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I tend to believe a diversity of systems is the healthiest state. Coöperative housing, for example, has a mixed history in New York. By removing price as a selection factor, they whitewashed "other* selection criteria, e.g. race [1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/nyregion/new-bill-seeks-to...

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Democracy itself is certainly not the best decision making process, but it tends to avoid some radical pitfalls of oligarchic and tyrannic processes.

Elections behave differently depending on scale [1]. This may be a function of the law of large numbers [2], or that the difficulty of coördinating scales exponentially with the number of people one must coördinate [3].

A small group of people with absolute authority to decide who does and doesn't get to live in a building can be more tyrannical than a large group of people forced to compete on just price. (And vice versa.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

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