify our metaphysical beliefs in a way that people today accept (across the board). That's the predicament. We live in a universe where ongoing energy is necessary to survive. We must compete for that energy, and so to civilize ourselves we require a competitive game, but one which outlaws certain strategies - such as murder. Our best systems for morality posit a transcendent being and law, but these require faith to operate, something many people today have in short supply. Provisionally, I'd say we do require a free-ish competitive market system, where the following are true: 1. A nation consists in a universal (within the bounds of the nation) race, language, and religion. 2. Government consists in two mirror-image hierarchies: church and state. These two hierarchies are meant to antagonize one another. If you could imagine the civic structure of government as laid out by the constitution, the structural hierarchy of the church would be its exact mirror image - all processes that would regularly occur within government must pass up the chain of both hierarchies, where the church officials and government officials negotiate with each other. 3. You must install a clear and authoritative way for these positions to be challenged if the People do not see that a person occupying any role is serving their function to society. 4. Each half of government would also have its own jurisdiction to maintain a police force. All police activity would require the presence of at least one officer from both sides. 5. Society itself would consist of levels of citizenship, offering certain privileges depending upon level. The right to vote would depend upon criminal history, citizenship level, and intelligence. 6. The voting process will be highly technical, beginning with committees locally of the highest level of citizenry which communicate with the lowest levels of government. Debate at the lowest level must transmit upward through the hierarchy, where individual voting habits, conclusions, and arguments are transparent (and made available) at each level of the process. 7. The government should maintain a philosophy of least necessary intervention in all private commercial affairs, save for collective voting to outlaw those things deemed subversive and detrimental to the moral principles of the official religion. 8. All immigration into the nation will require testing for a minimum functional level of use of the official language, and religious commitment to the official national religion. All heretical religious practices and all non-official languages will be outlawed within the nation in public spaces. Private spaces will be allotted for certain activities, much the same way that they are now. 9. A basic system of professional licensure or guilds would exist in much the same way that they do today. I'm not prepared to talk about labor-employer relations here. I specify this just to distinguish that I believe a system of pedigree should exist in the case of professional categories of work. 10. There are some technological concerns that I think are too much to get into here, and that means that I don't really have a good idea about how to deal with them! In the end, it's tremendously difficult. So many of the worlds most brilliant minds have gone to task trying to answer these questions, and the battle between liberty and obligation is always going to leave a bad taste in *someone's* mouth. No matter what, someone will be indignant that this or that idea is not libertarian enough, and someone else will say that it's too important to everyone to leave up to free market dynamics. I just came up with the points I did above by spit-balling, basically. I haven't even stopped to consider how each bullet point might negatively impact the others. In the end, I think some variety of representative Republic is necessary, but that function and revising the owners of the role has to be tightly controlled. I feel that some competition itself must be introduced in the ability to maintain these official roles. Even though I'd like it to be Thunderdome style battles to the death, that probably wouldn't work. @PS @ARM