So much of life in a “free country” is determined in markets where free citizens voluntarily interact to arrive at millions of diverse results simultaneously. No coercion is required. The information required for the most appropriate and efficient allocation of resources is available to each participant as he or she trades. No coercion by autocrat, oligarch, or majority can match the ethics and efficiency of a market when no single answer is required.

In those few cases where a single answer is required, the democratic process in a constitutional republic steps on the fewest participants on the way to that single answer.

But we don’t need a vote on what we’ll all have for dinner tonight.

“Do you seriously have such faith in human wisdom that you want universal sufferage and government of all by all and then you proclaim these very men whom you consider fit to govern others unfit to govern themselves?”

- Frédéric Bastiat

http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2006/12/19/libertarianism-and-democracy/

Obviously I agree with you here, Stephen. Democracy is one means for making group decisions. In some cases it’s a great means for doing so; in other cases there are better options. But that all presumes that something needs to be “decided” beyond the individual, and frankly I think that we’ve allowed too many individual liberties to be improperly subjected to a vote.