> At the very least it's a grand experiment into what works the best.

I really hate this phrase. Because implicitly it is using the wrong metric. So far we've seen the democracy, free speech, and advancement actually compliment one another. But we're at a turning point. We're already redefining what advancement means. Does it mean most powerful? Being able to feed and provide basic needs to everyone? Most scientific? Richest? Most humane? Historically most of these just correlated with wealth, so that metric became the target. But we're getting to the point where you can have many of those things without wealth, simply because they are so cheap. And soon they will be trivial cheap.

So a grand experiment into what? I think we had a good metric before but it isn't so clear anymore.