ABSTRACT
I am fully in sympathy with Bruno Frey’s plea for more direct democracy through the use of referenda following the model of the Swiss political system. However, a careful libertarian reader of his paper could easily get the impression that, for Bruno Frey, democracy is an end in itself and that, for this reason, it is important to improve the direct democratic participation of the citizens. Although it is true that the Swiss system of referenda has interesting advantages, which Bruno Frey correctly explains, vs the more widely extended systems of indirect democracy, I will argue that our main goal as libertarians should be, in the future, to strengthen free market liberalism, and not democracy per se. Or, in other words, if direct democracy has any merits, they are precisely to allow a (still imperfect) approximation to our ideal of free market and limited government.
