Yeah, Mencken was wrong about democracy. It actually is a good thing. Sadly, it no longer exists anywhere.

It's a common misconception that democracy (and government) are incompatible with libertarianism. (They need only be voluntaryist, or "as increasingly voluntary as possible" to be libertarian.)

The problem here is that most people don't think deeply about what democracy (and government) actually are. The website http://www.democracydefined.org makes a solid case for first correctly defining democracy, and second, pursuing it.

Democracy is not "suffrage alone." In fact, suffrage is a less significant limit on government power than the other "primary component" of democracy, ...proper jury trials! When either of these democratic limits is rigged, stacked, or corrupted, they are not "proper" and technically have then ceased to exist.

But that doesn't mean that, in proper form, those things are bad.

A democratic limit on government power is a responsive and adaptive limit based on the people's understanding of the situation/context. A republican limit on government power is a set rule written down on paper that is supposed to be followed. The latter limit is actually weaker than the former, in most cases. Republican limits on government serve primarily to act as "cultural guides" that establish "social norms." ...Once transgressed or ignored, republican limits are generally "gone for good." ...But empathic groups of people are never "gone for good," so democratic limits (like jury nullification of law," which repeatedly rears its head in news stories) tend to persist.

Which is better, to be accused of owning marijuana and be found not guilty, or to simply be pronounced guilty by people beholden to the law? I'll always choose even the chance of the former over the latter(dictatorship).

So what of the Konkinist ("agorist") insistence that "political relinquishment" (a form of Kurzweil's "technological relinquishment") and a faith-like belief in "anarchy" is required for libertarianism? Equally inane. Government is simply "any feedback-and-correction systemic control mechanism." When you make decisions, you are "self-governing." In fact, "government" and "cybernetics"(the study of goal-directed systems) have the same Greek root word, anglicized to kybernetik, or "steersmanship," from the process of using feedback-and-correction to control a ship's rudder and steer the ship.

How government is controlled or limited depends on the number and quality of the network nodes and their interactions.

But such control is certainly no worse than the absence of control, as long as a government exists.