If something is not free, it is not open source. The difference between free software and open source is one of ideology and philosophy. In practice, they're the same.
> More importantly, please stop using HN primarily for political battle. That's destructive of the intellectual curiosity this site exists for, and we ban accounts that do it.
Unless you assume that writing something political always means engaging in a battle, I don't think I'm doing that.
Democracy is not a system, it's a principle. The principle that the people rules. Today's representative democracies apply that principle very imperfectly.
The rulers don't have to be particularily benevolent to promote the people's interests if their interests and the people's interests are the same.
So you support a dictatorship as long as it permits emigration? Not that monarchies actually had anything to do with that, serfdom was abolished in most places long before them.
Democracies elect idiots "who wreck it all" all the time. That is not the problem with monarchies. The problem with monarchies is that a monarch will promote the interests of the monarch, the nobility will promote the interests of the nobility. Only a democracy will promote the interests of everybody. That is true whether we talk about a state or a company.
> In case of a failing business, an employee is free to vote with his feet at any moment, moreover if he is valuable specialist in a competitive market.
A non-democratic economy works for certain people under certain circumstances. That is simply not enough.
Equating democratic elections, the act of freely chosing how you run your society, to what amounts to fleeing a sinking ship is beyond ridiculous. So is calling the US a command economy.
Post-tax income is an irrelevant metric because higher taxes are compensated by the services they pay for. Our level of defense spending is not insignificant, yours is offensive. We don't need to outspend the rest of the world, we just need to convince Russia that invading the EU is not worth it.
A life of comfort is very much an ideal we should aspire to. There will always be people who have the intrinsic motivation to accomplish grander things. People don't accomplish great things because they are forced to.